Bonifacio

Bonifacio opened in 2016 at 1577 King Avenue in the Fifth by Northwest neighbourhood, west of the Olentangy and south of Ohio State, and is the work of Krizzia Yanga — a Columbus native who first brought Filipino food to the city through her earlier Red Velvet Café before committing to a full-service restaurant. The name is a reference to Andrés Bonifacio, the revolutionary; the cooking is what Yanga calls modern Filipino, which means the adobo, sisig and lumpia are recognisable but the plating and the produce are contemporary and local. Columbus Monthly named her a Tastemaker in 2021, and the restaurant has since drawn national recognition and grant support for Asian-American-owned businesses.

The format the restaurant is best known for is the Boodle Night: a kamayan feast in which the table is covered in banana leaves and heaped with sticky rice, pickled vegetables, longganisa sausage, lumpia and shrimp, and everyone eats with their hands. It is communal, loud and unusually good for a group that includes people who are not drinking, because the meal itself rather than the round of drinks is the event. The bar supports that with a list written to match the kitchen's flavours — fresh juices, tropical fruit and the Filipino pantry — instead of a separate cocktail programme bolted alongside. On the alcohol-free side the drink to know is the Ube Colada, built from ube simple syrup with lime, pineapple and coconut cream. Ube is the purple yam that anchors Filipino desserts, sweet and faintly nutty, and using it as the base of a piña colada variant produces something that is genuinely of the cuisine rather than a generic mocktail with a local label. CityScene named the restaurant in its December 2025 alcohol-free roundup on that basis. Weekend service starts at 10am.