Comune

Comune occupies a corner site at 677 Parsons Avenue in Schumacher Place, on the eastern edge of German Village, and has spent several years as the most serious plant-based dining room in Columbus. The kitchen, led by executive chef Zachery Riddle, works an almost entirely vegan menu from seasonal and locally sourced produce, with breads and spreads and a crispy rice dish as the constants beneath ever-changing vegetable toppings. The room is spare and Scandinavian in feel, and Columbus Monthly included it among the city's best restaurants in 2025.

The drinks programme is where the restaurant earns its place in a zero-proof guide. Comune runs what it calls a root-to-stem cocktail list — the same waste-minimising logic as the kitchen, applied to the bar — alongside natural wines and herbal digestifs. Crucially, the non-alcoholic options are marked on the printed menu with a degree symbol against the cocktails that can be made zero-proof, which currently covers the Vermouth + Tonic at $8, the Alta Highball at $10 and the Comune Sour at $14. That is a meaningfully different arrangement from a bar that will make something up on request: the guest can read the list and choose, and the zero-proof price is printed rather than negotiated. Underneath the cocktails sit house-made sodas at $6, offered in lemon and ginger, blueberry and cardamom shrub, or charred pineapple shrub — shrubs being vinegar-based fruit syrups, which give the sodas an acidity that most restaurant soft drinks lack entirely. The list is finished with Casamara Club amaro soda at $5, Jarritos Mineragua and Vichy Catalan sparkling mineral water, and a can of Good Liar, the non-alcoholic Midwest IPA brewed in Columbus itself. Dinner only, Monday to Saturday. One further point worth making for anyone planning a night out: because the kitchen is plant-based and the bar prices its zero-proof drinks at $8 to $14, Comune is one of the few rooms in Columbus where a guest who is neither drinking nor eating animal products faces no compromise at all. Reservations are advisable, the room is small, and service is dinner only.