Goodale Station

Goodale Station sits on the twelfth floor of the Canopy by Hilton Columbus Downtown Short North at 77 East Nationwide Boulevard, on the strip between the convention district and the southern end of the Short North. The room is glass-enclosed with terraces opening off either side, giving it a long view over the Columbus skyline and — unlike most rooftop bars in a city with real winters — a year-round season. It serves brunch at weekends from 11am, dinner nightly, and runs to 1am on Fridays and Saturdays.

The non-alcoholic list is small but distinctive, and the local framing of it is unusually direct: rather than describing the AF drinks as an option for guests who need one, coverage of the bar reports that the Don't Carrot All and the Berry Manilow are among the bestsellers of the season outright. That is a different claim from most zero-proof menus in the city, and it is consistent with how the bar presents them — as named drinks on the list with the puns intact, not as a separate concession. Behind the two named builds, the more interesting part of the offering is the shrub programme. Shrubs are drinking vinegars: fruit, herbs and sugar macerated with vinegar into a syrup that is then lengthened, producing something simultaneously sweet and sharp, with an acidity that gives a non-alcoholic drink the backbone it usually lacks. Goodale Station rotates them through the year rather than keeping a fixed roster, which means the AF options change with the season in the same way the cocktail list does. Guests should note the bar is inside a hotel and the ground-floor entrance routes through the lobby lifts. For planning purposes the room works better as an early-evening or brunch destination than a late one: the kitchen closes at 10pm even on nights when the bar runs to 1am, and the weekend brunch service from 11am is when the terraces are at their best. Being inside a hotel, it also tends to be quieter midweek than the street-level bars in the Short North a few blocks north.