Marcella's

Marcella's sits at 615 North High Street in the Short North, one of two Columbus locations for the Cameron Mitchell Italian concept — the other is on Polaris Parkway to the north. The Short North room runs dinner daily from 4pm with a happy hour in the bar and cocktail lounge on weekday evenings, and works a broad Italian menu of pizza, pasta and small plates aimed at groups rather than at a tasting-menu occasion. Its position matters for anyone planning an alcohol-free evening: it is directly across High Street from The Guild House and Soul at The Joseph, which means three restaurants with printed zero-proof sections stand within about a hundred metres of each other, the densest such cluster in the city.

The zero-proof drinks are printed on the same beverage list as the cocktails, wine and beer. There are two built cocktails. Strawberry Fields uses Seedlip Citrus as its base with strawberry and a lemon foam, the foam doing the work that egg white or aquafaba does in a full-proof sour by giving the drink texture rather than only flavour. The Citrus Spritz is the more useful of the two on an Italian list: Lyre's Italian Orange, the zero-proof amaro-style aperitif, lengthened with alcohol-removed sparkling wine, which lets a non-drinking guest order the spritz that everyone else at the table is drinking rather than something structurally different. A rotating Athletic Brewing non-alcoholic beer covers the beer side. Beyond the cocktails, the coffee list is unusually developed and functions as a genuine after-dinner option — Il Finto Espresso built with vanilla and honey, a caffè caramello layered with sweet cream and whipped cream, and an affogato of vanilla gelato drowned in hot espresso. Because it is a large room built for groups rather than a tasting-menu restaurant, it is also the most practical of the three Short North zero-proof lists for a party of mixed preferences — the sort of booking where one person is not drinking, one is driving, and nobody wants that to shape where everyone else eats. Note that the Polaris Parkway location north of the city runs its own menus, and the drinks listed here are the Short North list.