Playing The Host: A Kid-Friendly Tour of Columbus (Pt. 2)

A bloom hangs on against the impending winter cold at Columbus's Park of Roses

As noted in the last blogpost, we don't get to play host very often to family members, so when we do it becomes a special occasion, especially when there are kids (in this case, a 10- and a 13-year old) involved. This kid-friendly (though, in reality, an all-ages-friendly) excursion continues in this blogpost with another German Village staple.

Three of a Perfect Fare: Luck Bros. Coffee

If one takes out a marker to a map, one will see it’s not too hard to divide up Columbus underrated local and Ohio-based coffee riches into compact threesomes. In Downtown alone, there are three such easy-to-roam-among shop triplets available (Winan’s, Red Velvet Cafe & Hemingway's Coffee Nook; Cup O Joe, One Line Coffee Huntington Center, and the original Cafe Brioso; and Stauf’s View on Grant, Roosevelt Coffeehouse, and Brioso Roastery.)
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The residents in and close to Grandview Heights also have a similar three-fer option. Two such places are basically just down the block from each other and the subjects of prior blog posts in Grandview Grind and the flagship Stauf’s.

The other is a nice brisk walk down Grandview and a left on 1st Avenue, but more than doable if you’re in any decent physical shape (I’ve done it myself.) This other destination, Luck Bros Coffee House, is also a bit of a surprise in that I’ve never blogged about them before despite numerous visits prior, and I figured it was time to fix that oversight.

Columbus Coffee Chronicles: Going Gaga over the Baba (Budan)

Local knowledge is valuable, whether picked up in brief and fleeting tips from a helpful native or acquired over actual residential time in an area.

But you could have a good chunk of both in hand and still not know quite the full story behind the similarities...or is that differences?...between Cup O' Joe and Stauf's.

The front of Stauf's flagship Grandview Heights location

As I begun the long distance dating process with my spouse-to-be, I received piecemeal information about both places. I knew Stauf's roasted some pretty mean coffee beans - one of my favorite long-distance dating phase gifts from my spouse was a pound of Kaldi blend beans, which worked quite well with my then newly purchased Bialetti Moka Express. And I knew that their Grandview store in the historic Bank Block served up breakfast and lunch goodies (including one of the more delicious black bean burgers we've had) as well as had all the coffee equipment one could ever want.

Columbus Food Adventures' Coffee Tour

The Columbus Food Adventures Coffee Tour is definitely
worth keeping an eye out for when it is scheduled.

I have been a big fan of Columbus Food Adventures (CFA) and the myriad of culinary-oriented tours they provide of the area's metro scene. In fact, my spouse and I have been on enough of them to fill out one of the culinary passports they give tour-goers at the end of excursion entitling you to a free tour, and we are most definitely looking forward to scheduling that in the near future.

While organizing my computer files recently, I just realized that the latest tour we took with CFA, the Coffee Tour, was one I had not written about. Although it has been a couple months since this early December tour, I did want to write up a little something on it because, similar to previous tours with them, we along a friend of ours from out of town very much enjoyed this excursion.

I will start by saying this is one of CFA's more unique tours in that it covers one very specific item: coffee. This one item, however, has gained Columbus' renown for over the past few years. The coffee-oriented website Sprudge listed Columbus in its 2014 "5 Underrated Coffee Cities" and local roaster Crimson Cup was designated "2016 Macro Roaster of the Year" by industry magazine Roast. The coffee scene has also become a tourist attraction as well, with the folks at Experience Columbus creating the Columbus Coffee Trail that provides out-of-town java enthusiasts a fun way to seek out the area's best caffeinated concoctions.