The Restaurant
Agni opened in 2023 on the southern edge of the Brewery District at 716 South High Street - effectively on the German Village border - and within two years had collected a Bon Appetit Top 20 New Restaurants of 2024 nod, a USA Today Restaurants of the Year 2025 placement, and a 2025 James Beard Award nomination for chef-owner Avishar Barua in the Best Chef: Great Lakes category. Barua trained in New York at Wylie Dufresne's WD~50 and Atera, returned to Columbus to open Joya's in Worthington in 2021, and built Agni as his second project around a single conceptual spine: a fourteen-course tasting menu centered on a wood-fired grill that maps the chef's biography (Bengali-Bangladeshi family, midwest American upbringing, modernist New York fine-dining training) onto each plate.
The format runs as the city's most ambitious sit-down: two seatings nightly Wednesday through Saturday at 5:30 and 8:30, $165 per person for the full fourteen courses, with an optional beverage pairing (alcoholic or non-alcoholic) selected by a Columbus-based sommelier who built the by-the-glass list around small-production growers from Loire, Mosel, Etna and the Pacific Northwest. Each course is annotated on a printed menu with the cultural influences cited - Dublin to Oaxaca, Gahanna Ohio to Kolkata India - so the diner reads the precise geography of every plate. Signature courses have included a smoked-mussel chawanmushi with charred scallion oil, a Bengali fish curry reinterpreted as a single dry-aged grouper course over the live-fire grill, a Joya's-era duck shawarma that returns as a fourteenth-course handheld, and a midwest sweet-corn dessert that uses smoked corn silk as the base aromatic.
The dining room itself runs only thirty-two seats across a single long counter and a small back room. Service is led directly by Barua and his core team, with each course presented at the table by the cook who built it. The room is quiet, deliberate, and absolutely focused on the food - this is not a brasserie evening and it is not a social-dining room. For visiting clients, food journalists, or anyone in Columbus for whom the city's restaurant scene matters, Agni is the unambiguous first call.
Why This Is Columbus’s Impress Clients Pick
For impressing clients in Columbus, Agni is the city's single most defensible choice. The tasting-menu structure removes every negotiation at the table - the host books, the menu arrives, the evening unfolds. The James Beard nomination and the Bon Appetit and USA Today recognition give the room a national reputation that any informed guest will already know about. The intimate thirty-two-seat counter format guarantees the conversation never competes with ambient noise. And the pricing ($165 plus pairings) lands in serious-but-defensible territory - clearly sharpened, clearly considered, clearly not extravagant. The hardest reservation in town doubles as the most legible signal that a host has taken Columbus dining seriously.
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