Hiraeth

The Restaurant

Hiraeth opened in 2023 in a new-build two-story corner at 36 East Lincoln Street and Pearl Alley in the Short North, the city's most active dining-and-gallery district immediately north of downtown. The restaurant is the second project from the team behind Chapman's (the chef-driven Italian Village kitchen that has been a Columbus Monthly Top 10 fixture across multiple years) and the name - hiraeth - is a Welsh word that translates roughly as a longing for a home, a place, a person, or a time that may never return. The dining room runs across two floors with an open kitchen centred on a wood-burning oven that is visible from every seat in the downstairs main room and from the railing along the upstairs mezzanine. The aesthetic is warm and intentional: aged oak banquettes, hand-glazed ceramic tile across the open-kitchen pass, a single long marble bar at the entrance, and large arched windows along Lincoln Street that flood the room with natural light at golden hour.

The kitchen project is a modern Mediterranean small-plates-and-shareable-mains format that draws on the eastern Mediterranean basin (Lebanese, Turkish, Greek, North African) without being doctrinaire about any single tradition. The menu is structured in three movements: mezze (smoked-aubergine baba ghanoush, fattoush salad with sumac and pomegranate, a flatbread programme baked-to-order in the wood oven, octopus tarama with charred lemon, a labneh-and-zaatar starter that has been on the menu since opening), tapas-sized plates (a wood-roasted scallop with preserved-lemon beurre blanc, a confit duck leg with sour cherry and rose harissa, a slow-roasted lamb shoulder with merguez crumbs), and shareable mains (a whole-roasted branzino with chermoula and grilled fennel, a wood-roasted half-chicken with toum and pickled-onion flatbread, a long-running dry-aged ribeye with caramelised-shallot jam). Dessert runs short and seasonal - a saffron-and-pistachio kunafa, a citrus olive-oil cake, an orange-blossom panna cotta.

The beverage programme is the room's quiet luxury: a wine list of around one hundred and eighty references with deliberate depth in Greek assyrtiko, Lebanese reds (Chateau Musar, Ixsir, Domaine des Tourelles), Sicilian Etna whites and reds, and a selected South-of-France and North-African sub-section. The cocktail list runs through arak, ouzo, raki and mastiha - eastern-Mediterranean spirits rarely seen on Columbus menus - alongside a strong by-the-glass programme. The Short North location, fifteen minutes' walk from downtown and from the Hilton Columbus Downtown, makes Hiraeth the most accessible top-tier dining room for a downtown hotel guest who wants something distinctive and walkable.