Buckeye Hall Of Fame Cafe

Originally, ownership of the Damon’s on Olentangy planned to open a brand new building for that same chain, right across the parking lot. I know because I happened to be working there at the time. Instead, plans were soon scrapped in favor of a separate plot of land, a different operation entirely. This would have been 1997. Management was threatening us all with this incessant best of the best nonsense, insisting they would only accept top shelf talent for a transfer to the new restaurant. The hilarious conclusion to this tale is that only two employees bothered signing up anyway – our daytime manager Drew, and some part time prep cook. The best of the best? I’m not sure management quite filled their stated objective, there. If this is a Hall Of Fame cafe, its inaugural class doesn’t exactly rival Cooperstown’s.

The Buckeye Hall of Fame Café, they’re terming this latest venture. Great, just what campus needs. Nonetheless, when a Columbus institution, the Jai Lai, shutters its doors (at 1421 Olentangy River Road) in August of ’96, the brain trust behind our Damon’s decides to swoop in for the kill. Jai Lai was Woody Hayes’s favorite restaurant in town, and his efforts alone generated all sorts of revenue for the place. Still, local fervor for this niche notwithstanding, I get the feeling it will take a lot more than the support of an OSU football coach to keep this latest venture afloat. Plus, well, let’s not forget that Woody Hayes died in 1987.

A couple miles south of the Damon’s, also on Olentangy, past the brand new baseball field and the Jack Nicklaus museum, past the Lennox spaceship shopping center, directly facing the river, this building they do cobble together with impressive, land speed record time, I’ll give them that. Still, Buckeye football fans are already the most annoying aficionados on the planet, and this added fuel surely won’t help matters any. And while there are surely token efforts at championing the other sports under this umbrella, we all know what the driving force is behind this venture.

The football team used to hold weekly press conferences here, after all, back when it was the Jai Lai, and they even experimented with helicoptering patrons from here to the game back in ’74. So yes, a cursed shrine to OSU heroes of yore, as if these nuts don’t already vomit scarlet and grey factoids three hundred sixty five days a year. For what, a season that lasts all of eleven games. Every spring, the Buckeyes play an exhibition football game, serving no real purpose, except these too are always inexhaustibly attended by another capacity mob. You could probably plant an OSU flag in a dog turd and folks would pay to see it. Then again, some might argue this is exactly what happened during the John Cooper years.

As for us employees, the whole experience leaves a sour taste in our mouths – at least to the extent you could claim we care. Thus our avoidance falls somewhere between a boycott and pure lack of interest. For one, despite the threats, bigwigs like John Votino telling us we needed to get our act together or we weren’t going to be brought on board the “new Damon’s” they were allegedly building “right across the parking lot” from our current location, the timeline just isn’t adding up. He’s barking this junk at us in a late January meeting, about an alleged March groundbreaking…but then two weeks later the same team is in the news announcing that they’re opening this Buckeye Café. No mention of this new Damon’s location is ever made again. All of which can only mean one of three things:  

a) he was purposefully blowing smoke up our asses as some kind of weird motivational stunt, fully aware that there was no new Damon’s being built in our parking lot, that they were buying a shuttered restaurant miles away from here, and revamping it.  

b) they somehow decided in the space of two weeks and then made this purchase happen, along with the entire name and marketing angle they presented to the Dispatch.

c) my own personal theory, that he isn’t quite the bigwig nor as in the loop as he thinks he is and that the guys above him in the food chain – i.e. the fat cats with the money, making the actual, you know, decisions – had scrapped that “new Damon’s” business months upon months earlier, and he was relating to us old, outdated news.

But in the name of journalistic curiosity, if nothing else, I owe it to myself to inspect this place at least once, and it seems that the rest of our gang feels the same way.  

So after months of hearing Buckeye Café this, Hall Of Fame Café that, is this adding up to the eighth wonder of western civilization? Well, not quite. But as we pull up before this bright, two story oasis, glowing red as a fireplace ember, they do offer valet parking, a perk at least as good as Jon Axelrod’s suggestion that our own restaurant give out umbrellas when it’s raining. We don’t find the need to pay them for this service, though, for while the second floor of this building, in a clever twist, actually is a parking garage, there are also plenty of spots available here at street level, off to the side.  

The building exterior, though modern enough, is a concrete bunker painted grey, vaguely reminiscent of a castle, with scarlet flags billowing from strategic points up top. They’ve even gone as far as to sculpt roadside hedges low, in the familiar O shape of that famous Buckeye logo.  Once inside, we find a number of different bars scattered throughout the grounds, and the atmosphere is warm, inviting. The expected OSU memorabilia and color schemes dominate every available square inch, with the patron level, while not jam packed, certainly higher than you might expect an hour before closing time on a Tuesday in January. Everything is well lit and looks tastefully modern.  

Still, having already decided I’m not going to spend any money here personally, and with my roommate Damon also in more of a fact finding mode, our visit here is not bound to represent an extensive, in depth one. There’s an adequate dining area, a roomy pool hall, and an even roomier game room, which is where we find Jenny, Carrie, and John. We watch them manipulate joysticks, race digital vehicles, and fire off basketballs in the face of a shot clock and scoreboard continually broadcasting their ineptitude. Soon enough, the hour dictates that those responsible are closing this place down for the night, and we leave just a little bit shy of this development.

A glance at the menu lends the impression that this is standard sports bar food, nothing more. Still, given the theme of this place, you would have expected more imagination in at least the naming of the dishes. It would seem a no-brainer to honor famous Buckeye personalities with signature meals and drinks, possibly even crafting some menu items that were known favorites for these legends. What was Woody Hayes’s idea of a perfect food, for example, and why wouldn’t you have that on offer here? Or Archie Griffin’s or Jesse Owens’s? They seem to have dropped the ball on the two yard line with this one.

On an amusing side note, they once paid $10,000 to set an OSU Buckeye logo in the concrete directly before the front entrance. Except one afternoon it mysteriously acquired bike tire tracks before the wet concrete had dried. Yeah, that was me. Even so, I doubt this really impacted much, as they were able to stay in business for many a year after this, before finally going belly up in 2009. 

Somewhere around 2011, this concept and presumably much of its memorabilia was transferred to a new restaurant, at the Port Columbus International Airport. It has the same name and logo, so I would assume the same brain trust is behind this operation. This too seems to have gone bust, though in half the time as the previous incarnation – about six years, give or take – and the Yelp! rating may help explain why. Reviews are fairly brutal, especially in later years, and they wound up with a composite 2 star score.