COLUMBUS — Yogi’s Bar & Grill opens its fifth location Thursday, Oct. 15, expanding into northeast Columbus for the first time in the renovated former home of Turtle Creek Tavern at 5571 N. Hamilton Road, which closed in December.
Until now the local sports-bar chain has leaned west in Central Ohio, with two locations in Dublin and others near Grandview Heights and Upper Arlington. The Hamilton Road opening pushes east instead, planting Yogi’s between Gahanna and New Albany on Columbus’ Northeast Side, one of the region’s busiest suburban corridors.
The new restaurant offers about 4,000 square feet inside and a year-round outdoor patio with its own bar. Sixty televisions are viewable throughout the indoor and outdoor spaces, a setup aimed squarely at game-day crowds following Ohio State, the Browns, the Bengals, the Blue Jackets and the Crew.
The food menu, revamped for fall, covers the expected sports-bar ground — chicken wings, burgers, pizzas, salads and sandwiches. The kitchen is also leaning on a few less standard items to stand out, including pepperoni eggrolls, a buffalo mac and cheese bowl topped with spicy chicken tenders and blue cheese crumbles, and a hoagie built with beef tenderloin tips and sautéed mushrooms and onions.
Yogi’s is owned by Columbus Tavern Group, the company also behind Novak’s Tavern & Patio in downtown Columbus and The Filling Station Bar & Grill on the Far Northwest Side. That gives the group a footprint that now reaches from downtown to both the northwest and northeast suburbs.
For the Hamilton Road corridor, the opening fills a prominent tavern space that has sat in transition since Turtle Creek closed, and it adds another full-service option for residents of Gahanna, New Albany and the surrounding neighborhoods who previously had to drive west to reach a Yogi’s.
The timing lands in the heart of football season, when sports bars compete hardest for weekend crowds, and the year-round patio gives the new location a feature operators can market beyond summer. How the northeast bet performs will be watched by other local chains weighing the same eastward move across Columbus.
For now, doors open Thursday with a familiar formula in a new part of town: dozens of screens, a fall menu and a patio bar, in a renovated space that neighborhood regulars already know how to find.
