Nightlife in Columbus

In and Around Columbus featured Ringside Café. TripAdvisors give the cafe 3.5 owl eyes, and 89% of Urbanspooners recommend Ringside.

In Radio & Juliet, artistic media and historical conventions cross-pollinate on stage as the themes of Shakespeare and the music of Radiohead coalesce into a stark framework for Ballet Maribor’s minimalist forms. Dancers exploit the sense of alienation that permeates singer Thom Yorke’s voice to full effect, spinning in counter-clockwise pirouettes to symbolize their defiance of the passage of time. In swapping the Bard’s dramatic romance for Blue Tooth shades of melancholy, the production taps into an expression of longing attraction that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called “white hot in a way that Shakespeare could never have imagined.” Main-floor seats in the lavish, gold-swathed Palace Theatre, which was designed in the 1930s to mimic the Palace of Versailles, open up unobstructed views of the action.

Voted Columbus’s best movie theater in 2010 by readers of Columbus Alive!, Arena Grand Movie Theatre satisfies urges for blockbuster movies, cold beer, and cool, dark, cavernous spaces in which crowds can quietly assemble. Bring along a fellow film fanatic with two tickets ($9 per adult after 6 p.m., $7 for matinee showings, seniors, and students) to a showing at the theater and marvel at Jon Hamm's impossible good looks in The Town or give Betty White's career the boost it so desperately needs by catching her in You Again, coming to theaters on September 24. This Groupon may not be valid for certain movies during the first two weeks of their release—contact Arena Grand Movie Theatre for verification.

As dusk turns to darkness, Sway transforms from an upscale tapas restaurant to a raucous nightclub. In the hours before the switch, tapas are the main attraction. Chefs meticulously season and garnish each small plate. To make lobster flatbread, they layer chunks of meat and shiitake mushrooms atop super-thin crusts. They prepare scallops one by one, flavoring each morsel with sesame seeds, cilantro rémoulade, or ancho mole. Signature drinks, including the key-lime-pie martini, fuel the switch to club-mode. On most weekend evenings, neon lights crisscross young crowds, spotlighting live DJs and all the dust that's floating in the air.

Mozaik’s menu of elegantly prepared small plates careens taste buds through a tour of Asian, southwestern, and Italian flavors. The raspberry pecan salad drenches pecans, roma tomatoes, blue cheese, and dried cranberries in a tangy raspberry dressing. Fingers revel in an array of grilled naan flatbreads, such as pollo e pomodoro, which is festooned with homemade tomato jam, grilled chicken, and asparagus, or the mediterranean, which recruits a choir of hummus, feta cheese, green peppers, and kalamata olives to tap out flavorful tunes against tone-deaf molars. Average-size forks lance a selection of 12 small plates, including the NY Strip Tease, which nestles slices of char-grilled meat into a trove of truffles fries and parmesan cheese. Artistic chefs meticulously hand roll a rainbow of cabbage and carrots into the vegetarian-friendly spring rolls and masterfully craft the Voodoo shrimp plate out of Cajun seared shrimp soaked in a vat of Voodoo beer-tomato sauce paired with homemade cornbread.