Pointe Tavern

Columbus, Ohio

Field Note

If its dive bar credentials were ever in doubt, know that Pointe Tavern sits in a nondescript, tiny strip mall that features a disc golf supply store as its most visually-striking tenant. Yes, a few steps away from a Subway sites Pointe Tavern, a dive bar once nearly lost to an attempt at nominal gentrification (“Come visit The Pointe!”).

Posh Columbus inner-loop suburb Upper Arlington is hardly an expected home for a dive bar of Pointe’s quality, but there it sits, complete with lightly maintained back-room pool tables and a continuously-operated popcorn machine. Its surprisingly high-quality draft list fits with the universal trend toward dive bars stacked with craft beers for visitors, domestics for regulars.

For this reviewer, Pointe Tavern is home base. It beckons with tables and chairs the exact color of black that could have been either intentional, the sum total of years of rigorous use or some combination of the two. There’s a patio in the sense that any compilation of chairs and tables outside can be termed a patio, probably better referred to as a part of the parking lot obstructed by a metal fence.

The restrooms carry the theme forward, stark, utilitarian rooms where I’ve many times contemplated exactly how many beers I’ve had and how many more I can reasonably expect of myself. A back room features the aforementioned pool tables, both of which I can’t recall seeing in use as anything more than a temporary resting place for someone’s Coors Light.

Haphazard furniture and contemplative bathrooms aside, Pointe Tavern is a dependable, trustworthy bar experience. It’s never jammed. It’s never empty. It’s popcorn and TVs and Keno and beer. It’s an oasis in an otherwise “in-between” strip of near-west Columbus and if somehow you fall in the Venn diagram center of beer drinker and disc golf enthusiast, this is going to be a hard location to pass up.