Agni

Agni builds its case around one instrument: the wood fire, and a chef's counter that puts the room's tasting menu on direct display. The standard here is a kitchen willing to let seasonal vegetables carry as much weight as protein, which is not the default posture for high-end dining in this city. House-made pasta rounds out the format, giving the menu a course that reads as comfort against the more exploratory fire work around it. Seating matters at Agni in a way it does not at most restaurants: the counter puts diners closest to the technique and the tasting menu's full arc, while the main dining room runs a more fixed, order-driven experience with less latitude to customize course by course.

That split is worth knowing before booking, since the two rooms deliver genuinely different nights out. The kitchen's approach, built on live fire and seasonal produce treated as the main event rather than a side dish, places Agni closer to the wood-fire tasting rooms found in a handful of ambitious American kitchens nationally than to anything else currently running in Columbus. It is priced and paced for occasion dining: anniversaries, proposals, the dinner that is supposed to be the whole event rather than a stop on the way to somewhere else. The tasting menu format asks for time and a diner willing to eat what the fire produced that week rather than what they had in mind walking in.

That is the trade the room is built around, and it rewards diners who come hungry for the format itself, not just for a specific dish. For a special-occasion kitchen in a city with no shortage of steakhouses and Italian rooms, Agni's commitment to vegetables and fire as the headline, not the supporting act, is the clearest signal of what kind of restaurant this is.