The Heirloom Café is an eatery on campus located on the lower level of the Wexner Center for the Arts. Credit: Tyrik Hutchinson-Junior | Lantern Reporter
A small cafe in the basement of the Wexner Center for the Arts is back to serving locally owned and grown foods after closing for over a year due to COVID-19.
The Heirloom Cafe, located at 1871 N. High St., is an independently owned cafe that reopened in fall of 2021 after having closed temporarily in March 2020. Although the cafe would have celebrated a decade in business last year, this year will now mark the cafe’s 10-year milestone, Bethany Brakemeyer, general manager of Heirloom Cafe and a 2010 Ohio State alumna, said in an email.
Jeremy Fox, owner of Heirloom Cafe since October 2019, said the cafe is one of campus’ hidden gems — with an emphasis on “hidden.”
“When I was looking to buy the cafe, only about 2 percent of the people that I talked to had ever heard of Heirloom,” he said. “The plan is to get the word out and let people know that we are down here.”
Although business for Heirloom Cafe is heading back in the right direction, Fox said the goal moving forward is to get business back to how it was before the pandemic, when the cafe was at full capacity and drew in more customers.
“We want to get back to when things were normal,” Fox said. “My goal is to get the word out, get back to a full staff and to offer our normal hours of operation.”
Fox said Heirloom buys organic foods from locally owned businesses to source its menu, which includes a variety of foods and drinks such as the quinoa and greens bowl, house-made granola and specialty lattes, according to the cafe’s website.
Brakemeyer said the cafe allows students to study and enjoy food in a setting that offers a change of pace from other campus eateries and locations.
“This is a hidden study area where a lot of students come to study for a long time,” Brakemeyer said. “When the weather is nicer, we like to utilize the patio outside where a lot of students like to take their food.”
The current front-of-house staff of Heirloom Cafe consists entirely of Ohio State students, Brakemeyer said, and although they are not currently hiring, she said they are always accepting applications.
“There is a lot of turnover in our staff because students either graduate or do not live in Ohio,” she said. “We usually will let people know when we are hiring, but some people love the environment so much that they will just ask.”
The cafe has seen two graduating classes of employees since the start of the pandemic, Fox said, which has also affected the overall environment of the cafe.
“Shutting down was sad because of the employees we lost,” Fox said. “We didn’t get to see our former employees graduate, which was important to us because this is a family environment.”
Fox said they have implemented COVID-19 safety guidelines at the cafe since opening back up, such as socially distanced seating, sanitation checks, mask requirements and maintaining a limited capacity in order to keep customers and employees safe.
Brakemeyer said Heirloom Cafe accepts BuckID, along with cash or card payments. The cafe is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., and more information can be found on the cafe’s website.
