Drunk Brunch: Knead [NOW CLOSED]

You need to get to Knead.

Knead is located on High Street between Spruce St and Swan St, just around the corner from the North Market. In contrast to many of the downtown dining options, Knead skips the glitzy decor and white linens and offers up a bright and unpretentious urban diner aesthetic. A wall featuring a map of the state of Ohio and surrounding states proudly marks the farms from which Knead’s food is sourced.

As the brunch menu doesn’t specifically include drinks, I had to awkwardly ask our server for a cocktail menu at noon on a Sunday, but fortunately she didn’t seem to think this was an odd (read: lush) request, and as I looked around I realized most people were sipping an adult drink.

I ordered the OYO ’75, Knead’s take on the French 75 using OYO Stone Fruit vodka. The regular French 75 is my standard breakfast cocktail of choice, and Stone Fruit is quickly becoming my “breakfast liquor of choice” (which is a thing I don’t think most people have) so I thought this was basically the perfect drink for me. I didn’t really like the salt rim, and thought it overpowered instead of balancing the fruitiness of the vodka and bubbles, so I wiped it off and sipped happily. My husband had the Floradora (which I called the “Flo Rida” all afternoon), made with Hendricks gin, lime juice, framboise liqueur and ginger ale. Delicious.

I had the Egg McJunkin Sandwich: scrambled eggs with Amish cheese and house cured bacon served on homemade bread. With the name humorously nodding towards McDonald’s breakfast “food,” it combines real ingredients (the origins of which are listed on the menu) to make the breakfast sandwich you only WISH you could get through a drive-thru.

My husband, who doesn’t love breakfast food nearly as much as me and tends to order off the “lunch” side of brunch menus, had The Motherclucker: fried buttermilk chicken, house cured bacon, aged cheddar cheese, greens, roasted poblano chile and garlic aioli on a toasted challah bun. He only gave me one bite, because this was a sandwhich worth hoarding, but from that one bite I can confidently award this the best fucking chicken sandwich I’ve ever tasted award. Also, I HATE ketchup. but I LOVED Knead’s homemade ketchup, which was served with the Motherclucker’s fries. Despite how much I enjoyed my own sammich, for the first time I found myself wishing I had NOT ordered breakfast.

Amazing food, amazing cocktails and amazingly, this drunk brunch was notably cheaper than our comparable brunches (about $15 cheaper).

Brunch at Knead is served Saturdays and Sundays from 10am-3pm. Knead is located at 505 N. High Street.

Read about other drunk brunch spots in Columbus.