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FeedThe Chief & The Chef
We get to brag about our favorite things in Columbus every month in these pages, so Best of Columbus month is both an exciting challenge—the pressure’s on to pick the best of the best—and a chance to show off. Like Election Day and Halloween rolled into one, with a little Thanksgiving gluttony for good measure.
With your help (thanks to those who voted in the readers poll at ColumbusMonthly.com), our editors picked 206 things that make this city fun, interesting, rewarding, eccentric and delicious. (The complete list starts on page 49.)
While putting this issue together, I realized it also tells a couple other important stories about what makes Columbus great.
Mayor Michael Coleman selected Kim Jacobs to be chief of police because she was the best candidate for the job. That she is also a gay woman—the first to hold the post in Columbus, and a rarity nationwide—says everything about how accepting this city is.
But as we learn in Nicole Kraft’s profile on page 126, the real change is coming from Jacobs’ attitude. She is open and accessible, and passionate about engaging with the community and her fellow officers. The chief says, “We do it Columbus’ way.”
Laura Lee sought out this city for very similar reasons. The chef moved here from San Diego to open her food truck because she’d heard how friendly Columbus’ mobile food community is. And she was right. As Carrie Schedler reports on page 132, the support Lee found helped get Ajumama rolling, and the Korean street food truck has been the hit of the summer.
In other cities, food trucks compete to claim lucrative corners. Here, they help each other out.
It’s Columbus’ way.
Handcrafted cover
This month’s cover is actually a hand-printed poster crafted by Igloo Letterpress proprietor Allison Chapman. Igloo was picked for our Best of Columbus list (taking a class to make your own cards is the best way to say thanks), and we thought that asking a winner to create the cover is what this issue is all about.
For those of us who design magazines on computers, it was also a great lesson in the artistry and painstaking skill that goes into doing it by hand. And you can tell: Chapman’s work gave the cover a unique personality and authenticity that you just can’t fake with an iMac. (She’ll be selling original prints of a version of the cover in her Worthington shop if you’d like to check it out for yourself.)
That originality is just the kind of thing that makes Columbus the best.
Cheers,
Brian Lindamood
