Start from 32 curated places around Columbus, IN, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Zaharakos Ice Cream Parlor & Museum
Open since 1900, Zaharakos is a fully restored Victorian soda fountain and ice cream parlor that operates as both a working sweet shop and a museum of soda fountain history — two ornate onyx fountains, a 1908 pipe organ that still plays, and marble countertops that have been wiped down a million times. The ice cream is genuinely excellent and the hot fudge sauce has been made from the same recipe for over a century. This is not nostalgia theater; it's the real thing.
Henry Social Club
A contemporary American restaurant that takes local sourcing seriously and builds a seasonal menu around Indiana producers — the kind of cooking that treats the Midwest's agricultural abundance as a point of pride rather than a limitation. The dining room is relaxed and the service is genuinely warm. It's Columbus's most ambitious kitchen, pairing large and small plates with a serious cocktail and wine program on Washington Street downtown.
Trails & outdoors
Mill Race Park Trail System
The trail network within Mill Race Park follows the Flatrock and Driftwood rivers through bottomland forest and open meadow in a setting that feels far more removed from town than the short drive suggests. The paved main loop is accessible and family-friendly; side paths lead to quieter river overlooks. The covered bridge and amphitheater are both trailside highlights. This is Columbus's most used green space and it earns every visitor.
Flatrock-Driftwood River Trail
The broader trail corridor following the Flatrock and Driftwood rivers south from Mill Race Park offers a quieter, more extended outdoor experience than the park loop — several miles of river-adjacent walking through mixed habitat that's excellent for birds in spring and fall. The trail surface varies from paved to packed gravel to informal path as you move further from the park. Bring water and good shoes.
Things to do
Columbus Area Visitors Center Architecture Bus Tours
The guided bus tour of Columbus's architectural landmarks is the single best experience the city offers — a two-hour narrated circuit that covers over twenty significant buildings with context and stories that no self-guided effort can match. The guides are trained, knowledgeable, and genuinely passionate about what Columbus built in the postwar decades. If you do one thing in Columbus, make it this.
kidscommons
kidscommons is Columbus's downtown children's museum, three floors of hands-on exhibits in a former J.C. Penney building on Washington Street. The signature attraction is ExploraHouse and its giant two-story slide-through toilet, but the whole place is built for kids roughly 2 to 12 to climb, build, and experiment. It's the obvious move when a family needs a break from architecture touring.
Landmarks & sights
Columbus Visitors Center & Architecture Tour
Every architectural pilgrimage to Columbus starts here — the Visitors Center is itself an architecturally significant building and the departure point for the city's world-class guided bus tours that cover many of the city's most significant buildings in a single outing. Columbus has more buildings on the National Register of Historic Places per capita than nearly any American city, and the guided tour is by far the best way to grasp the full scope of what happened here. Don't try to wing it on foot — the buildings are spread across the city and context is everything.
Miller House and Garden
The single greatest work of architecture in Columbus is this 1957 Eero Saarinen-designed residence commissioned by industrialist J. Irwin Miller — a National Historic Landmark with interiors by Alexander Girard, landscape by Dan Kiley, and a level of integrated design ambition that has never been surpassed in American domestic architecture. The conversation pit alone is worth the trip. Tours are limited and book out weeks in advance during peak season; treat securing a slot as a priority.