After more than two decades of pasta, Prosecco and pre-theater meetups, Due Amici has quietly closed its downtown Columbus location, ending a 22-year run on Gay Street. The Italian spot, which opened in 2004 and grew into a go-to for after-work dinners, weekend brunch and private parties, had long been one of the anchors of a corridor now crowded with construction fencing and new development.
According to Columbus Business First, reporter Dan Eaton noted that the Gay Street restaurant shut its doors Tuesday after 22 years in business. The outlet reported that there is no announced replacement tenant for the space and no stated timeline for any kind of reopening.
From New Year’s Eve debut to downtown fixture
The restaurant’s own website states that Due Amici opened on New Year’s Eve 2004, leaning into cozy brick walls, a full bar program and flexible private event rooms to pull in downtown office workers and celebratory crowds alike. The site also lists the Gay Street address, between High and Third streets, as the restaurant’s official downtown home base.
Capital Line construction and a changing corridor
Due Amici’s block sits inside the footprint of the city’s Capital Line project, which has turned parts of Gay Street into a long-term work zone. To blunt the impact on street-level businesses, the city and its partners created a rent-support grant program for first-floor tenants along the route. The Downtown Columbus project page includes Due Amici on the roster of businesses eligible for that assistance, a reminder of how big public works and day-to-day commerce have been colliding on the same stretch of sidewalk.
What comes next for 67 E. Gay still a mystery
As also noted by Columbus Business First, no future tenant has been identified for the 67 E. Gay Street storefront, and the owners had not publicly outlined next steps at the time of that report. Earlier in the day, the restaurant’s website and online reservation tools were still listing the Gay Street location, according to Due Amici, suggesting the shutdown was fresh and the operational details were still in flux.
The closure lands in the middle of a larger downtown shakeup, where cranes and new investments share the stage with small-business turnover. That push-and-pull is detailed in the Capital Crossroads and the Discovery SID 2023 State of Downtown report, which notes that the same construction and capital that bring new energy can also put additional pressure on longstanding neighborhood fixtures like Due Amici.
