Ohio has plenty of normal places to grab dinner, but the state is also home to restaurants where the building, menu or mascot is just as memorable as the food. Like these weird restaurants in California, Ohio’s strangest dining spots prove that a meal is easier to remember when the restaurant fully commits to the oddity.
From a Star Wars fighter parked outside a diner to a burger topped with peanut butter and pickles, these five Ohio restaurants are weird in the best possible way.
Mike’s Place in Kent
Mike’s Place may be the hardest restaurant in Ohio to explain in one sentence.
The Kent restaurant describes itself as a proud independent family-owned business, but that barely captures the experience. Outside, visitors can find a homemade Star Wars X-wing fighter that has been part of the restaurant’s identity since the 1990s. Inside, the dining areas include an old bus, a boat, a castle-like banquet room and enough mismatched decorations to make the place feel like a roadside attraction that happens to serve breakfast, burgers and ribs.
Some restaurants pick a theme. Mike’s Place appears to have picked every theme and then kept going.
Kewpee Hamburgers in Lima
Kewpee Hamburgers looks strange to anyone who does not already understand Lima’s affection for the nearly century-old burger brand.
The restaurant’s name comes from the Kewpie doll, and the baby-faced mascot still gives the place a wonderfully odd old-fashioned identity. Kewpee says it has been a Lima staple for nearly 100 years, while the remaining Ohio locations preserve a burger tradition that once stretched across a much larger chain.
The weirdness is not loud or modern. It is the kind of strangeness that comes from surviving so long that the mascot, slogan and style feel like a dispatch from another era.
The Schoolhouse Restaurant in Camp Dennison
At The Schoolhouse Restaurant, dinner is served in a building that once held actual students.
The Camp Dennison School was built in 1864 and served as a school from 1870 to 1952. In 1962, it was converted into a restaurant designed around family-style dining and childhood memories.
That gives the place an unusual emotional texture. Guests are not just eating in a themed room made to resemble a classroom. They are eating inside a former schoolhouse that has been repurposed into a restaurant where the entire building is part of the meal.
Bearden’s in Rocky River
Bearden’s looks like a classic Ohio burger spot, but one menu item makes it unusually memorable: the peanutburger.
The Rocky River restaurant has been serving fresh steakburgers since 1948. Its famous peanutburger combines a burger patty with peanut butter and sweet pickles, a combination that sounds like a dare until enough locals insist that it works.
The restaurant also has an old-school diner feel, complete with a mini train circling the room.
Peanut butter, pickles, burgers and a model train should not necessarily belong together. At Bearden’s, they somehow do.
Pier W in Lakewood
Pier W is not weird because it is messy or goofy. It is weird because it feels like Ohio built a cruise ship into a cliff.
The Lakewood restaurant has been a Cleveland-area landmark since 1965. Its architecture was designed to resemble the hull of a luxury liner, and the restaurant sits within a cliff overlooking Lake Erie.
That means diners can eat seafood while looking out over the water from a building that appears to be part restaurant, part ship and part scenic overlook.
Ohio’s weird restaurants cover a lot of ground. Some are playful, some are historic and one looks ready to leave port without warning.
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