Eat and Drink in Style at the Metropolitan at The 9
Fantastic food and classic cocktails await inside a Cleveland icon
The Metropolitan at The 9 is one of Cleveland’s most notable hotels, but thanks to a great restaurant and a stunning cocktail bar, it is also a place that locals flock to for an evening of fine dining and fancier drinking.
Read about the hotel here
Adega, the Metropolitan’s modern Mediterranean restaurant, is a regular on lists of the best places in Cleveland to eat, and for good reason. The best local and international ingredients are expertly brought together by executive chef Nelly Buleje to form a menu that brings together dishes from across Europe. Dishes such as the humble hummus are expertly done, while other seemingly simple dishes, such as mussels are elevated with the addition of ingredients that may, to the untrained among us, seem somewhat incongruous, such as absinthe and cinnamon. The same can be seen in another mediterranean staple: Italian Bolognese. Handmade pasta and a complex and rich sauce that takes more than a day to prepare from start to finish come together in a superb dish.
Adega also has a comprehensive wine list and a very competent sommelier to go with them in Michel Emerick. In fact, the restaurant’s very name comes from the Portuguese for “wine cellar” and that love of wine can be seen in the range of wines which includes wines from France, Italy and Spain, but also from further afield such as Greece and Israel as well as a good selection of domestic bottles, particularly reds. The current wine list can be found here.
After dinner, waddle downstairs to Vault, an upscale cocktail bar located inside the century-old bank vaults beneath the Cleveland Trust Rotunda. The stunning bar has a comprehensive menu that has dozens of cocktails (as well as beer and wine), many of which have very interesting and clever names, such as the The Corner of Euclid and Bourbon and the Lake Shore Lemonade. The menu even has a glossary of historical relevance so you can learn why they are called what they are. Then there is the AZ85 Manhattan, a somewhat limited cocktail in that it is only served nightly at the bar and with a limit of just 10 per day thanks to the exhaustive method used to create the hollow ice ball that is at the centre of its dramatic look.
Click here to learn more and see the menu
All in all, Adega and Vault combine for a fantastic and upmarket evening of dining and drinking in the heart of Cleveland.
