The Opening
1818 American Grille will open its full-service restaurant on September 24 at 1070 Ghent Road in Bath, Ohio, adding a main dining room, covered patio, raw bar, and private dining spaces to the ground-floor operation it has run since launching The Grille Room — an intimate, kitchen-view dining experience that earned a 4.7-star Google rating from more than 50 reviews and was named an Akron Life Best of the City 2026 winner.
The concept is the latest from the team behind The Last Page, a regional operator whose approach positions 1818 as a neighborhood-anchored destination capable of capturing both everyday covers and higher-margin private event business. The full opening follows a renovation of the first-floor space that was underway while The Grille Room operated downstairs.
The Culinary Program
Chef Brad Race leads the kitchen, where a wood-fired grill anchors the menu across proteins, seafood, and seasonal vegetables. The culinary program is framed around elevated American classics — a positioning that places 1818 in a segment of the full-service restaurant market that has shown durable consumer demand even as mid-casual traffic has softened nationwide. Race said the approach deliberately avoids complexity: "Start with quality ingredients, focus on execution, and create an experience people remember."
The wood-fired format is a capital-intensive but competitively differentiated platform. Operators deploying open-fire cooking as a signature technique have increasingly used it as a driver of both menu pricing power and brand identity in a crowded full-service landscape. For 1818, the grill was cited as foundational to the concept from initial development, shaping equipment investment, kitchen layout, and menu architecture from the outset.
Private Dining as a Revenue Layer
The full opening materially expands 1818's revenue surface. Private dining spaces designed for corporate meetings, celebratory dinners, showers, and social gatherings represent a higher-margin channel that single-room concepts cannot fully access. For independent and regional operators, private event revenue has become an increasingly important hedge against weekday traffic variability — a trend tracked across the full-service sector as operators seek booking-guaranteed covers to smooth weekly revenue.
The addition of a raw bar further diversifies the menu and price-point range, giving 1818 a seafood anchor that supports beverage attach rates and average check growth, particularly in pre-dinner and reception formats.
For regional restaurant operators and foodservice investors watching the Ohio market, the 1818 launch represents a meaningful test of whether an elevated wood-fire concept with private dining infrastructure can build durable volume in a suburban township market outside Akron. Early reception metrics from The Grille Room — a competitive review rating at launch and a regional editorial award — suggest initial positioning has resonated with the local guest base.
The opening also adds to a broader trend of independent operators expanding full-service formats with differentiated culinary platforms, a dynamic covered previously in F&B Industry News's look at wood-fire and live-fire restaurant concepts.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
