Service! opens The Line in Columbus with fresh pasta and training mission

Fresh pasta is one of the clearest signals that The Line in downtown Columbus wants to be more than a training lab with tables attached. At 145 N. Grant Ave., in a former Columbus College of Art & Design building, Service! is shaping a restaurant where scratch cooking and workforce development are meant to reinforce each other, not compete for attention.

Chef Matthew Heaggans is leading the kitchen, with roughly eight full-time staff members backed by cohorts of paid trainees. The menu preview makes the kitchen’s identity hard to miss: house-made breads, fresh pasta, seafood dishes, pork katsu and short rib cannelloni all point to a chef-driven operation that is leaning on technique without turning into a white-tablecloth room.

That training mission is the other half of the story. Service! was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic to support hospitality workers, and The Line is designed as a more advanced step than Café Overlook, the organization’s existing workforce-development restaurant at the Franklin County Government Center and courthouse complex. Café Overlook opened in spring 2022, and county materials say workers there earned at least $15 an hour and received benefits while building job skills. A 2023 report said the program had trained about 150 employees.

Service! has also built pathways beyond the dining room, working with the Franklin County Board of Commissioners, Department of Job & Family Services, Jewish Family Services, ECDI, Otterbein University and Columbus State Community College. Those ties matter because The Line is meant to move people into management or culinary education, not just into one more line cook job. The larger Service Innovation Kitchen project is pitched as a state-of-the-art culinary center that will train workers, support local businesses and promote economic mobility, with an incubator program for food entrepreneurs also planned.

The space itself is set up to do a lot of work. The Line is expected to seat about 80 guests indoors and another 40 on the patio, with a bar area, private event space and an eight-seat chef’s table. The menu is supposed to move from casual breakfast and lunch service into a more elevated dinner format, giving downtown Columbus a place where fresh pasta shares the spotlight with a broader modern American lineup.

The opening had originally been targeted for early 2026, but the timeline slipped after copper and restaurant equipment were stolen from the site. Now expected later in summer 2026, The Line is still aiming to do what Service! has promised from the start: turn a downtown dining room into a working model for careers, education and entrepreneurship, with fresh pasta as one of its most tangible calling cards.