City View Tavern

City View Tavern has been up on Oregon Street since 1875, when it opened as a grocery with a small taproom, and for a long stretch it went by Lagemann's. I stopped in for a quick lunch before golf expecting a beer and a bag of chips and walked into a new era. The sign out front says under new ownership and management. A framed Enquirer clipping inside fills in the rest. Debra Henning bought the place in 1985, ran it with her partner and husband Silas Evans, and put it on the market in 2020. It took six years to sell. The buyer was Randy Freking, a retired lawyer, author, and Reds podcast co-host who'd been drinking there for close to 50 years. His first day as owner was August 29. I got there under three weeks later. He's the fifth owner in the building's history.

The Vibe

Two rooms and a deck. The front room is a bar with Blue Moon tabletops, a unisex restroom papered wall to wall in old postcards, and a run of portraits by the door: an old painted likeness of Big Ted, the original owner, caricatures of Silas and Deb, and the clipping about the sale. There's a Lagemann picture somewhere too. I never found it. The back room is drop ceiling, ceiling fans, dark wood paneling, framed Reds and Bengals front pages, and a picture window that looks straight down the hill at downtown. Past that is the deck: string lights, black cafe tables, a bench along the rail, and the whole city laid out below you. That's why people climb the hill. On a weekday afternoon it was a handful of regulars watching the game, me, and Patrick, who was the bartender, the server, and the cook, and made all of it look like a slow day. Freking told the paper the vibe isn't changing. From what I saw, he means it.

The house rules here come with stories. For decades the bar didn't pour tequila. The version Patrick was told is that sometime back in the fifties or sixties Charles Manson, who was born in Cincinnati, got deep into the tequila and went off the patio, and that was the end of tequila at City View. The timeline doesn't survive contact with his prison record, and nobody at the bar claims to have seen it. It's a bar story. One of the first things the new owner did was put tequila back on the shelf, which is about as gentle as a new era gets.

The Food

The menu is one page. Burgers, a chili named for Silas, and chips. Patrick said first-timers get the Big Ted Deluxe, so I did: lettuce, onion, pickle, and American cheese, minus the tomato, medium rare plus. He took the order, pulled my beer, walked back, and cooked it. It came out medium rare plus. That's a hand-formed patty, not a smash, and hitting temp on request three weeks into a change of ownership, with one guy running the whole building, is not nothing. It's not a gigantic burger. It's plenty. The chips are a bag of Lay's, and I went BBQ. That's the kind of place this is, and it's the right call. I drank a Braxton October Fuel lager on draft, Covington beer on a Cincinnati hill. That's it.

The Bottom Line

Worth a Short Detour, on one condition. Come for a cool little dive and the view over Cincinnati and you'll leave happy. Come expecting anything beyond a good burger, a cold beer, and a fall back in time and you've misread the place. Sit on the deck if the weather is right.