RESTAURANT NEWS | OHIO

1818 American Grille Puts a Wood Fire at the Center of Dinner in Bath

Chef-partner Brad Race and the team behind The Last Page built their Bath restaurant around cherry and hickory, a raw bar, and familiar American dishes cooked with care.

1818 AMERICAN GRILLE | MAP | INSTAGRAM

By JAMIE DUTTON
6:12 a.m. CT, Oct. 16, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Jamie Dutton's job has her in airports regularly, as does a family spread out across the Midwest. She’s partial to BPTs and Bell’s.

The first thing you notice at 1818 American Grille is the fire. It isn't decoration. A wood-fired grill sits at the center of the kitchen in Bath, Ohio, burning a blend of cherry and hickory, and most of what leaves the kitchen has spent some time over it.

The restaurant is the newest from the team behind The Last Page in Cleveland, and it takes a deliberately simpler route than that restaurant's global, shareable cooking: classic American dishes, good ingredients, and careful execution.

Brad Race

The name comes from the year Bath was founded, and the restaurant opened in stages. Downstairs, the 32-seat Grille Room came first over the summer, built around the open kitchen and a 16-seat chef's counter that's held for walk-ins. Even on its own, the Grille Room was named an Akron Life Best of the City 2026 winner. On Sept. 24, the rest of the restaurant followed, with the main dining room, a 10-seat raw bar, a heated, covered second-story patio, and two private dining rooms that seat up to 14 guests each.

Chef-partner Brad Race leads the kitchen, working with partners Gary Shamis and Todd Leebow. Race has spent nearly 30 years in restaurants, including time at Oceana, Nobu, and Minibar by José Andrés, kitchens that don't leave much room for shortcuts. His approach here is restraint. Familiar dishes get stripped back to quality ingredients and clean technique, and the fire does the rest. The grill burns two-thirds cherry and one-third hickory, a mix that gives the food smoke without covering it up.

Dinner starts with Parker House rolls with lemon herb butter, ricotta toast with fig jam, crispy prosciutto, lemon, and pistachio, stuffed banana peppers, and mussels in white wine with garlic, shallots, and thyme. The 7-ounce 1818 burger comes with garlic rosemary fries, as do the other classics. From the wood fire there's a filet mignon, grilled chicken thighs, grilled salmon, and a half rack of ribs in a pomegranate-molasses barbecue sauce.

7oz chophouse burger

The dish that explains the kitchen best may be the bone-in pork chop de Parma. It's cut from the same pigs raised for Prosciutto di Parma, animals fed in part on the whey left over from Parmesan making, and it's brined overnight, grilled, and served with a Parmesan mustard jus and Parmesan potatoes. At the raw bar, there’s East Coast oysters alongside tuna tartare, snow crab legs, and a chilled lobster tail. Dessert leans local, with ice cream from Pav's Creamery.

Cajun chicken pasta

There's room here for a weeknight burger, a dozen oysters at the bar, or a long dinner on the patio, and that flexibility seems to be the idea. A restaurant built on rolls, ribs, and a pork chop doesn't need a complicated pitch. In Bath, it just needs regulars, and it's built the kind of room that earns them.