By Audrey Elwood, Arts & Entertainment Editor

Nestled in the heart of Clifton, Highland Coffee House is not your standard coffee shop. 

It does not open until 3 p.m., and closes at 2:30 a.m. They serve coffee and run a full bar through the dead of night. When everywhere remotely productive to study closes, Highland opens. It is such a rarity to see an off-campus study spot open so late. 

Highland opened in 1978, making it one of the oldest coffee shops in Cincinnati. You can see the history inside with chalkboards as menus and vintage liquor signs. The board games have seen decades of college students. Scribbles all over  the bathroom make outdated references to bands that have long since dissolved.

Patrons are told to grab a menu and sit down, which is odd, seeing as they are trying to cultivate a coffee house environment. It may leave customers waiting aimlessly when they already knew what they wanted to drink.

My friend ordered a hot hard cider, while I stuck with my classic iced vanilla latte. The drinks came out after around 10 minutes, which is a little long for a coffee shop. However, only one guy was working that night, and he was also a server to the entire shop.

“My drink was scrumptious. It had a twist of orange, which was unexpected, but delightful,” Elizabeth Fitzgerald, junior management, business analytics and information systems and psychology major said. “I have had drinks there before, and they have always been good.”        

The iced vanilla latte was genuinely one of the worst drinks I have ever had in Cincinnati. It was not espresso, and it had no vanilla. It ended up tasting watery and bitter the minute it came out like it had been waiting out and spoiling for hours. The espresso itself (I am still not sure if it was espresso or just drip) tasted like it was over-pulled and burnt.

The thing about Highland is that it truly is a great place to study. However, they do have a six-dollar or one-drink per hour fee. This serves more as a guideline than a rule as it is not particularly enforced. 

Since I was not buying more than one drink, I asked if I could buy a cookie instead to cover this fee. These cookies were scrumptious. Truly a marvel. Forget Crumbl and Insomnia, if you want a good chocolate chip cookie, Highland is your place for a melt-in-your-mouth, buttery, moist crumb cookie.

All-in-all, Highland is a good study spot to get away from the usual campus study spots. It is just a hop away from campus, but still far enough to get some distance from Xavier. However, I cannot in good faith recommend any of the coffee drinks, as mine was were truly abysmal. 

If you can partake, the alcoholic drinks come highly recommended. If you just need a sweet treat to get you through a paper, grab a cookie. Highland is somewhere I would revisit, just only after I turn 21.