With so many choices for eating and shopping in town, it goes without saying that there are only a few places that we make regular stops – for us, one of those is Carfagna’s Market on the North Side (E. Dublin-Granville Rd).
When the farmers markets are going on, this is a normal Saturday afternoon stop for us – right after hitting Worthington. The biggest part of the shop is the butcher area, where you can get just about any type of meat/deli meat that you can think of, along with a huge section of prepared foods. One of our favorite things to buy here is their festival sausage, which is somewhere in between sweet and hot Italian sausage spice-wise. A little heat, but not too much.
In addition to their meat selection, they carry a lot of local dairy products (Smith’s Dairy in particular), beautiful produce in the summer, any type of frozen and dried pasta you could dream of, a great cheese selection, and an impressive wine selection as well.
In the past year or so, they opened up a little restaurant (Carfagna’s Kitchen) up at Polaris, where they sell prepared pasta, subs, and pizzas. It’s very casual – there are plenty of tables at which to eat, but it’s more of a seat yourself and wait for your order to be called type of thing. We usually stop here for takeout once every week or two. My husband’s favorite dish is the basic spaghetti and meatballs ($6.95), with their handmade spaghetti, a couple of meatballs, and their fantastic marinara (which other than my own sauce, is all I pretty much use anymore).
My favorite (not pictured) is the fabulous Meat Heaven Spaghetti ($9.75), which is the same handmade spaghetti topped with ground chuck, grilled sausage, sauteed pancetta and meatballs w/ red sauce. Each entree comes with your choice of soup or salad and some pretty meh garlic bread. Their salad is a respectable iceburg/romaine mix, good but not great.
We haven’t tried their pizza or subs yet, so we can’t attest to them, but we haven’t gone wrong yet with any of their pasta selections. One thing that endears them to me is that they package their takeout beautifully, and keep them warm in a hot box while you’re driving to get up there – we live well on the other side of town and the food is always still hot when we get home.
Their hours are a bit short (11am – 8pm Mon-Thurs, 11am-9pm Friday, 3pm-9pm Saturday, closed Sunday), but if you plan ahead, it makes a great dinner on a night when you don’t feel like cooking, and is a much more cost effective alternative than one of the chains.
If you’d like to go: Carfagna’s Market, 1405 E. Dublin Granville Rd (at I-71), Cols. 614.846.6340; Carfagna’s Kitchen, 2025 Polaris Parkway, Cols. 614.848.4488