Columbus Monthly December 2020

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Beverly D’Angelo Has No Regrets • The Rise and Fall of CeaseFire Columbus

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Contents On the cover: Photo by Tim Johnson

december 2020

30 Year of the baker

Meet some of the Central Ohioans baking their way through 2020.

Features 42

Beverly D’Angelo Has No Regrets

The Upper Arlington native never achieved the Hollywood superstardom she probably deserved. But she made the most of every role, including the one she played in real life: a woman defined by love.

photo: tim johnson

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When the Killings Stopped An assortment from Matija Breads

What a short-lived experiment on the South Side of Columbus can teach a city struggling with gun violence

DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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Contents december 2020

54

67 Arch City

Home & Style

Dining

18 Arts

54 Q&A

64 Year in Review

23 Tradition

55 Products

28 Perspective

56 Home

Sugar Ray’s tragic year Santa’s pandemic pivot My body, my self

6

An equestrian’s German Village boutique A holiday at home

New Albany’s most exclusive neighborhood

Eight happy developments during a gloomy time

67 Short Order

Kirin Noodle Bar takes center stage.

70 Drink

A winery’s new urban mix

in every issue

10 FROM THE EDITOR 12 Small Talk 26 Datebook 27 PEOPLE 62 TOP 25 real estate transactions 80 City quotient

photos: clockwise from left, jodi miller; tim johnson; tessa berg; erin edwards

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Columbus Monthly DECEMBER 2020

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photos: clockwise from left, jodi miller; tim johnson; tessa berg; erin edwards

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NOVEMBER 21, 2020 thru FEBRUARY 28, 2021

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Volume 46 / Number 12 Columbus Monthly (ISSN 2333-4150) is published monthly by Gannett. All contents of this magazine are copyrighted © Gannett Co., Inc. 2020 all rights reserved. Reproduction or use, without written permission, of editorial or graphic content in any manner is prohibited. Publisher assumes no responsibility for return of unsolicited materials. Known office of publication is 62 E. Broad St., Columbus, Ohio 43215. Periodicals postage paid at Columbus, Ohio, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Columbus Monthly, 62 E. Broad St., P.O. Box 1289, Columbus, OH 43216.

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From the Editor

Beverly, Biden and a Bygone Battleground

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small town votes, they’re worth a lot more than big city votes,” says Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the political newsletter Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

The election also confirmed that Ohio, once the country’s preeminent presidential battleground, is now Trump land.

For the first time since 1960, Ohio was on the losing side of a presidential election. Kondik, the author of the 2016 book “The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President,” says the state has grown less representative of the country overall—more white, fewer college graduates—and that’s pushed it toward Donald Trump’s Republican Party. The spotlight now shines on Georgia, Arizona and even Texas, all of which are more likely to decide who occupies the White House than Ohio in our current political climate.

I may live in a “special world,” to borrow a phrase from Kael, but Ohio is just another red state now—no matter how many pots and pans my neighbors clang.

Peter Tonguette

profiled actress Beverly D’Angelo (Page 42). His writing on film has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Sight & Sound.

Donna Marbury

is a freelance journalist and communications consultant.

She wrote about airbrush artist Raymonn “Sugar Ray” Daniels (Page 18).

Theodore Decker

Dave Ghose dghose@columbusmonthly.com

wrote about the rise and fall of CeaseFire Columbus, a violence intervention program (Page 48).

Decker is the metro columnist for The Columbus Dispatch.

photos: clockwise from left, rob hardin; Brooke LaValley; courtesy Donna Marbury; dispatch file

In early November, I found myself thinking a lot about the late New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael. She was the most interesting and influential critic of her generation, and she was an unabashed admirer of Beverly D’Angelo, the Upper Arlington native who’s the subject of a fascinating profile by Peter Tonguette in this issue (Page 42).

“She’s really a symbol of what’s wrong with movies right now,” Kael said in 1992. “How could an what we actress so beautiful and talentlearned this ed not get cast in better films?” month Then the presidential election to end all presidential elecThe Buckeye Santas, a group tions came to a close just a few of independent Kris Kringles, has been meeting via Zoom since days before we put this issue to the pandemic worsened (Page 23). bed, and another Kael quote popped into my head as I sat on Frank X. Resch is the fifth genmy front porch and observed eration of his family to run the how my University District 108-year-old Resch’s Bakery on the East Side of Columbus (Page 30). neighborhood responded to Joe Biden’s victory. “I live in a Retired Express CEO Michael rather special world,” Kael said Weiss’ recently sold home in following Richard Nixon’s 1972 ultraexclusive New Albany Farms triumph over George McGovincludes six bedrooms and six and a ern. “I only know one person half baths (Page 56). who voted for Nixon.”

When the Associated Press called the election for Biden, my neighbors whooped, hollered, honked car horns, banged pots and pans, and danced in the street—not a surprising reaction if you look at voting results. According to unofficial tallies, 90 percent of voters in my precinct chose Biden, a 10-point improvement from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 percentage. In Franklin County overall, Biden captured 65 percent, a five-point increase from four years earlier.

We live in a divided country, of course, and the impromptu block party doesn’t reflect Ohio as a whole—or at least a good portion of it. I recently drove though Knox County, where seemingly every home had a Trump/Pence sign. The election confirmed that anecdotal evidence, with the GOP ticket capturing 71 percent of the Knox County vote, a five-point jump from 2016. Those results mirrored the red wave that occurred in other small towns and rural areas of the state, giving the Republican candidate a decisive eight-point victory in Ohio. “In a state like Ohio, if you add all the rural and

Contributors

Columbus Monthly DECEMBER 2020

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Children’s mental health.

photos: clockwise from left, rob hardin; Brooke LaValley; courtesy Donna Marbury; dispatch file

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Small Talk Special advertising opportunities coming in Columbus Monthly

FEBRUARY Best New Restaurants

Editors reveal the best restaurants to open in Central Ohio in the past 12 months.

Guide to Private Schools K-12

Central Ohio’s top private education institutions.

February issue closing: December 28

Best Driving Vacations

MARCH Health Matters: Surviving Cancer This special section will give readers important information about screening, early detection and treatment options available right here in Columbus.

Guide to Cosmetic Procedures and Treatments

In this special advertising section, you can let readers know about your specialty, your experience and how you can be a partner in their quest to keep looking and feeling great.

March Issue Closing: January 22

Home & Garden: Spring/Summer Springtime is about refreshing the home, from interior rooms to outdoor settings.

This issue will focus on seasonal updates, with home and garden features that have looks we love.

Home & Garden Closing: January 15

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Model Cavy A brown and black guinea pig named Fred enjoyed 15 minutes of fame thanks to his appearance modeling a Kaytee Comfort Harness and Stretch Leash in our October “Columbus Pets Guide” cover story. “Fred is a @columbusmonthly model! George is jealous,” tweeted Carrie Ghose, whose daughter owns Fred and his unpictured brother George. “My toddler was studying that pic today,” tweeted Irene Alvarez, following up a day later with a photo of her daughter, Kalli, bent over the pages. “Back at it this morning.”

In another tweet, Ghose, who happens to be married to our editor, Dave Ghose, warned, “Don’t get the leash. The graphic is tongue-in-cheek. Unless you have a skinny cavy.” The Ghoses report that while the harness was not a good fit for the robust Fred, no animals were harmed in the course of the photo shoot.

COVID Consequences “Tending Bar Under COVID-19,” an essay in our September issue by Oddfellows Liquor Bar manager David Yee, was one of our most-viewed articles online last month. In it, Yee describes how the coronavirus has exposed and increased the hardships faced by service industry workers and outlines ideas for change. In a Facebook post, Brandon Moseman called it a “must read,” while Jamie Clemento wrote on Instagram, “This man speaks unequivocal truths. Fetishizing brunch over literal human life has permanently changed the industry.”

$1.1 million. An August 2020 article in the Home & Style section incorrectly reported he’d personally bought the home.

Corrections The new Liberty Branch Library at Home and Steitz roads will not replace the Powell Branch at Library Park, as was incorrectly reported in the Powell special section in our October issue. The new branch is in addition to the existing branch.

In his capacity as a trustee for another individual, Barry H. Wolinetz purchased a home in New Albany in February for nearly

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Even with the pandemic, Central Ohio families are still making plans for driving vacations in 2021. BDV will be a valuable resource, a guide to quality travel opportunities in all price ranges. BDV will be mailed in late January 2021 to Columbus Monthly’s subscribers.

Best Driving Vacations Closing: December 18

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ArchCity charity p. 20 | media P. 21 | tradition p. 22 | people P. 27

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Art for the Departed

Raymonn Daniels’ lifelike, celebratory portraits of the dead are all too common during a year of tragedy.

Photo by Tessa Berg

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Arch City arts

In Loving Memory

During a tragic year, Raymonn Daniels helps others mourn death and celebrate life through art.

By Donna Marbury

Kevin Constant Sr. was finishing a quick shopping trip at the Come & Go Center on Oakland Park Avenue when he noticed an artist working in the back of the grocery store. After talking to Raymonn “Sugar Ray” Daniels, known for airbrushing designs on clothes, shoes, motorcycles and walls, Constant ordered a shirt to commemorate his son, Kevin Constant Jr., who was shot and killed in 2019.

“I wore the shirt on Oct. 11, because it was the one-year anniversary of his death. I wore it on his birthday, Sept. 28. Any other time, I just keep it in plastic,” says Constant.

The shirt features a photo of his 26-yearold son flanked by angel wings. Hugging the photo are the words “In Loving Memory of Kevin Jr. My Son” in cursive script.

“I’m sad when I wear it, but it’s for my son.

I really can’t explain the feeling because he was so young.”

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Mourning family and friends can be both celebratory and sad for Black folks. Those two emotions coexist as loved ones search for ways to show outward displays of pain and joy. For Daniels, his airbrushed RIP T-shirts are a way to help people express their love as they grieve.

“Sometimes people order a shirt from me as one of the first things they do when their family dies,” Daniels says. He gets the call right after they make burial arrangements.

Daniels has been an airbrush artist for more than 20 years, and his work is an ingrained part of Columbus culture, though it’s not hanging in galleries or adorning big buildings. For many high school students in the city, his airbrushed pieces represent a rite of passage—seniors customize vibrant sweatsuits in the fall around homecoming.

During the spring, Black neighborhoods are peppered with his banners showing off

the detailed, bright faces of local graduates.

Many restaurants and day cares feature his mural work. It is inviting, lush with color and accessible to business owners who want to display their personality.

“I feel like I normalize art; I make it functional,” Daniels says.

But this year, he’s seeing more customers who are using his art to mourn, as his airbrushed RIP shirts have proliferated during a time of pandemic and growing bloodshed. A Columbus native, Daniels maintains his art studio inside the Come & Go in the Linden community, which disproportionately suffers from high unemployment and crime.

“I am an artist tucked into the neighborhood where the crime is happening. I sometimes feel like a therapist through my art,” Daniels says.

During the summer of 2020, Columbus saw an increase in violent crime with 51 murders, at least 10 of those within the Linden community’s 6 square miles, according to an analysis of police reports by The Columbus Dispatch. As of September, the city’s homicide rate had increased 40 percent from 2019.

Many of Daniels’ customers are young people who buy an RIP shirt to memorialize a friend

photos: Tessa berg

Raymonn “Sugar Ray” Daniels inside his studio

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around their age. Adding to an increase in Black deaths in 2020 is COVID-19, which has affected people of color more severely.

“It’s just as tragic and unexpected as when young people die from being shot,” Daniels says.

He says he has painted more than 200 RIP shirts this year, and he’s sometimes overwhelmed as the increasing number of deaths have made the shirts a larger part of his business. Some feature iron-on photos with elaborate airbrush designs, a quote or phrase and the dates of a loved one’s birth and death. His most striking shirts are portraits, capturing his subjects smiling, full of life. He receives orders for airbrushed RIP shirts from across the country.

Yvette Butler of New Albany purchased an RIP blazer from Daniels to remember her daughter, Chaude` Reed, who died in a fire in October 2020. Butler says he was able to capture her daughter’s beautiful, bright personality in the detail of his art. “My initial reaction to seeing his work—it brought me to tears. It’s like he instantly felt my pain.

He felt the family. He wanted to make sure the artwork of her was exactly what we gave him, and he went over and beyond.”

Though Daniels understands that his artwork helps the community mourn, it’s not always easy to spend so much time with the faces and memories of the recently deceased. “Even though the person is gone, when I’m painting their face, they are still alive,” Daniels says. “It’s tough for me because sometimes I feel like the person is trying to come out through the art.” ◆

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Arch City charity

Patrick Moore arranges mats for socially distanced bedding in the Downtown YMCA gymnasium in March.

An extraordinary financial crisis awaits the giving season.

By Chris Gaitten

December is rainmaking season for nonprofits, as the largest annual donations traditionally roll in between Giving Tuesday (Dec. 1 in 2020) and New Year’s Eve. This year, the needs of charitable organizations are more urgent than ever.

For more than eight months, the coronavirus has caused the cancellation of marquee fundraising events and scuttled revenue-generating social entrepreneurship ventures, causing widespread financial losses. The situation is more dire for nonprofits in the health and human services sector because they’re dealing with a simultaneous surge in need from vulnerable populations, says Michael Corey, executive director of the Human Service Chamber of Franklin County, a 102-member advocacy group for social-service organizations.

The Columbus Foundation and the United Way of Central Ohio have provided emergency nonprofit funding, and Columbus and Franklin County added $20 million from their federal CARES Act dollars. But requests for the CARES money—totaling $91 million from 247 local nonprofits, Corey says—outpaced available aid. In an informal survey in October, about two-thirds of the chamber’s members reported losing a com20

bined $61 million in revenue and incurring $21.6 million in COVID-related expenses.

On Oct. 23, Gov. Mike DeWine made $25 million of the state’s CARES Act money available to nonprofits. But as Corey points out, there are questions about whether all that funding must be spent this year, which limits its efficacy. Furthermore, corporations and philanthropic foundations have signaled cutbacks in giving in 2021 due to the economic fallout. “The bigger fear isn’t actually getting to the end of this year,” Corey says. “It’s what happens next year.”

In short, now is the time to give. Columbus Monthly emailed three nonprofits to see how the pandemic is affecting them and what types of support they need most.

Columbus Early Learning Centers Enrollment restrictions and safety protocols have reduced CELC’s child care and preschool capacity by 65 percent. Between the associated drop in revenue and anticipated funding losses, the nonprofit projects a 22 percent decrease in total income in 2021, says CEO Gina M. Ginn. Volunteering is limited, so Ginn suggests people create grab-and-go craft activities, buy books from the classroom wishlist (amzn.to/2IrRCcV) or make videos

YMCA of Central Ohio To reduce the virus’s spread in homeless shelters, the YMCA socially distanced its Van Buren Center by setting up four additional shelters, as well as quarantine housing at a hotel, says chief strategy officer Brandi Braun. Through October, the YMCA had provided shelter for more than 120 people with COVID. Government funding has helped offset annual giving shortfalls, but the nonprofit needs kitchen volunteers, donated meals, art supplies for children and general financial support. To donate, visit ymca columbus.org; to volunteer at Van Buren, email vbvolunteer@ymcacolumbus.org.

Godman Guild While more people were able to access the nonprofit’s adult education, career readiness and youth programming after it went virtual, CEO Ellen Moss says the shutdown cost its two businesses, Camp Mary Orton and Blue Bow Tie Catering, about $625,000. Though Godman made up the bulk through COVID relief funding, corporate donations are uncertain for 2021.

To donate personal protective equipment, contact Zach Matthews (zach.matthews@ godmanguild.org); visit godmanguild.org for monetary donations. ◆

photo: rob hardin

Nonprofits in Need

of themselves reading aloud, which staff can play for kids. Donate at columbusearly learning.org, or contact Amy Deverson Roberts (aroberts@columbusearlylearning.org) to set up a creative volunteering experience.

Columbus Monthly DECEMBER 2020

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media Arch City

Kerry Charles’ Homecoming The TV news anchor returned to his birthplace to report on life in the city during tumultuous times.

photo: tim johnson

photo: rob hardin

By Chris Bournea

Halfway through this nightmarish year, Kerry Charles landed his dream job back in his hometown. In June, as the coronavirus spread and the country grappled with a racial reckoning, the Columbus native returned to co-anchor NBC4’s news desk next to Colleen Marshall on the weekday evening broadcasts.

The upside for Charles: There is no shortage of newsworthy topics to tackle.

Growing up in the Linden area, Charles was innately curious about current affairs.

His foray into journalism came as a Crestview Middle School student in the 1990s, when he hosted the weekly WCBE 90.5 radio show Kids Sundae. He also served as an anchor and reporter for the Kids News Network, which aired on 10TV. The LindenMcKinley High School grad has been an anchor, reporter and producer in Cincinnati; Greensboro, North Carolina; Shreveport, Louisiana; and most recently in Atlanta before returning to Columbus, where he previously worked for the ABC/Fox affiliate.

At NBC, Charles sits in the seat once held

by Mike Jackson, who left the station to focus on his recovery after a massive stroke in early 2019. Marshall, the evening broadcast’s mainstay, compares the co-anchor relationship to a marriage, saying she and Charles are a good fit because they share a similar work ethic. “He’s very driven and very passionate about the stories he wants to tell,” she says.

Charles says he pushes for coverage that promotes understanding. When his work takes him to his former stomping grounds in Linden, he strives to provide context for headline-grabbing events.

“We can’t just say, ‘There’s a shooting in Linden.’ There are systemic issues,” Charles says. “We need to address that.”

When reporting on crime there and in other communities, news outlets should describe the underlying historic and socioeconomic causes, he continues. “You talk about redlining and white flight, and you talk about the crack epidemic and the opioid epidemic. When you add that amount of

Kerry Charles walks toward the construction entrance to the new recreation center in his old neighborhood of Linden.

stress and you add on the pandemic, that’s a lot of socioeconomic factors.”

His longtime friend Orie Givens, a Spectrum News 1 reporter in Ohio, also lived and worked elsewhere before returning to Columbus. Givens, who started out with Charles on the Kids News Network, says their reverse migration offers a unique perspective on local news.

“We’re at this space where we’re able to reflect on how far we’ve come, being on TV as kids and now being on TV as adults—as Oprah says, those full-circle moments,” Givens says.

“I can tell stories about Columbus because I’ve seen the changes from afar. Kerry has that experience, too.”

Though Charles visited Central Ohio throughout his itinerant career, the region

has progressed since his childhood. “I remember growing up when Columbus was a ‘cowtown,’” he says. “It was interesting to come back and see how the city has grown.”

The population boom and the city’s expanding diversity are the most noticeable changes. Charles has also been struck by how the broadcast market has evolved in the decade since he left, with a fresh generation of news directors and on-air talent who increasingly reflect that diversity. Shortly after joining NBC4, he and African American colleagues Matt Barnes and Darlene Hill cohosted The Conversation, a series of hourlong specials about race and inequality.

The program shows people are really interested in discussing race, Charles says.

“I never thought I’d see that in Columbus.” ◆ DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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Arch City tradition

Miguel Anaya, as the Cavalier, lifts Caitlin Valentine, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, during a performance in 2017.

BalletMet cast and crew reflect on a season without the time-honored performance of “The Nutcracker.”

By Peter Tonguette

After the weather turns chilly and Christmas music fills playlists, Central Ohioans will notice something missing this holiday season. There will be no dancing snowflakes, no Sugar Plum Fairy, no handsome Prince, no Clara—no production of “The Nutcracker” at the Ohio Theatre. The pandemic prompted BalletMet to cancel the holiday staple for the first time in its 42-year history.

To mark the interruption of one of the city’s most enduring performances, four BalletMet veterans spoke about what the show means to them.

Daryl Kamer, co-founder Favorite memory: “We were doing a ‘Nutcracker’ Morning at the Ballet years and years ago. It was where they bring schoolchildren in. This child walked in, stopped in his tracks as he stepped into the Ohio Theatre, looked up at the chandelier and all of the gold and the gilt, put his hands on his hips, looked at me and said, ‘Nice 22

place you have here.’ You could see the awe on his face.”

What she’ll miss: “It was my very special opportunity to be able to work with the children. Observing them grow from the first rehearsals, in terms of their technical work and their theatrical awareness—just their joy of performing—has been wonderful.”

Erin Rollins, costume shop manager Favorite memory: “The snow scene is quite fast-paced, but the dancers don’t really let on how fast-paced it is. At one point, there’s this breakneck sprint that several of the girls have to do to get from one wing into another to reach their entrance. One year, one of the gals wiped out on her way around that corner. Her husband, a fellow dancer, decided he was going to fix that problem. He would station himself backstage, and as the girls were coming around, they would grab his arm and literally whip around to make that corner.”

Sydney Smith, stage manager Favorite memory: “My goal is always to make sure that the show is consistent and there aren’t too many things that are out of the ordinary with it. I feel like the mishaps actually stand out more to me than the positive things that happen, [like] when Fritz accidentally throws the present into the orchestra pit, or the Arabian silk gets twisted up—that kind of stuff. The mishaps are also fun, in a longer run like ‘Nutcracker,’ just because it keeps it exciting.”

Caitlin Valentine, dancer Favorite memory: “I had quite a few shows [in my] first season [in 2014], so it was a lot to take on. I remember specifically there was a Saturday matinee and Saturday night show that they had booked me [as] Sugar Plum for both shows. That’s something they try not to do, because it is crazy hard and exhausting. I remember saying, ‘No, I can do it.’ I remember feeling very accomplished because I performed it twice in one day.”

What she’ll miss: “I’ll miss being part of the tradition of the holidays. It helps us get in the spirit of the holidays in a sense, but it’s also the tradition of so many families and so many children in Columbus. The fact that they’re a part of our tradition, and we’re a part of theirs, is something really special.” ◆

photo: Andrea Noall

Hiatus of the Sugar Plum Fairy

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Santa’s Pandemic Pivot

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How Christmas’ merriest man is adjusting to a strange season Even jolly old Santa Claus, who can travel the globe in a single night and shimmy down millions of chimneys undetected, isn’t immune to the effects of COVID-19.

No one knows this better than Rob Harmon of Newark, the president of the Buckeye Santas, a group of about 70 independent Kris Kringles who spread Christmas spirit at malls, gatherings and homes statewide. The organization— which also includes women portraying Mrs. Claus—was founded in 2007 to provide details on potential gigs, share information on good and bad clients (a naughty-or-nice list, if you will) and talk shop to help members become better at their craft.

photo: courtesy rob harmon

photo: Andrea Noall

Normally, the Buckeye Santas would meet nearly every month, but they’ve opted for Zoom calls since the pandemic worsened in late spring. As Harmon points out, they’re vulnerable because they tend to be heavier and older, with an average age nearing 70. The group’s leadership encourages everyone to exercise, get flu shots, stay hydrated and take vitamins.

To be the best Santas they can be, they must maintain their health, Harmon says.

Some members plan to sit out the season altogether, while others have adopted 21st century Christmas magic. Tech-savvy Santas bought green screens, which they’ll use to create North Poles for virtual calls with existing clients.

Harmon’s mall in Newark plans to hold traditional photo ops, albeit tweaked for safety. It will be a noncontact experience, with people wearing masks and Santa set up behind a plastic divider. Harmon compares it to a photo bomb from Father Christmas. “Hopefully I can pretend like I’m a mime or something behind the Plexiglass.” —Chris Gaitten DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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Arch City image

Lindsey Rodenhauser of Franklin County Public Health writes a note on the “Recovery Wall” after an unveiling on Oct. 21.

The event was held to launch the agency’s Recover for Life campaign, which encourages support for those with addiction. The mural, by artist Amy Haggard, is at 435 W. Town St. in Franklinton.

Photo by tim johnson

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Arch City editors’ picks

Datebook Things to See and Do

Expanded Dimensions: The Quilt & Surface Design Symposium Online, through Jan. 9

Holidays in Columbus Online, Dec. 3

Take your mind off canceled parties and family gatherings by joining this nostalgic tour of Columbus’ Christmas traditions of years gone by with local historians Doreen Uhas Sauer and Tom Betti. Columbus Metropolitan Library will host this virtual history panel where you can reminisce about the enormous Statehouse holiday tree, ice skating at the Centrum and Lazarus’ Christmas parade, elaborate window displays and famous Talking Tree, seen at right in a photo from the early 1980s. columbuslibrary.org

The annual gathering of fiber artists at CCAD in June was canceled, but its director, Tracy Krieger, has curated an exhibition of stunning textile and fiber works that transcend the boundaries of quilting. View the pieces, as well as Krieger’s gallery talk, on the Riffe Gallery website. On Dec. 5, artist Sue Cavanaugh (seen below: Cavanaugh’s “Kitchen Prayer Flag,” 2019, made with cotton, acrylic paint, mustard, ketchup, jelly and balsamic dressing) will host a family-friendly online workshop. oac.ohio.gov

BalletMet won’t be performing the holiday classic this year, but to keep the joy alive, the company has created a free online hub for all things Nutcracker. A Nutcracker Holiday will include two new videos—one for teens and another for younger children—performed by BalletMet dancers; the rerelease of “Finding Clara,” last year’s behind-the-scenes movie about the making of the show; and an app-based, Nutcracker-themed Downtown scavenger hunt. You’ll also find recipes, games, coloring sheets and more for the many children and adults for whom the holiday season won’t seem right without a visit from a dancing nutcracker, Mother Ginger, a Sugar Plum Fairy and a little girl whose broken nutcracker doll becomes a handsome prince. balletmet.org

Maccabee Landing Bevelhymer Park, Dec. 13

What’s better than a helicopter dropping thousands of (lightweight) dreidels? Why, a caped “Chanukah hero” (left)—one of the Maccabees, who defeated the Greeks—stepping from a helicopter in Westerville to light a giant menorah. Chabad Columbus will host this drive-up answer to last year’s dreidel drop.

The group will also hold a drive-thru Winter Wonderland Chanukah Carnival on Dec. 10. chabadcolumbus.com

Give Back Lifetown Holiday Store Dec. 14

Join with other volunteers from Besa in support of Lifetown’s annual holiday store for families of children with special needs to help with shopping, gift wrapping and stocking shelves. Ages 18-plus; masks required. givebesa.org

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Charity Newsies Virtual Gala Dec. 3

The annual auction and gala supporting Charity Newsies, which provides new outerwear and other clothing to outfit thousands of children in need each year, will be held as an online event. charitynewsies.org

“Comfort & Joy at Home Live” Online, Dec. 23

Cleveland native and multimillionrecord-selling pianist and songwriter Jim Brickman is raising funds for the Southern Theatre through this livestreamed holiday concert with VIP Zoom room options, part of a series that will benefit local theaters nationwide. jimbrickman.com

“Quarantine with the Clauses” Online, Dec. 10–27

Don’t judge Santa and Mrs. Claus for imbibing a few too many quarantinis—even a live TV broadcast from the North Pole is a bit of a comedown from Santa’s usual ’round-theworld gift-delivery voyage. But their predicament is sure to bring laughs to viewers of this new musical, commissioned, performed and presented online by the Short North Stage. shortnorthstage.org

photos: clockwise from top, Courtesy Columbus Metropolitan Library; Courtesy Ohio Arts Council; JEFF KLAUM; Courtesy Chabad Columbus

A Nutcracker Holiday Online, Dec. 5–27

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People Arch City

Field to Table

1 Sandra Cameron, Valorie Miille, Cydney Philbin, Krysten Barber 2 Shawn Fuqua, Grant Winkel, Enga Fuqua, Angela Winkel, Bruce Harkey and Roger Foreman 3 Libby Roach, Laura Rosene, Nancy Russo 4 Roger Foreman and Bruce Harkey, Enga and Shawn Fuqua, Grant and Angela Winkel 5 Bob Roach, Art Russo, Scott Toop 6 Phil Smith, Mary Oehler, Joy and Dave Goldfarb, John Noble, Amanda Smoliniec, Ellen Smith, Jeff Oehler 7 Patty Tumen, Stephanie and Grant Stephenson, Kim Solomon, Nancy and Jerry Snyder, David Tumen, Mark Solomon 8 Valorie Miille, Krysten Barber 9 Laura Rosene and Scott Toop 10 Peggy Davis

photos: Courtesy Franklin Park Conservatory

photos: clockwise from top, Courtesy Columbus Metropolitan Library; Courtesy Ohio Arts Council; JEFF KLAUM; Courtesy Chabad Columbus

The annual party organized by the Women’s Board of the Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens was reimagined as an at-home event. Over the course of five days, the organization sent emails offering suggestions for individual Field to Table celebrations, and on Aug. 28, participants tuned in to Facebook Live to virtually join conservatory leaders at their homes. The event raised $300,000 to support the conservatory’s community outreach and access initiatives.

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Arch City perspective

My Body, My Self After a series of miscarriages, I lost trust in my body.

A compassionate photographer helped me regain it.

By Zoë Brigley

On a frosty, winter day, I drive down to Clintonville with my passenger seat piled high with lingerie, stockings, underwear.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m on my way to an assignation. But no, this is an appointment with myself and a woman with a camera, and it is to test how far I have come in learning to love my own body. I am about to pose completely nude in front of a stranger.

It has taken many years to come to this moment of reclaiming my body. At the time of this appointment, I am recovering from a miscarriage. I have had four miscarriages in total, and the doctors have never been able to explain why, despite all the tests.

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It is a great joy to me that out of six pregnancies, my two sons did survive. But still, I have in the past blamed myself for the losses and asked why my body had to fail while others’ succeeded. I have never been a churchgoer, but there were times when I began praying because I was so afraid that my body would let me down again.

My lost pregnancies are not the only time I have felt my body was hijacked. It began as a teenager with body dysmorphia, a condition where a person cannot stop thinking about flaws they perceive in their body, which may be minimal or invisible to other people. I didn’t know it then, but I was suffering from quiet bor-

derline personality disorder, a condition that causes not only body dysmorphia but also extremely low self-esteem, fear of abandonment and mood swings. My experience was different from regular borderline personality disorder, because there were no angry outbursts. Instead, I turned a withering dislike on myself.

Looking in the mirror, I believed I was monstrously ugly, although I know now that I was just an average, awkward teenage girl.

The condition often causes people to go to great lengths to prevent abandonment or separation. At age 14, I fell under the spell of an older man who would exploit that tendency. The abusive behavior started only when I was completely dependent on him, and it meant having sex whether I wanted to or not. For a long time, because of my disorder, I couldn’t leave him, no matter what he did. Despite the coercion and violence, I thought I would die if he left me, so I sacrificed my body, and it was mine no longer.

photo: Kate Sweeney

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photo: Kate Sweeney

But I did escape, with the support of family and friends. I reclaimed my body. I fell in love and got married and was happier than I’d ever been. When I first moved to America from the UK, I was pregnant, and everything was in place to create the beautiful life I dreamed of. Then, in the second trimester, I had a miscarriage. Shattered, I had to rebuild myself with only my partner to lean on, no family or friends in the new town. And the miscarriages kept coming.

During those high-risk pregnancies, my body was not my own: poked, prodded, probed and tested. These were the days of bed rest and fetal movement checks, of trying to do everything right, of regulating everything that went near my body. I got through it by thinking of the babies.

There was nothing I would not have done for them, and that motherlove made me strong. I thought I could weather anything, but when my sixth pregnancy ended with a second trimester miscarriage, the old grief returned. I felt like I was being haunted by what had happened to me as a teenager.

All these feelings suddenly appeared again.

Had my body failed me? Was it marked forever by what had happened to me? Would I never escape it?

But I tried to be brave and asked myself: If I couldn’t have the child I had wanted, what new story could I write for my body and my life? The first step was to remember that my body was not failing me; in fact, it was sustaining me every day. Whatever it had suffered, and despite the miscarriages, my body was doing its best. I started swimming, the water bringing me physical sensuousness. I took up aerial hoop classes, amazed at what stunts I could teach my body to do, how strong it became with practice. And then, at just the right moment, Kate Sweeney came into my life.

After following Kate’s Instagram feed, I found myself looking out for her nude or semi-clad photographs of women of all shapes, colors and sizes. I noticed them hanging in Virtue Salon, the vegan hairdresser where I have my hair cut. Kate minimally edits them, and though she draws on fine art—Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” or Goya’s “La Maja Desnuda”—Kate’s women are more defiant. Their bodies are fleshy, pendulous, freckled, cheeky, but not contorted for the male gaze—not tense, not self-conscious. Kate’s photographs rely on a trust that the male gaze—assessing, measuring, judging—cannot provide. “I just thought, these women are so beautiful,” Kate tells me during the shoot, “and I real-

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What if we were to say that our bodies are beautiful just as they are? What if we embraced our bodies as unique?

ized that if I found beauty in all these different women, I should start to extend that same kindness to myself.”

Like me, Kate suffered as a teenager from body dysmorphia, in her case linked to an eating disorder. “It wasn’t even that I felt like my body was bad,” Kate tells me later. “I just wanted to disappear. We have to change the message that the more attractive you are, the more valued you are.” Kate is Columbus-born and -raised, though she spent some years in New York.

When she found herself in a toxic relationship with a man she describes as “a gaslighter,” she returned to Columbus and began taking photographs of women in the local community. Like a magic antivenom, Kate’s photographs take us on the journey that healed her: In seeing how beautiful real women are, we also come to terms with ourselves.

On the day of the shoot, I am determined to accept my body, even when naked. I am terrified, but Kate welcomes me into her cozy house and leads me to the studio with her beautiful rolls of colored paper backdrops. She asks me what music I would like to listen to and she shows me her camera, which is purposefully small and unintimidating.

We try lots of shots in different dresses and lingerie. She helps me to overcome my shyness by talking me through poses. And none of it feels sexualizing, because it is not the male gaze looking at me, but the female gaze, and so I don’t worry about what I look like—it feels like acceptance rather than having to perform. “I’m so grateful and honored that so many women trust me,” says Kate. “I wish that all women would document their bodies. Because aging is a privilege, and to see how the body changes is really cool.”

But I am a 38-year-old and have had two children, and when the time comes to take off all my clothes, I am nervous. And why is it so hard? Why does it feel frightening

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to be under someone else’s eye? A minute before, in my underwear, I was completely comfortable. Why, I ask myself, is this suddenly so scary? I lie down in front of the camera, and it feels painful in a good way, like massaging a sore place. I can’t say that I feel ashamed or proud—just vulnerable, and I realize that I am still looking to other people for approval, when I need to find that approval within myself.

The final part of the process only happens some weeks later, when the photographs arrive. I look at the nude shots and laugh that in some pictures I do look absolutely terrified. But I take this as a sign of bravery—that I did something hard despite the fact that it scared me. In others, too, I look calm and hopeful, at one with myself, and I take that as a victory, because that is where I aim to be. I look at my body completely naked, and I quite like myself. I remember what Kate said to me before I left: “You see?

The body can be art.”

I realize now that before the shoot I would hardly ever actually look at my own body, probably because I did not feel pride or joy in it. I look at it now with compassion.

I take care of it. I pay attention to it. I dress it carefully. To some extent, I have learned to love it, and when I walk out the front door, I feel happier in my own skin.

If I—who believed myself to be a monster—can love my body, then probably you can too. What if we were to say that our bodies are beautiful just as they are? What if we embraced our bodies as unique?

What if we refused to be controlled by images that are an illusion of digital enhancement, that were never achievable in real life? What if we too did the work of Kate’s magic photographs and noticed the beauty of real bodies around us? Could we perhaps glimpse the power and beauty in ourselves?

It’s a mindset that could change our lives completely, if we could just say: This is my body, and it is amazing. ◆ DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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Cookie Sheet This city is awash in great cookies, with more being dreamed up every day. We gathered together some of our favorites from area retail bakeries, onlineonly bakeries and one nonprofit kitchen.

1 Vegan ginger-molasses cookies from Dough Mama 2 The gluten-free Monster cookie and Oatmeal Cream Clouds from Bake Me Happy 3 Snickerdoodle and peanut butter cookies from Sassafras Bakery 4 A selection of cookies from Freedom a la Cart’s annual Cause Cookie campaign (for every $25 donated to Freedom a la Cart, you receive a box of a dozen holiday cookies; donations support survivors of human trafficking) 5 Almond cookies from Belle’s Bread 6 A variety of Lion Cub’s Cookies 7 Italian rainbow cookies from Amy’s Rainbow Cookies 30

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Photos by Tim johnson

Year of the

Baker People across the U.S. took refuge in baking this year, filling their kitchens with the smell of sourdough breads, French pastries and other doughy indulgences. We talked to Central Ohio retail bakers and home bakers alike about why they bake, about technique and about baking through a pandemic.

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Visit columbusmonthly.com for a web extra on Lion Cub’s Cookies.

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Rolling with the Times How Resch’s Bakery has endured for more than a century

Even more than usual , Resch’s Bakery is a study in the fine art of balancing change and tradition. Customers still pass underneath its familiar neon sign when they enter the East Side landmark—but now they also pass by new window placards about social distancing, online ordering and racial justice.

Employees still prepare jelly rolls, birthday cakes, apple fritters and other baked goodies in the same meticulous German way— but now they do it while wearing masks and spaced 6 feet apart.

Frank X. Resch, the fifth generation of his family to run the bakery, calls the coronavirus pandemic the biggest challenge he’s faced since he took over the business after his father’s death in 2010. Yet Resch is confident he can make it through this crisis. After all, his bakery has survived two world wars, the Great Depression, urban flight, changing culinary tastes and even a previous global health catastrophe. The deadly influenza pandemic of 1918 occurred six years after two German immigrants, Frank A. Resch and his nephew Wilhelm Resch (Frank X. Resch’s great-grandfather), opened the first Resch’s on the South Side of Columbus. In 1960, Frank X. Resch’s father, Frank J. Resch, opened the current bakery at 4061 E. Livingston Ave., about 4 and a half miles east of the much smaller original location, which closed in the early 1990s.

Family lore doesn’t include anything on how the bakery overcame that earlier devastating outbreak. But Frank X. Resch does have a theory on what’s responsible for his business’ remarkable longevity: It’s become a family tradition to many of its customers. “They were brought here by their parents or their grandparents, and I 32

think it’s become a comfort for them,” he says. “I kind of attribute our business to that. They grew up with us.”

To keep those longtime customers happy, the bakery doesn’t change things willynilly. It started as a small retail operation and remains one today, never jumping into wholesaling. Except during the heyday of Reeb’s Restaurant on the South Side of Columbus in the mid-20th century, Resch’s delicacies have never been available anywhere else besides its bakeries. Frank X. Resch started helping out in the business when he was 7 years old, first sweeping the floor and cleaning pans and then learning how to bake from his father and a German

baker. Now, the current owner of the business and his most trusted managers—many of whom have worked for the business for decades—teach those same precise baking techniques to new employees, who often start at the bottom just like Resch did and then work their way up to bakers, cake decorators and other more critical jobs.

Yet Resch’s hasn’t exactly been standing pat. It’s doubtful the business would still be around if it hadn’t moved to the larger Livingston Avenue location six decades ago. Its most popular items have also shifted, from bread in the early days then to cakes and now doughnuts. “You listen to the customers, and they kind of tell you the way to go,” Resch says.

In late October, Resch stands in the bakery kitchen. It’s just before 8 a.m. on a Saturday, typically the busiest day of the week, and his team is hard at work preparing for the rush. The Buckeyes start their pandemic-delayed football season on this day, which means Resch expects to see more customers in the early morning before the game’s noon kickoff. Dreary weather also might increase sales. “When it’s hot and muggy, nobody wants to eat,” Resch says.

PHOTO: BOTTOM, DISPATCH FILE

By Dave Ghose

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PHOTO: BOTTOM, DISPATCH FILE

Resch’s Bakery 4061 E. Livingston Ave., East Side, 614-237-7421

Opposite page, a photo of the original bakery; This page, clockwise from top, Nya Washington fills a box of doughnuts for a customer during a busy Saturday morning; a worker makes chocolate dipped doughnuts; freshly baked cinnamon rolls

Resch watches an employee put the finishing touches on a tray of sugar yeast doughnuts, a more breadlike, hexagonshaped variety. “I’ll take those out, Matthew,” he tells the baker, before shuttling the tray to the front of the store. On a busy day, Resch joins the rest of the team in food preparation, helping out where he can.

Gary Diewald, the production manager for Resch’s, usually spends his Saturdays in the front of the store, making sure the shelves are stocked with cookies, cakes and other goodies. He also limits the number of customers in the store at a time and makes sure social distancing is maintained. “We’re trying to get people in and out as easily as possible,” says Diewald, who’s worked for Resch’s for 46 years.

When they enter the bakery, most customers grab a ticket from a dispensing machine and wait for their number to be called. But a handful instead pick up orders directly from a metal shelf next to the entrance and in front of a mural of the Black Forest region of Germany, where

the Resch family comes from. This shelf is stocked with prepaid online orders, a new service. “We’ve had that for six weeks,” Diewald says. “It’s getting busier and busier.”

On Saturdays, Diewald sees a lot of familiar faces (though they’re masked these days) and gets to talk to longtime customers. And there are plenty on this day. A middle-aged man, standing in line outside the store, says he’s been coming to Resch’s since his childhood, when his mom would buy birthday cakes for him here. A white-haired woman, waiting inside the store, says she got her wedding cake from the original Resch’s on the South Side.

Cecil Jenkins has been a regular at Resch’s for 40 years, starting when his family lived in the Driving Park neighborhood of Columbus. Now, Jenkins lives in Pickerington, but he still stops by Resch’s at least once a week, usually on Saturdays, when the bakery offers special doughnut flavors, such as devil’s food and red velvet.

“It’s worth the drive,” he says.

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Eight Bakers Without Storefronts Drawing inspiration from trips abroad, family histories and childhood nostalgia, these entrepreneurs inspire us with their baked creations and stories of determination.

O hi o P i es Emily Irvine wanted to work in food because she loved eating it. She remembers the bite that sparked the love affair. “It was a crème brûlée—the cracking of the top and the shards of caramelized sugar and the creamy cool vanilla custard,” recalls the Bexley native.

Irvine’s first job in food was at the Bexley Natural Market. “From there, I went onto farming. I worked on small organic farms for about 10 years,” she says. Despite no baking experience, she began working at local bakeries during winter breaks. With practice, she grew her confidence as a baker. “I had a business card, and I was making pies at home, but I don’t think I ever intended to do anything with it,” she says. In 2017, she launched Ohio Pies from her home full time.

By Erin Edwards and Emma Frankart Henterly

Irvine is passionate about sourcing ingredients from Ohio farms for her pies, which range from maple pecan to blueberry to banana cream. She also uses Ohio grassfed butter in her flaky crust—the key to which is to “start with really cold butter in larger chunks than you would think.”

Why pie? Irvine says that none of the pies she tried locally stood up to the ones her grandparents used to make. “You can’t really compete with nostalgia,” she says.

Plus, she loves the challenge.

“It is hard to make a good pie.

There’s a lot more involved, because you have to get the crust right and the filling right,” she says. “I feel like I could keep doing this the rest of my life and always be learning new stuff and always keep getting better.”

An assortment of pies; inset, Emily Irvine

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Look for Ohio Pies every Tuesday at Bexley Natural Market (508 N. Cassady Ave.) or place your order at ohiopies.com.

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Mjo m ii Calvin Kim and his wife , Sasha, dove into the world of home bakers after discovering that Columbus lacked a sweet treat readily available in his home country of South Korea.

That’s where the pair met, while Sasha was living there as an expat.

“While we were dating and living in South Korea, we tried some macarons in Seoul and really enjoyed them,” Calvin says. “But after moving to Columbus in 2014, we couldn’t find anything like the ones we tried [there].”

They went to Pistacia Vera, of course, and other local bakeries.

But nothing matched the crispymeets-chewy shell texture and the abundant-but-not-too-sweet filling of Korean macarons.

Calvin started to experiment.

“After lots of trial and error, I made a pretty decent salted caramel macaron recipe of my own,” he says. “Friends and family loved them and encouraged me to sell them. … I was more than confident that this business would go well.” In 2018, Calvin quit Mjomii owners Sasha and Calvin Kim

his full-time job as art director at an ad agency, and Mjomii was born.

The name—which is pronounced “meeyo-me” and means “subtle and delicious flavor” in Korean, Calvin says—is a blend of ideas from both Calvin and Sasha, who is herself half Korean and has a graduate degree in speech language pathology from Ohio State University. “The ‘J’ is the symbol for the ‘Y’ in the phonetic alphabet,” Sasha says.

Mjomii’s flavors have a decidedly Asian influence; think taro cream, walnut and red bean, black sesame and even soy—though you’ll also find flavors like chocolate orange, raspberry and salted caramel, the flavor that started it all. When asked whether Mjomii offers other treats, Calvin cryptically replies, “Not yet.”

Order online for pickup or mail delivery at mjomii.square.site, or find the macarons at the German Village Makers Market on Dec. 6.

M at i ja B r e a ds Matt Swint doesn’t mince words about how COVID-19 affected his wholesale baking business: “I got slaughtered.” Beloved by local chefs for its focaccia and ciabatta, Matija Breads went from 20 active customers a month to four when Ohio’s dine-in ban took effect.

Matija (named for Swint’s Italian grandfather) has survived in part because of its size. “If I had been a larger [business] and lost all my customers at once, I don’t know what I would have done. [Being small] makes you extremely nimble,” Swint says.

The pandemic’s silver lining was that it allowed Swint to take a breath and look critically at his business, which runs out of a commissary kitchen. Since its inception, Matija had remained hyper-focused on a small menu of Italian breads. “I realized a lot of people want brioche and … seeded rolls. It’s OK to be the guy that makes rolls, which I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be Dan the Baker [see Page 40]. I wanted to be the guy that makes all the pretty loaves,” he says. Swint still makes beautiful breads, but he has expanded his offerings to better cater to his clients’ needs. (He now makes rolls.)

In recent months, Matija has staged a comeback.

“I picked up Ray Ray’s [Hog Pit]. To be honest, that saved the company,” Swint says. He also signed up three of the city’s newest restaurants: Cleaver, Rye River Social and Emmett’s Café.

Swint is sure about one thing: There is plenty of room in Columbus for other bakers like him. “You can’t have enough [bread] bakers in this city,” he says. “The more the merrier. … We need to have something that combats all the doughnuts and pie places.”

Look for Matija Breads on local menus at Katalina’s, Sassafras Bakery, Rye River Social and Emmett’s Café, among others.

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Pastries from Three Bites Bakery; inset, Isabella Bonello

Th re e Bi t e s Ba k e ry A professional baker for six years, Isabella Bonello worked at Pistacia Vera and Fox in the Snow Café before launching her own cottage bakery, Three Bites, a year and a half ago as a side business.

When the pandemic began, Bonello was working in the corporate baking department at L Brands. When the company no longer needed birthday cakes and pastries for meetings, Bonello’s department was eliminated. In August, Three Bites became her full-time focus. “I think the one thing that would set Three Bites apart is it’s not just a hobby; it’s what I’ve spent years developing,” she says, explaining that her goal is to open a retail bakery someday.

Through her website and local makers markets, Bonello sells pastry assortment boxes with treasures as far ranging as pan de coco, Chinese five spice shortbread, brown 36

butter rum cake and jalapeño cornbread. She also sells custom cakes.

“I always include shortbread cookies of some flavor in every variety box I do, and it is consistently some people’s favorites.

I also love doing savory stuff.

Pastry doesn’t always have to be sweet,” she says.

Bonello takes baking inspiration primarily from her family’s background, which is Italian and Filipino. Because of those influences, her pastries aren’t too sweet, featuring a lot of nuts and fruits, and not too big.

“Whenever you go to Europe, a lot of the desserts, a lot of their pastries, they’re not too big. I feel like that’s something, at least in Columbus, that’s lacking. Everything is kind of the size of your head,” she says. “I really believe that you’re allowed to have sugar, you’re allowed to have butter. It’s just you only literally need like three bites.”

To order assorted pastry boxes or custom cakes, visit threebitesbakery.com.

K e nn e dy ’ s Kakes Baking is a skill handed down to Adrian Jones by her grandmother and mother. Using their recipes as a foundation, Jones started Kennedy’s Kakes (named after her own daughter, Kennedy) in 2009 as a part-time business from her home kitchen.

“I just took a leap of faith and started selling the things that people always asked me for, and it was my pound cake that my mom made and sweet potato pie,” says the baker and cake artist. “And it evolved into what I’m doing now. I would’ve never thought wedding cakes. It was just traditional desserts in the beginning, but my own business is something I’ve always wanted to have.”

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Pâtis s e rie L a ll ier

Mention French pastry in Columbus and Michelle Kozak’s name is often one of the first to come up. Her baking business, Pâtisserie Lallier, is treasured by those craving fresh pain au chocolat, fruit tarts, madeleines and even meticulously made confections that fill Advent calendars during the holidays.

After immersing herself in a monthlong pastry course at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris in 2009 (“for fun”), Kozak launched a small-scale cottage bakery from her Grandview home. In 2010, she started selling her pastries at Clintonville’s Global Gallery Coffee Shop. Two years later, after taking intermediate and advanced pastry courses, she traded her job in banking for the more solitary, creative life of a full-time baker.

A Luck Bros’ latte with Pâtisserie Lallier baked goods; inset, Michelle Kozak

“I think people are always surprised when they come over to see how small it is and how much I’m able

to produce from it,” Kozak says about her galley-style kitchen, which affords her only a 4-footwide workspace. (She uses a table and a baker’s rack in the dining room as well.)

Before 2020, Kozak had never had an online marketplace. When the COVID-19 outbreak began, Kozak ceased selling her pastries at the farmers markets she had attended for years and instead shifted to online orders and porch deliveries in Clintonville, Upper Arlington and Grandview as well as distanced drop-offs at Global Gallery. She says her fans—some of whom date back to her early days at the Clintonville Farmers Market—have followed.

“I’m really thankful, because I had never imagined this as a business model, but it’s worked really well,” she says. “It gave me a new outlet and a different way to sell. As long as it keeps working, I will continue with it.”

To place an order with Pâtisserie Lallier, visit patisserielallier.com.

This year, Jones was primed to have one of her busiest years yet, with 26 weddings on the calendar.

She’s ended up with less than half that number because of the pandemic. It was a wakeup call.

About six years ago, Jones went full-time, and a year ago, she moved Kennedy’s Kakes into a commercial kitchen in the YWCA Downtown. “Even though I was making a profit, it never seemed outrageous enough to have my own kitchen or my own building.

I was just too scared to do that,” she says. “The opportunity came to me, and I really felt like I just closed my eyes and stepped out.

It’s been amazing.”

“I started doing some of the things that I had I wanted to do, like tasting boxes and intimate, small cakes,” she says. “And it worked.

There was a demand for it.”

Now, you don’t have to be a bride or groom to feel like one. Jones offers tasting boxes to anyone, filled with various cake flavors as well as special items like macarons and cookies.

Visit kkakes.com to order custom celebratory cakes, pound cakes, cupcakes and more.

Kennedy Goolsby, left, with her mother, Adrian Jones

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John Glenn’s birthday cake

Moonflower Bakery For Dublin resident Pearl Althoff, baking just fits into her lifestyle. “Ever since I can remember, I’ve been in the kitchen helping my mom, helping my grandma,” she says. “It’s always been something that’s brought me joy.”

So it’s probably no surprise that when she transitioned from fifth-grade teacher to stay-at-home mom in 2017, she turned to baking as a creative outlet. Around the same time, Althoff—a 10-year vegetarian at that point—became vegan.

After talking to a vegan friend and watching documentaries like “What the Health” and “Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret,” she decided to take the plunge.

“Those [films] really just opened my eyes to a lot of the conditions that the animals are in, and also the workers who work in farms and the slaughterhouses,” she says. “I really wanted to align my actions with what I felt was important.”

To that end, baking became something of a mission.

“I really wanted to bring awareness to how good vegan food can be—especially baking,” she says.

For 40 years , Worthington baker Jan Kish has been delighting Central Ohio with her whimsical, extravagant wedding and celebration cakes. But there’s more to Jan Kish-La Petite Fleur than meets the eye.

“I have a degree in English from Oxford in England, and I wanted to teach,” she says. But while in the U.K., the quaint tea shops caught her eye.

After Oxford, Kish studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and England and L’Académie de Cuisine in Maryland but ended up working as a surgical assistant at Ohio State University. During the decade she spent at OSU, she launched a catering business, La Petite Gourmet, on the side. She later opened a restaurant/catering business in Upper Arlington called La Petite Fleur.

“I would come home [from work] and do catering. It was exhausting,” she says.

By 1990, Kish decided she’d had enough of the retail scene: 38

the guesswork of trying make just the right amount of product, the staffing demands. “The thing that I really wanted to do, which was the cakes, I was getting so far away from,” she says. Instead of leaving the industry, Kish went back to being a home-based baker.

Today, about 85 percent of the cakes she creates are for weddings.

She’s also created confections for clients ranging from Oprah Winfrey to President Bill Clinton; among her favorites, she says, is a stunning creation for John Glenn’s 95th birthday in 2016. It featured a globe with a moving shuttle tracing the path of his orbit and a firework designating his launch point from Cape Canaveral.

For Kish, baking is about “looking at cake as an art form—a good, edible art form,” she says. “You eat with your eyes first. … But if the taste doesn’t follow up, it’s a huge disappointment. You’ve got to make sure one equals the other.”

Order a custom cake or cupcakes by visiting jankish.com.

Unlike many businesses, Moonflower has blossomed during the pandemic. “People kept calling, asking for food,” Althoff says. “It’s been really refreshing to have the support of your community at a time like this.”

Order Moonflower Bakery’s cakes, tarts, pies, cookies and more at moonflowerbakery.com.

Pearl Althoff

photo: left, courtesy jan kish

Ja n Kis h - L a P e t it e F l e u r

It wasn’t until after Althoff’s husband, Rick, surprised her last year by building a website for her fledgling endeavor that she decided to go all in on the home bakery. She named it Moonflower, after a native bloom in Sanibel, Florida, where she and Rick married.

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11/12/20 11:18 AM

Home Sweet Home

Devon Morgan decorates a cake in her home kitchen.

Built Pastry’s Devon Morgan shares advice on starting your own cottage bakery.

By Erin Edwards

photo: left, courtesy jan kish

When Devon Morgan was furloughed in March from her job in restaurant sales, she started baking up a storm—like a lot of people. It came easily to the longtime Columbus pastry chef, whose professional pastry experience includes Eleni-Christina Bakery and Hilton Downtown Columbus.

Then, Morgan took her baking one step further: She launched Built Pastry, a cottage bakery, food photography and consulting business.

For a while, Morgan had been considering the idea of starting a business to help other people open their own bakeries. Selling her own baked goods was an obvious way to spread the word about her consultancy.

This year, with just a small mixer and her kitchen’s one oven, Morgan has produced a variety of cookies, quick breads, focaccia, crackers and other goodies for pop-ups and markets like the German Village Makers Market.

Ohio doesn’t keep statistics on how many home bakeries launch every year, but bakers I spoke to in Central Ohio say they’ve noticed an explosion of new businesses, as hobbyists and professional bakers alike have pivoted out of necessity amid the pandemic.

In Ohio, two options exist for baking and selling baked goods from a home kitchen: a cottage bakery and a licensed home bakery. According to the Ohio Department of Agriculture, cottage bakeries may sell items that “do not require refrigeration, such as breads, cookies and fruit pies.” Although a license is not required, cottage bakeries are subject to strict labeling requirements.

Home bakeries, on the other hand, are subject to regulatory oversight and allow for the baking of cheesecakes, custardfilled doughnuts, pumpkin pies and other “potentially hazardous bakery items that need refrigeration.” In addition, licensed home bakeries may not have pets in the

home or carpet in the kitchen. They are also subject to inspection.

Thinking of launching a bakery from your own kitchen? Morgan shares some advice. ◆ “ You can be a cottage bakery and not do the farmers markets or the pop-ups, but it definitely is a way to have a consistent form of income and also a way to kind of get your name out there,” she says. But first, do your research. Although cottage bakeries in Ohio do not require an operating license, some farmers markets require you to carry insurance. ◆ To sell your baked creations, you must carefully label them. “The very first market that I did, I tried to use Avery labels—which are everywhere—and it was a total disaster,” she says, explaining that the wording would end up crooked

or cut off. She ended up investing in a label printer, which saved her valuable time. “My biggest piece of advice is, find a good label maker.” ◆ Rein in your menu. When she started out baking for pop-ups and markets, Morgan say she “wanted to bake all the things.” Don’t try to do too much. ◆ “Make sure that you have a vision of how you want to set up your table at farmers markets and that you have enough containers to hold your products,” Morgan says. “I think that it’s so important to visually make people want to come to the table.” ◆ Keep track of your receipts for tax purposes. All of those pans, spatulas and labels can be written off.

You can find Built Pastry online at builtpastry.com.

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Daniel Riesenberger makes croissants at his Grandview bakery.

the extra fermented dough in there. It adds extra richness. You pull your scraps, then you start your leaven.

When my leaven’s ready, which is the People line up every weekend at Daniel Riesenberger’s Grandview-area bakery, Dan the Baker, for artisanal breads and outstanding croissants. Besides the traditional butter croissant, he also makes chocolate croissants, ham and cheese croissants and seasonal varieties like summertime tomato and fontina. Here, Riesenberger explains in his own words his elaborate process and offers a warning to home bakers before they attempt to mimic his methods. “There’s so many more fun things you can do with your life than make croissants at home,” he says.

“Go support your local croissant artist, because they are crazy people.” dan-thebaker.com —Brittany Moseley

Making the sourdough is the first thing I do. I build the sourdough overnight, let it ferment. Once I come in the next morning, I’ve got the first step done. I also have croissant scraps from previous batches. I don’t make my croissants without scraps, because it tastes really good to have 40

next day for me, I’m ready to mix the dough. Then, I pull the dough out of the mixer and form it into the correct size blocks that are 4 kilos, or a little more. Each block of croissants is a book, and each book makes 45 to 50 croissants. I freeze mine so they don’t ferment before they’re processed. As soon as I’m done with the croissants that night, which is usually five hours or so of freezing time, I put them in my cooler, just to keep the fermentation locked down.

Laminating is the process of incorporating the butter in the dough. Laminating uses a sheeter, which is basically a set of rolling pins that has two conveyor belts on either side of it and a handle in the middle that allows you to crank the thickness down of the rolling pins. It’ll convey the dough back and forth through those rolling pins at a precise thickness and allow you to manipulate the dough and butter into the correct size and dimensions. It’s like 4.2 kilos of dough and a kilo of butter.

I like to let the blocks sit in the freezer for about a week. Then, I let them thaw. You send a block through the sheeter to get it to the full-size length, which is about 18 inches by 70 inches. If it’s for butter croissants, cruffins or ham and cheese croissants, I divide the block lengthwise down the middle using a croissant bicycle, a multi-wheeled cutter. I put those two halves on top of each other, which makes it easier to cut two at once. Then, I put all of the triangles in the cooler. Later, I take them out of the cooler, separate them and shape all of them. Once the croissants are shaped, I leave them out overnight.

The next morning, the croissants are doubled or even tripled in size. They get an egg wash. It gives them the sheen that is so customary. A croissant without egg wash is like you’re not wearing clothes. You don’t look right. You can’t step out like that.

They go in the oven for about 20 minutes. I bake mine pretty hot because I want them to spring up well, and I also love the caramelized flavor in the dough. I always go for a darker color on the bake, which I know is sometimes divisive. People are like, isn’t that burnt? I’m like, this is delicious. Caramelization is the flavor.

Photo: top center, courtesy dan the baker

Making Croissants with Dan the Baker

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A World of Baking Brilliance

Melon rolls from Belle’s Bread

Exploring six of Central Ohio’s best hidden-gem bakeries

By Nicholas Dekker We’ve long swooned over macarons from Pistacia Vera, cinnamon rolls at Fox in the Snow, cruffins and sourdoughs from Dan the Baker. Here, we highlight a half-dozen other bakeries that deserve your attention, with delicacies ranging from All-American red velvet cupcakes to Turkish simit.

Photo: top center, courtesy dan the baker

Belle’s Bread 1168 Kenny Centre Mall, Northwest Side, 614451-7110 Tucked into the Japanese Marketplace at Kenny Centre, French-influenced Belle’s Bread often flies under the radar, but Food & Wine named it one of the best bakeries in the country this year. We think they got it right. The shelves are stocked with beautiful fruit Danishes, textured melon rolls, yeasty doughnuts filled with sweet bean paste and adorable rolls drizzled with Nutella to make kitty faces.

What to order: Start with the melon rolls, Danishes and custard cream rolls.

Cakes and More 4969 N. High St., Clintonville, 614-430-8811 Starting as a home bakery and adding a Clintonville storefront in 2011, Cakes and More hides a few surprises up its sleeve. Though specializing in artfully decorated cakes, a visit to its retail shop highlights the “And More” part of the name: brownies, cake pops, cookies, a dense layered confection called Brazilian Whisper and even empanadas. The little pockets, made daily, are stuffed with chicken, cheese, veggies, shrimp and other fillings.

What to order: Don’t miss the alfajores—two delicate, buttery cookies with a layer of dulce de leche in between.

J’s Sweet Treats and Wedding Cakes 1540 Parsons Ave., South Side, 614-906-8888 Owner Juana Williams has made a name for herself with intricately decorated wedding cakes (her buttercream frosting earns special accolades). Her brick-walled shop entices guests with more treats like soft chocolate

chip cookies, vanilla cakes, banana pudding with homemade whipped cream, pound cakes, brownies, cheesecakes and more “edible art,” as Williams calls it.

What to order: Williams’ red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing Salam Market & Bakery 5676 Emporium Square, North Side, 614899-0952 You might get distracted by the butcher shop or by the shelves stocked with goods from around the Middle East, but follow your nose to Salam’s back counter for freshly baked goods like pita bread and halal meat pies.

The latter often sell out, so arrive early. The warm, golden pockets are filled with a variety of meats and veggies, such as chicken, cheese, lamb kebabs or falafel.

What to order: meat pies, in whatever flavors are offered that day Spicy Cup Café 1977 E. Dublin-Granville Road, Northwest Side, 614-547-7117 Spicy Cup (formerly Panaderia Guadalupana)

is one of the city’s most notable Mexican bakeries. Its glass cases are bursting with beautiful pastries, cakes and savory selections.

Guests can pick up a tray, grab a pair of tongs and load up with sugar-dusted churros, colorful cookies, cream-filled doughnuts and turnovers stuffed with guava or pineapple. Compared to their American counterparts, Mexican pastries tend to be lighter and less sweet.

What to order: the lightly sweet conchas— an airy, rounded bread noted for its shell-like patterns on top Tulip Café (inside Espresso Air) 25 N. State St., Westerville, 216-394-6849 Turkish dishes are hard to come by in Columbus, but Tulip Café is seeking to rectify that.

Though Tulip Café doesn’t have its own retail shop, you can find its delicacies regularly at Uptown Westerville’s Espresso Air coffee shop and at local farmers markets. Look for honey-drenched baklava with pistachios or walnuts, Turkish delight, or simit: circular, bagel-like breads crusted with sesame seeds.

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The Upper Arlington native and self-styled bad girl never achieved the Hollywood superstardom she probably deserved.

But she made the most of every role, including the one she played in real life: a woman defined by love.

Beverly D’Angelo Has No Regrets

By Peter Tonguette

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photo: Manfred Baumann

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passionate. She is fond of saying: “Everything I’ve done is because I’ve loved someone.”

She tells me this over the phone, speaking from her Los Angeles home, where the coronavirus lockdown seems to have put her in a reflective mood, eager to talk about her life and loves, personal and professional. I have a list of probing questions in front of me, but I don’t refer to them too much. D’Angelo is something of an open book, going to surprising places I might not have asked about.

At the same time, her excitement about life—who she’s known, what she wants to do, and, yes, even where she came from—is contagious. When I ask if she remembers some of her haunts back home in Ohio, she exclaims: “The Chef-O-Nette! The Goodie Shop! Are you kidding?”

In the five decades since D’Angelo left Upper Arlington behind—at the earliest possible opportunity, as she tells it—she has fostered an image as a rebel. She blazed her trail as a singer in Canada, appeared in a rock ’n’ roll version of “Hamlet” on Broadway, starred in five Vacation movies, married (and divorced) an Italian duke, became, at 49, the mother to twins fathered by Al Pacino, and took parts in many so-so movies mainly distinguished by her presence.

And now, in the midst of the pandemic, she’s plotting her latest project: a one-woman autobiographical multimedia show in which she will try to explain it all. In fact, I feel as

photo: Manfred Baumann

“H

ere’s the story of my family,” Beverly D’Angelo tells me. “I grew up in a household that was based on one thing: love.”

It is mid-July, and I am listening to the actress, singer and native Upper Arlingtonian recount her life. She talks about her parents—still famous in certain circles of old Columbus: former WBNS executive and all-around media bigwig Gene D’Angelo and his wife, Priscilla. “I grew up witnessing an amazing love affair,” Beverly says with the flair for the dramatic that I will come to recognize.

When you write about the movies as I do, it’s a depressing fact of life that stars—even really big ones—rarely live up to their on-screen personas. The exceptions stand out: When I interviewed him a few years ago, Robert Redford had that same charm and sharp perception that we expect from him on-screen. So did Warren Beatty, who, though he never actually agreed to an interview with me, exuded a certain shambling, distracted magnetism in a brief phone call.

Beverly D’Angelo, though, is the biggest outlier. If you’ve seen her in her best roles—as a hippie in the musical “Hair” or as Patsy Cline in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” or as Chevy Chase’s foil in the Vacation comedies—then you already have a good sense of what she’s really like: She’s smart as a whip, quick with a comeback, by turns emotional, funny,

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Clockwise from left, D’Angelo at her Los Angeles home; her parents, Gene and Priscilla D’Angelo in 1977; a school photo from 1960–61; D’Angelo with Milos Forman (glasses) and the cast of “Hair” at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival

photos: clockwise from top left, dispatch file; courtesy beverly d’angelo; AP Photo/Levy

photo: Manfred Baumann

though she’s done just that by the time I hang up from that initial interview—two hours after I picked up the phone.

D

’Angelo’s screen identity is bawdy but cultivated, passionate yet unafraid of being the butt of a joke.

“She has great, really complicated qualities,” says Stephanie Zacharek, the film critic of Time magazine.

“She’s really earthy in some ways, but she’s also very sophisticated.” Despite such strengths, D’Angelo’s career—not as distinguished as those of peers like Jessica Lange or Debra Winger—has been a source of some regret for her admirers.

In 1992, the late Pauline Kael, the legendary New Yorker film critic, summed up the consensus view, saying, “She’s really a symbol of what’s wrong with movies right now. How could an actress so beautiful and talented not get cast in better films? God, is it really possible that people like some of the women they cast nowadays more than Beverly D’Angelo?”

There were, of course, good parts. Her performance as Patsy Cline in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” landed her a Golden Globe nomination—what should have been the first of loads of nominations and awards. But D’Angelo was never again nominated for a Golden Globe, and never, ever nominated for an Oscar. “Part of it was me,” she says today. “I resisted being branded. To this day I do. It’s very, very difficult for me to identify myself in a way that feels constrictive.”

Instead, D’Angelo made odd choices and left turns.

In 1983, after “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” she signed up to appear in a raucous comedy starring Chevy Chase as suburbanite Clark Griswold, “National Lampoon’s Vacation.”

The movie racked up enormous box-office receipts, and D’Angelo’s performance as Ellen Griswold, Clark’s levelheaded but pugnacious spouse, personified the prototypical movie mom for a generation. There was a trio of sequels, plus a reboot. “I know she made a ton of them and people always kind of say, ‘Oh you know, poor Beverly D’Angelo—stuck in those comedies,’” Zacharek says.

“But she’s really good in them. … I’m not crazy about Chevy Chase in general, so to me, she makes those films so watchable and enjoyable.”

D’Angelo took the work seriously, modeling Ellen in the Vacation comedies on Priscilla and even incorporating her mother’s full name in the last film in the series, 1997’s “Vegas Vacation.” When Clark and Ellen renew their vows, she gives her name as Ellen Priscilla Ruth Smith Griswold. “Ellen is the devoted wife—the thick and thin,” D’Angelo says.

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Top, a still from “National Lampoon’s European Vacation”; bottom, D’Angelo as Patsy Cline in “Coal Miner’s Daughter”

says that’s OK. “Every time she shows up, she just opens up this little bit of magic,” she says. “And when you think someone has done that, really during the course of a long career, that’s actually valuable.”

D’Angelo’s 1981 marriage—her only—to a member of Italian nobility, a duke named Lorenzo Salviati, also contributed to her blasé attitude about career advancement.

She told People magazine that she met Salviati the previous year after attending a series of parties, the sort where “you carry a spare cocktail dress and get home a day later.”

For D’Angelo, though, becoming a duchess—seeing firsthand “deep, heavy-duty, multigenerational wealth”—made jockeying for position in nouveau riche Hollywood even less enticing. “I lived a life of royalty,” she says. “I’d come back to Hollywood and I’d see all these people striving to get a Bentley and trying to speak mangled French to order something in a fancy restaurant—and I’d think, ‘I have this.’”

The marriage lasted 15 years.

Fellow actors sing her praises. “She’s thoroughly enjoyable,” says actor Michael O’Keefe, who co-starred with D’Angelo in a farce directed by “A Hard Day’s Night” helmer Richard Lester, 1984’s “Finders Keepers.” “She’s hilarious.

She’s completely whacked-out, in the right way.” But marquee movies remained out of grasp. When Hollywood made a whole movie revolving around Patsy Cline, 1985’s “Sweet Dreams,” they cast Jessica Lange. A pattern was starting to emerge: Beverly D’Angelo was more interesting and inventive than the movies that surrounded her. But Zacharek 46

photos: top, dispatch file; bottom, courtesy Beverly D’Angelo

N

ot that movie stardom was top on the list of D’Angelo’s goals anyway.

When she was a teenager, she just wanted to be a cheerleader.

The second oldest—and only daughter—of Gene and Priscilla’s four children, D’Angelo and her family were longtime residents of the wealthy, WASPy suburb of Upper Arlington. Naturally, D’Angelo tried out for the ultimate wealthy, WASPy activity as a sophomore at Upper Arlington High School: cheerleading. She felt pretty good about her chances, too.

“My audition was great,” D’Angelo remembers today. “I got everybody so excited. My jumps were good. I was really made to be a cheerleader. I was so cute and everything.”

But it was not to be: The shoo-in was named a mere alternate. “I think—and it’s just my theory—but I think the reason that I was made an alternate cheerleader, and not the bigdeal cheerleader, was because, statistically speaking, there’s always a cheerleader that gets knocked up,” D’Angelo says.

“They probably looked at me like, ‘That’s the one.’”

Her story begins at the Beverly Manor Apartments, where her parents were living at the time of her birth in November 1951. Family lore has it that her first name was inspired by the building, but she also heard that she was named after a drummer who had been a friend of her father’s. She prefers the second version.

In August 1949, Gene—a first-generation Italian-American who first made his living as a musician—and some buddies got dressed up to go to one of Upper Arlington’s swimming pools. There, the fellas reckoned, they would encounter wealthy, attractive members of the opposite sex. “He walks in, zoot-suited up, to that swimming pool and sees my mother,” Beverly says. “He said the bathing suit was gold. She said it was silver. They both told me this story many, many times.

He walked up to her, and he said, ‘Are you seeing anybody?’

And she said, ‘Yeah, a couple of guys.’”

It was not so hard to believe: Besides being beautiful, Priscilla Ruth Smith was born to a prominent old family.

Her father, Howard Dwight Smith, was the architect who dreamt up the design of Ohio Stadium and other prominent structures around town. She had graduated two years earlier from Smith College, where she studied the violin. The couple eloped four months after the poolside encounter.

After plying his trade as a musician for the first seven years of Beverly’s life, Gene shifted gears in 1955, entering the broadcasting business and eventually rising to prominence as the chairman and president of WBNS-TV. Gene’s

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success improved the family’s station, and while the children were encouraged to be creative, a certain dull conformity seeped in. “We purposely, growing up, would all buy the same clothes,” D’Angelo says. “We wore our hair the same. We spoke the same. We ate the same.”

While an Upper Arlington High School student, D’Angelo spent a summer in Italy. When she returned home, her suitcase was affixed with a sticker reading “Make Love, Not War.” The experience opened her eyes to the world beyond suburban Columbus, and it felt suffocating to return home.

“It was like, if somebody had shown you how to fly, and then you were locked in a cage,” she says.

Her mother counseled her: “You’re soul-searching, but you don’t even have a soul yet.” Profoundly glum, she transferred to Whetstone High School for her senior year. Mostly, though, she lost herself in magazines and the places they took her to. “I read an article about Janis Joplin, and I kept rereading it over and over again,” she says. “It all became about getting to California.”

photo: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

photos: top, dispatch file; bottom, courtesy Beverly D’Angelo

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really didn’t surprise her all that much: “It all seemed very logical. I knew I could handle the music.” She says today, “For my mad scene, I strangled myself with a microphone cord and died onstage with fire alarms going off.”

Casting directors fell for her. Her first movie role came in 1977 with Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” in which she can be glimpsed—and briefly heard—in what amounts to a walkon. “He gave me my Screen Actors Guild card,” she says.

Not long after, Milos Forman, the Czech director recently honored with an Academy Award for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” was casting about for actors to appear in his film version of the hippie-themed musical “Hair.”

D’Angelo, seemingly made for the part, drew the director’s immediate attention, professionally and otherwise. A dinner date with Forman led to a love affair, which complicated the casting process. “There were more auditions, and even more auditions, because people started to know that I was having an affair,” says D’Angelo, who, overwhelmed, fled to London only to receive a pleading phone call from her boyfriend-director: “He said, ‘I need you,’ and I said, ‘As a girlfriend or as an actress?’ And he said, ‘Just come back—both!’” She came back. She got the role.

n the strength of her father’s media connections, D’Angelo did make it to California. Having participated in an art-study program during a subsequent trip to Italy, her father’s pull enabled her to get a job as an inker and painter at the Hanna-Barbera Animation Studio. She downplays her artistic talent; the real point was to be part of the so-called “summer of love.”

Burrowing deeper into the counterculture, in the early 1970s, she pulled up stakes and moved to Canada. There, she indulged her lifelong secret wish to become a singer—you know, like Janis Joplin. “If you had a shopping list to check the boxes of who would be a revolutionary, countercultural-living flower child, it would be me,” she says.

After joining a musicians’ union as (of all things) a castanet player, she found herself singing jazz standards, from 6 until 11 p.m., in a topless bar called the Zanzibar Tavern in Toronto. “I wasn’t topless,” she says. “I sang in a long black dress, in between two girls on these oil drums with the tops cut off and plexiglass with a light that would shoot up and illuminate them as they danced in a G-string.” She adds: “I felt like I was Billie Holiday.” There were better gigs, too. She even sang backup with Ronnie Hawkins.

D’Angelo actively pursued singing, but she fell into acting. (“I never wanted to be Sarah Bernhardt,” she told Columbus Monthly in 1979.) But, while still abroad, she landed a part in a radio musical about Marilyn Monroe on the CBC, and she toured the provinces as Ophelia in a rock ’n’ roll version of “Hamlet,” first called “Kronborg: 1582” and later retitled “Rockabye Hamlet.” In 1976, just after the show opened Beverly D’Angelo with on Broadway, D’Angelo told The Columbus Carrie Fisher in 2015 Dispatch that being plucked from obscurity

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When the Killings Stopped What a short-lived experiment on the South Side of Columbus can teach a city struggling with gun violence

By Theodore Decker

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For this march, they will head west, to the spot where a bullet ended the life of Jaleel Carter-Tate five days earlier.

It is Sunday, Oct. 4, and about 25 people have gathered at the Family Missionary Baptist Church on Oakwood Avenue, the starting point for this monthly plea for peace. A gusty storm front races toward Columbus from western Ohio, but no one talks of canceling the event, the 132nd march against gun violence held by a grassroots collective known as Ministries 4 Movement. Today marks 11 years of marching, through 44 seasons, and a discouraging weather forecast isn’t about to end the streak.

Carter-Tate was 25 years old when he died on the South Side on Sept. 29, in the 800 block of East Whittier Avenue. Columbus police were called before 10 p.m. and found him bleeding from a gunshot wound. He died on the scene, becoming the 116th victim of homicide in what is shaping up to be the bloodiest year on record in Ohio’s capital city.

The marchers stop at the spot where Carter-Tate fell. A nearby street sign has become a roadside memorial. Mylar balloons are tied in a tangle to the post, and crowded below is a cluster of stuffed animals. At first blush, they seem like an odd tribute to a man in his 20s, seated as they are among an assortment of liquor bottles. But teddy bears are common at memorials marking deaths that are as untimely as they are violent. They are futile bids to turn back the clock.

A few speakers step forward. One man says a dispute over a sports bet may have caused Carter-Tate’s death. If true, it is in keeping with the trend that most of these killings are not the result of the drug trade, as many would have you believe. They inevitably arise from what criminologists call “interpersonal disputes,” a catchall term for an array of petty beefs and more serious grievances that in some instances fester for years before exploding on the streets. A bumped arm in a packed nightclub leads to a spilled drink, then to words, and finally gunfire. Trash talk on social media inflames tensions between rival teens. A young boy sees his older brother killed and waits until he is grown, sometimes for years, to impose street justice on a shooter who avoided arrest.

But what happens if an outsider steps into these volatile situations, someone from the neighborhood with street cred, good intentions and impeccable timing?

Vulnerable young people might regain control of their emotions, stopping themselves from acting on violent impulses. The people involved in this march can attest to the power of these interventions because, well, they’ve done them. Nearly a decade ago, they launched a short-lived pilot program called CeaseFire Columbus that coincided with a dramatic drop in violence in a 40-block section of the South Side.

This group was within striking distance of a strategy that, if it had been embraced by

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CeaseFire Columbus leaders Deanna Wilkinson, Frederick LaMarr, Cecil Ahad and Dartangnan Hill outside Family Missionary Baptist Church

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Minister Aaron Hopkins, left, and Rev. Frederick LaMarr lead a march against gun violence in November.

Columbus is on track in 2020 to record its most lethal year for homicidal violence.

In 1991, 139 people were killed. That was the height of the city’s crack cocaine trade, and that record stood for nearly two decades as killings hovered around 90 to 100 each year.

Murders jumped in 2017 to 143, only to fall back in 2018 and 2019 before surging again this year.

In fact, the violence has soared to such levels in 2020 that Mayor Andy Ginther and his administration have been regularly addressing it, even during a year dominated by the coronavirus pandemic and weeks of racial justice protests.

In his fourth violence-related news conference of the summer, Ginther pledged $200,000 in federal money to each of four nonprofits, which in turn could pass some of the funds on to smaller groups.

Earlier in the summer, the mayor also announced the formation of violence intervention teams and outreach at hospitals.

But the most promising development came in October, when the city announced it was partnering with David Kennedy, a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of 50

Criminal Justice in New York City and the director of the National Network for Safe Communities. For $80,000, the city hired Kennedy to help suss out who and what is driving the city’s violence. That study is expected to take six months.

“The theory is that there is a small percentage of individuals committing the large amount of violent crime that is taking place in our community,” says Ned Pettus, the director of the city’s Department of Public Safety.

That is not a new theory, or one that is unique to Columbus. In fact, it was one of the foundations of CeaseFire Columbus, which was founded in 2010 and run by Ministries 4 Movement. Criminologists say gun violence is driven by a fraction of a percent of the population. A 2011 Ohio Attorney General study, conducted by Ohio State University, found that offenders convicted of three or more violent offenses accounted for less than 1 percent of the state’s population but a third of all violent crime convictions over nearly four decades.

Kennedy helped to pioneer a carrotand-stick approach to reducing gun violence in Boston in the mid-1990s, an effort that came to be known as the Boston Gun Project’s Operation Ceasefire. Once iden-

tified, those key players on the street are called in to meet with law enforcement and told they will be hammered relentlessly as long as they continue to engage in violence.

But if they are serious about leaving street life behind, a vast support network will help them. As word of the Boston success spread, cities across the country adopted similar efforts.

There is no single formula for successfully reducing violence, but the most promising approaches are built upon a base acknowledgement that to reduce violence in any city, you must engage directly with those violent offenders. “That’s what characterizes everything that works,” Kennedy says.

During the October march, Deanna Wilkinson speaks to the gathering about a 15-year-old boy killed recently on the East Side. Two years earlier, he’d participated in the Urban GEMS gardening program she began in 2015. The program started with a small garden beside Family Missionary Baptist Church but has expanded since, teaching children to grow and sell their own produce while building confidence, healthy choices and life skills. Many have grown up surrounded by violence.

photo: tim johnson

the city, might—just might—have saved Carter-Tate. Instead, they march in mourning.

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photos: top, tom dodge; bottom, eamon queeney

photo: tim johnson

“These are complicated lives,” says Wilkinson, a criminologist and associate human services professor at Ohio State University. She touches on the frustrations of violence prevention work, the occasional politics, the constant struggle for funding.

“These young people are worth a lot,” she says. “Every time we lose one, we lose a huge part of our city.”

In 2007, Wilkinson brought together an array of city officials, law enforcement agencies, human service organizations, community activists and faith leaders to form the Youth Violence Prevention Advisory Board, a group meant to brainstorm solutions to gun violence. Through the board, she got to know better Tammy Fournier Alsaada, a leader of the People’s Justice Project. They joined with Cecil Ahad, a South Side activist known as Brother Cecil and the founder of Ministries 4 Movement, and the Rev. Frederick LaMarr, the pastor of Family Missionary Baptist Church. Both were doing their own work to provide mentors and positive role models for young men and boys at risk of falling into their neighborhood’s cycle of violence.

That group of four formed the core of what would become CeaseFire Columbus.

“We were a really good team,” Wilkinson says.

“Dr. Dee, she had all the statistics, and she could do the numbers and paperwork,” LaMarr says. “Me and Brother Cecil, we had the boots on the ground.” Fournier Alsaada, Wilkinson says, had a strong drive and a special ability to distill conceptual research into plain English.

Ahad also had forged a relationship with Dartangnan Hill, a founder of the neighborhood’s Deuce-Deuce Bloods street gang who had tired of the violence. After Ahad’s nephew was murdered, the pair held in November 2009 what became the first neighborhood march. “It was Dartangnan who really introduced us to a lot of people, who opened a lot of doors up for us,” Ahad says.

This Columbus collaboration was inspired by the work of Dr. Gary Slutkin, a Chicago physician and public health expert who noticed gun violence spread like an infectious disease. Like Kennedy, Slutkin’s intervention efforts focus on reaching those who are most likely to spread violence, but his tactics differ from his fellow researcher. Slutkin’s initiative, Chicago’s CeaseFire (now called Cure Violence), avoids partnerships with law enforcement and instead relies on street-level violence interrupters who, because of their own history on the streets, carry respect and are able to defuse volatile situations before they lead to gunfire. Over the longer term,

Top, Davontay Womak, left, and Terry Felder listen to Frederick LaMarr, center, with Cecil Ahad, right, in 2016; bottom, Ahad, right, speaks at the spot where 17-year-old Lamont Frazier was killed in 2013.

these interruptions accrue, reinforcing that violence is no longer “necessary” or tolerated. Caseworkers, meanwhile, support those who want out of the life, while community activists labor to change societal norms through public education campaigns and neighborhood marches.

In 2010, Wilkinson invited Ministries 4 Movement to implement a Columbus version of the Chicago model. Local leaders based their operations at LaMarr’s church and trained in Chicago. They drew up a detailed proposal for a pilot program and sought money to pay for it. They made a pitch to Mayor Mike Coleman’s administration and asked for $750,000, which would have paid for two sites for a year. “They

are completely ready,” Slutkin said during a 2011 visit to Columbus. “They need government support.”

They didn’t get it. Coleman did not put the project into his budget and went instead in another direction, throwing his support and city money behind a Recreation and Parks program known as Applications for Pride, Purpose and Success. APPS sought to provide an outlet for young people at city recreation centers, along with mentoring, job training and high school equivalency. Its violence-prevention component stumbled in the first year due to infighting, but the city wrote off those troubles as growing pains and considers the program a success. continued on Page 76

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Home&Style Q&A p. 54 | Products P. 55 | Home p. 56 | top 25 P. 62

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Abundant Sundries

A new shop opens in German Village.

Photo by Tim johnson

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Home & Style Q&A

A Pandemic Launch An equestrian opens a German Village boutique

By Sherry Beck Paprocki

You are happiest on horseback, according to your LinkedIn profile. Has owning a store changed any of that? I’ve ridden and showed horses for most of my life. For the better part of my professional career, I took a hiatus from showing, but I always had a horse and rode whenever time permitted. It is a happy place for me and I’m grateful that I’m still able to have a horse in my life. Horses challenge you, humble you and they most definitely give us more than we deserve at times. I’ve always said to people “what grounds you, will save you” and horses are definitely that for me. Once I opened my business, I stopped showing 54

Barbie Coleman stands in her German Village shop. Read more at columbusmonthly.com.

and now that I have the store, my riding schedule has certainly changed. I’m out the door at 6:30 a.m. most mornings to go ride before I open the store.

ty thankless profession but I really loved the challenges and problem-solving it presented and the extraordinary experiences I had, the people I met and the places I traveled.

What did you do before you became a shop maven in German Village? I worked in public relations for 20-plus years up and down the East Coast before moving to Columbus in 2010. I’ve done just about everything in public relations from working with small brands, global brands and even a few years doing society [philanthropic] public relations in Palm Beach. My specialty was crisis management so I always laugh that some of my best work is work I can’t talk about. I worked just as hard getting in The New York Times as making sure my client or company wasn’t in The New York Times. It can be a pret-

How does your past experience play into your current position as boutique founder? I never could have created my company and opened my store without those professional experiences and the people I worked with. As I was honing my craft as a PR person, I was also figuring out who I was. My whole world was my job and my identity was wrapped up in the failures and successes of whatever client or company I was working for. As I got to know myself and understand the person I really am—not the one everyone told me to be—I was able to start to see what was next for me. ◆

photo: tim johnson

After a 20-year career in public relations, Barbie Coleman launched Urban Sundry Ltd. in December of 2017 with two online brands: Urban Sundry and Equestrian Sundry.

She also set up shop at local outdoor markets such as the German Village Makers Market and equestrian events throughout the Midwest. For the last two years she’s run a seasonal storefront, September through April, at the World Equestrian Center in Wilmington.

People always asked when she was going to open a full-time, brick-and-mortar location.

Coleman lives in German Village and, one day, she spotted a “For Rent” sign while driving in the area. That was in February of this year and, knowing this was the right space, she steered toward a move-in date of May 1.

Then the world shut down. “Believe it or not, there wasn’t a question of whether or not to keep going,” says Coleman. “I know only one direction and that’s forward.”

“I also have an incredibly supportive husband who said, ‘Do what you always do and make it happen,’” she recalls. “I’m the first one to say ‘challenge accepted!’ when things look tough.”

Given the pandemic during this holiday season, Coleman’s shop has regular hours but will also cater to those who want to schedule private shopping time.

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photos: 1, 5, 8, courtesy ballard designs; 2, 4, 9, courtesy williams sonoma; 3, 7, courtesy crate & barrel; 6, 10, courtesy pottery barn

photo: tim johnson

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Home & Style home

Ron Guzzo, left, and Joe Garner are in front of one of the homes they built in New Albany Farms.

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photo: rob hardin

New Albany Farms

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By Brian R. Ball

More than 30 years ago when Les Wexner envisioned his personal estate, he designed one of Central Ohio’s most exclusive communities for his neighbors, and it continues to thrive.

photo: rob hardin

When L Brands founder and now-retired chairman Les Wexner and his friend Jack Kessler took a legendary ride on the country roads of Plain Township nearly 35 years ago, the pair began to envision an uber-upscale community. They thought it should be anchored by the region’s best golf club and, eventually, a business park to financially support the creation of a wellplanned community that encompasses an exemplary school district, health clubs, cultural events and other amenities.

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The New Albany home of former Express CEO Michael Weiss and his wife, Arlene, went into contract for sale this fall.

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Around the same time, Wexner had a vision for what would become his personal estate of about 300 acres and its organic farm. Just south of his estate, he worked with planners to carve out 23 large estate lots that created the gated New Albany Farms neighborhood.

He anticipated that this is where a select few executives and top professionals in the region would enjoy rural living, and still be within the country club community.

Count twice-retired Express chief executive Michael Weiss among the early highprofile folks who decided to take advantage of the opportunity. Contrary to beliefs at the time, Weiss says he never felt pressure to move from Bexley—Wexner’s hometown— to the exclusive, gated community of New Albany just to please his boss.

“I never felt pressure to build in the Farms,” Weiss says. “I really wanted—given the opportunity—to design and build a home.

It was an opportunity for self-expression.”

The house he and wife, Arlene, built in the 1990s, and recently contracted to sell,

was conceived “as an 18th century Georgian house … but with 1990s sensibility and technology,” explains Weiss.

“It has the gracious feeling of the 1920s when people built grand-looking houses,” he continues. “We took the best from [architectural] history.”

The home, measuring nearly 14,000 square feet, includes six bedrooms and six-and-ahalf baths, according to its MLS listing. It was offered for $3.3 million and was expected to transfer to its new owner on Dec. 1.

That 11-acre estate sits in the midst of a well-manicured lawn with a large lake behind a meadow of tall grass that lines New Albany Farms Road. That common area—maintained by the homeowners’ association—serves as a setback to create the country theme of the luxury neighborhood on large, open lots within the broader New Albany Country Club community. Woods grace the back of the property, while trees also obscure some of the neighboring residences. Stringent design standards guided

photo: Ashton Onesko/Prestige Pro Photo

Home & Style home

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photos: Dale Clark-Arc Photography

photo: Ashton Onesko/Prestige Pro Photo

A grand entry in the Weiss home has welcomed hundreds of visitors through the years who attended personal, business and philanthropic events there. Below, the loge provides a comfortable resting space near the home’s swimming pool.

development of the premier homes that were built there.

“We thought the country farm theme would be an extra attraction suited for homes on the largest lots and at the highest price points,” explains Kessler, long-time chairman of the New Albany Co., which directs residential and commercial projects in New Albany. “It worked.”

Kessler expresses satisfaction with New Albany Farms hamlet, which has a gated entrance off Kitzmiller Road between Morse and the old Ohio 161.

Little can be seen of the neighborhood from Kitzmiller or Reynoldsburg-New Albany Road, which borders the community on its west side. Trees that were planted when the neighborhood was new have now grown taller than the homes there.

“It’s nice to see it completed,” Kessler says, “and the last homes built.”

A drive through the Farms with Kessler’s daughter, New Albany Realty agent Jane Kessler Lennox, shows the care in the planning and execution of the development. A resident of the area, she and her husband, Thomas Lennox, the former Pelotonia nonprofit’s CEO and current founder and president of the DIB Brands marketing/design firm, have had some well-known neighbors during their 17 years inside the gate.

The late IndyCar driver/owner Bobby Rahal and his ex-wife Deborah Berry once owned a property complete with a horse barn. Berry later lived in another Farms home after the couple divorced. Retired White Castle CEO Bill Ingram and his wife, Martha, also live in the enclave. So does noted joint implant inventor and surgeon Dr. Adolph Lombardi and his wife, Anne.

Central Ohio businessman Glenn Leibert also owns an estate there.

“It’s kind of a who’s who,” says homebuilder Ron Guzzo of Guzzo & Garner Custom Homes, which has built three houses within the neighborhood. The Farms “is the crown jewel of the New Albany Country Club community,” says Guzzo.

Among the first homes built were those belonging to the Weisses and the Lennoxes.

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Home & Style home

Several more were built through the rest of the 1990s. Another batch got built in the 2000s. While nearly all are built to resemble grand rural estates, one home has the architectural theme of a barn, made of post-and-beam construction complete with a silo.

“These are special, special homes,” Guzzo says. “The Farms architectural review committee has extra incentive to make [all] homes nice because the Wexners live nearby.”

Guzzo helped Columbus cosmetic surgeon Walter Bernacki and his wife, Polly, design a home eight years ago after they bought the last undeveloped Farms lot.

Bernacki said he wanted to apply his aptitude for details when they decided to move to New Albany from Westerville in the design of a home built without simulated brick and other corner cutting. “We wanted to use old world materials such as limestone, slate for the roofs and copper in the eaves. We didn’t just want a great house,” Bernacki says. “We wanted a house that works for our family.”

Bernacki’s 8-acre property takes on the flavor of a French country home featuring wood beams, antique stained-glass doors and a limited use of natural stone. It also features a lake complete with fish and, Bernacki’s favorite feature, a covered loge with an outdoor fireplace for relaxing dinners and entertainment.

The property also affords Bernacki the opportunity to engage in his favorite hobby: gardening. He focuses on both a vegetable garden and the formal gardens on the estate grounds. Building the home new “provided us with a blank slate,” he says, noting that he and his wife enjoy doing their own gardening rather than hiring it all out.

Despite her husband’s enthusiasm, Arlene Weiss confesses that initially she was not at all that thrilled with moving to New Albany after 14 years living in Bexley. To begin with, she worked at the Buckeye Boys 60

Ranch in Grove City, so the commute to work was significantly extended. She says New Albany in the mid-1990s also lacked many amenities, such as nearby shopping.

“We’re New Yorkers,” she says. “To move to a place without the retail nearby was sort of a shock. I was so grateful when Easton opened, because of the variety of retail.”

The couple has transitioned back to urban living, buying a condo at Miranova overlooking Bicentennial Park in Downtown Columbus, visiting their New York City place and other destinations. Urban retirement suits them just fine as it’s part

of a familiar big city transition. “In New York,” the retired CEO says, “people step up from the suburbs to a wonderful apartment on Central Park.”

He notes that the large home they built in the Farms proved most accommodating as the site of business dinners and charity events. “We’d have a Christmas party for 100, easily. Black tie events,” says Michael Weiss. “People do live in just a few rooms.

If you do a lot of entertaining, others get used and that makes it worthwhile. The minute those gatherings ended, the house felt excessive.” ◆

photo: rob hardin

Guzzo, left, and Garner built three of the large homes in New Albany Farms.

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real estate news Home & Style

A Clintonville home for sale

Housing Shortage

photo: Doral Chenoweth III

photo: rob hardin

Just building more homes doesn’t solve Central Ohio’s growing demand. By TC Brown Central Ohio’s real estate market has more buyers than existing homes, so why aren’t builders just building more houses to fill the demand?

The hard reality of a red-hot housing market is that it is not that simple. First, the median price buyers paid for a house in the fall was $240,000. While that was $34,000 higher from the previous year, it was way less than the minimum price of a new build.

“They can start in the low $300,000s but that is about as small a house as you can build,” says Vince Squillace, executive vice president of the Ohio Homebuilder’s Association. “The market is underbuilt and it is exacerbating in Columbus because we have great population growth with great demographics for construction.”

Three million people are expected to call Central Ohio home by 2050, an increase of one million residents. So, permitting activity needs to increase two- to three-fold to meet projected housing needs, accord-

ing to Vogt Strategic Insights, a real estate research firm.

A Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission housing study released in September was topped with a headline that “Central Ohio is at a critical inflection point.” The report noted that as more homes are built at higher price points, existing affordable options are lost.

For demand to be met, something must give, say builders and real estate agents.

Developers say their hands are tied by land availability, zoning, density restrictions, regulations, construction costs and a lack of skilled workers.

Jim Lipnos, president of the Homewood Corp., says with the current tight market, buyers are in stiff competition for affordable housing, but the cost of a new house puts it out of reach for many.

“New housing gets so expensive it is not an option for some people,” Lipnos says.

“Where there is a housing shortage on

either side of new or existing, it definitely impacts the other side.”

In the fall, just under 3,000 homes were listed in the market, about half the number from the previous year.

While the average price for a new home is around $340,000, up to 30 percent of that cost is dedicated to meeting regulations. Another challenge for developers is density limits imposed by local communities, says Jon Melchi, executive director of the Building Industry Association of Central Ohio.

“The size of the lot … drives up the cost significantly and that is the biggest challenge we have with local governments,” Melchi says. “They want large lots. Some consumers want that but most new homeowners don’t.”

Creativity to attract buyers is often employed, says Doug Turlow, a broker and owner of Home Central Realty.

“They might offer some sort of financing incentive say on a $350,000 home where you are paying the same as a $325,000 existing home so it makes up the difference,” Turlow says. “They try to make it where it equals out a bit.”

Meanwhile, as Turlow and others say, “The market is through the roof.” ◆ DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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Home & Style REAL ESTATE

Top 25

real estate transactions SEPT. 1–30, 2020

7018 Hanbys Loop $1,445,000 LE SA

ING ND PE

7656 Wills Run Lane $1,695,000 LD SO

7623 Fenway Road $1,175,000

PRICE

ADDRESS

BUYER/SELLER

$2,562,500

14 Highgrove, New Albany

St. Pete Intercoastal Concepts LLC from Singer, Jan E. & David M.

$2,375,000

9 New Albany Farms Rd., New Albany

Davis, Shelia S., trustee, from K9 Morse LLC

$2,035,000

4348 Sunbury Rd., Galena

Liu, Jiechun from Peiffer, Jack O. & Joan E.

$1,650,000

6755 Merchant Rd., Delaware

Flores, William S. & Ashley from Rhoades, Lennie D. & Perry, Marcia J.

$1,650,000

3898 Baughman Grant, New Albany

Scherbel, Arthur & Samantha from Bohutinsky, Andrew Fox & Siemer, Elizabeth M.

$1,650,000

2000 Jones Rd., Granville

Joseph, Andrew Paul & Merlo, Kristen Marie from Antritt, Stephen M.

$1,600,000

2156 Cheshire Rd., Upper Arlington

Skaruppa, Matthew J. & Cynthia P. from Poling, Brant E. & Myers, Jennifer L.

$1,580,000

8 S. Ealy Crossing, New Albany

Holladay, David B. & Deanna G. from Monroe, Scott, trustee

$1,575,000

1999 Woodland Hall Dr., Delaware

Rayani, Sujana & Choudhary from Willoughby, Stephen W. & Rock, Jayme L.

$1,570,000

6045 St. Boswels Ct., Dublin

Biyani, Rahul K. & Prachi from NOYB Partnership

$1,525,000

7824 Brandon Rd., New Albany

Lewis, Brad & Defante, Maria, trustees, from Skoulis, Thomas A. & Julie M.

$1,500,000

2050 Tremont Rd., Upper Arlington

Whisler, Matthew W. & Maria Elena Casal from Koffel, Bradley P. & Michelle L.

$1,450,000

251 Lakeview Dr., Buckeye Lake

Phelps, Shawn W. from Snowden, Gary K. & Sherry L.

$1,400,000

7620 Pillion Way, Delaware

Rankin, Demicha D. & Chaffon D. from McKinnon, Troy & Stephanie

$1,400,000

2454 Kensington Rd., Upper Arlington

Schwerling, Paul J. II & Gina from McKenna, Shawn E. & Jennifer C.

$1,375,000

8146 Mitchell Dewitt Rd., Plain City

Mangum, Stephen J. & Aubrey D. from Parry, Thomas N.

$1,367,500

336 Sycamore St., Columbus

Rourke, Michael J. from Nicastro, Nicholas J. & Mitchell, Jamie L.

$1,280,000

2036 Concord Rd., Upper Arlington

Dabbelt, Grant C. & Angela S. from Moran, Gregory S. & Augenstein-Moran, Sharon R.

$1,247,700

2415 Swisher Creek Dr., Blacklick

Bolton, Karen Ruzek & Mark from Kraner, Phyllis D.

$1,150,000

6036 Dublin Rd., Dublin

Dennison, Emily L. & Sean P. from HMC Investments LLC

$1,100,000

4900 Deer Run Dr., Dublin

J3 Lodge LLC from Deer Run Land LLC

$1,075,000

7845 Brandon Rd., New Albany

Stypula, Jonathan M. from Levine, Edward W. & Davies, Kathleen M.

$1,066,888

10829 Eckington Dr., Dublin

Lin, Meiyu & Zheng, Hong Dong from Janani, Jigna N. & Negi, Rohit, trustees

$1,035,500

10473 MacKenzie Way, Dublin

Memmer, Jeffrey S. & Kristin L. from Whitson, Eddie L. & Kathleen A.

As provided by Columbus Dispatch researcher Julie Fulton. Statistics are gathered from the greater Columbus area, including Franklin and parts of other surrounding counties.

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COLUMBUS MONTHLY DECEMBER 2020

Dining year in review p. 64 | short order P. 67 | Let’s eat P. 72

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Changing of the Guard

Camelot Cellars undergoes a rebrand that mirrors the community it serves.

Photo by JODI MILLER

DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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Dining Year in Review

Owner Ian Holmes at the Coastal Local Seafood location in the North Market

Happy Thoughts Eight positive things that happened this year in Columbus dining

By Erin Edwards

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Against all odds, grand openings took place amid the pandemic.

Believe it or not, 2020 saw a slew of restaurants make their entrance onto the Columbus food scene. (Insert shameless plug for our Best New Restaurants issue, coming out in February.) Polaris dining got more interesting when The Royce and Nomad opened. Chef Matthew Phelan’s Novella Osteria began serving homemade pastas in Powell. Afra Grill made its debut with fast-casual Somali fare on the North Side.

Chef BJ Lieberman continues to make a splash at Chapman’s Eat Market in German Village. Adella’s on Oak brought a much-

needed dining option to Franklin Park. A mother-daughter duo opened Café Elena on the Northwest Side. Emmett’s Café introduced us to the idea that a great coffee bar can have delicious food. The list of determined newcomers goes on and on.

Cheers to them.

Coastal Local Seafood did far more than just stay afloat.

We’ve been fans of Coastal Local owner Ian Holmes for some time, naming him a Columbus Monthly Tastemaker—an upand-coming food professional—in 2017.

But unless you were a restaurateur who

photo: tim johnson

Much has been written this year (including by us) about the pandemic’s awful impact on restaurants, bars and service industry workers. People lost their jobs. Many businesses failed. Restaurant workers were forced to put themselves at risk. Many people stopped dining out. The long ordeal isn’t over, and this winter will likely be harsh on our restaurants as dining shifts indoors.

But we don’t want to overlook the positive things that happened on the Columbus dining scene in 2020: stories of entrepreneurial stick-to-itiveness, welcome distractions, a new appreciation for the outdoors, interesting trends. Here are eight good things that happened this year.

Columbus Monthly DECEMBER 2020

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purchased fresh seafood from the pier-toplate vendor or a diner who ate in one of those restaurants, you may not have been familiar with Holmes and his seafood. In March, Holmes lost about 95 percent of his business overnight when restaurants were forced to shut because of COVID-19.

In only a week, Holmes launched directto-consumer seafood deliveries, which he dubbed Seafood Stimulus Packages. (He says his brother-in-law built his website.)

Coastal Local had already been set to join the North Market’s new Bridge Park location in 2020. Before that location made its debut this month, North Market’s longtime fishmonger, The Fish Guys, ended its nearly 14-year run in the historic Spruce Street market. Holmes quickly stepped in to fill the fresh seafood void, also adding a fine menu of prepared foods like lobster rolls, chowders, fries and more.

photos: top, tim johnson; bottom, Eric Albrecht

photo: tim johnson

We embraced the outdoors.

Patios, beer gardens and outdoor dining spaces may have saved many restaurants this year. But they also saved our sanity.

Breweries like Land-Grant and Gemüt instituted safety protocols and made the most of their outdoor beer gardens, offering space to safely enjoy a brew in public.

Several communities, such as Hilliard and Delaware, expanded their DORA districts— outdoor areas where visitors are allowed to stroll and sip a libation. And once the city of Columbus passed the Temporary Outdoor Seating Pilot Program, permitting businesses to expand their patios, restaurants like Wolf’s Ridge Brewing, Marcella’s and Hubbard Grille literally spilled into the streets—it felt downright European.

Above, the mushroom combo with beets, lentils, split peas and mushrooms, foreground, and the ful at Nile Vegan; below, the patio at Gemüt Biergarten

Vegan options continued to flourish.

Not one, but two vegan delis launched in Columbus this year, opening within a month of each other. In October, Vida’s Plant-Based Butcher opened in Fifth by Northwest; it was quickly followed by a Clintonville deli from the popular food truck Seitan’s Realm. At both, vegan and vegan-curious customers can find plantbased cold cuts, sausages, cheeses and deli sandwiches. In addition, Lifestyle Café filled the former Angry Baker space in Olde Towne East, and the Ethiopian restaurant Nile Vegan added a second location in Grandview. And on Parsons Avenue, Village Taco completed its move from Alexandria, Ohio, filling the old Hal & Al’s space.

DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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Dining Year in Review

Two Columbus chefs earned James Beard recognition.

When The James Beard Foundation announced its 2020 Restaurant and Chef Award semifinalists in February, two Columbus chefs made the cut. Pit barbecue purist James Anderson, owner of the food truck Ray Ray’s Hog Pit, was named a semifinalist for Best Chef: Great Lakes.

(Recently, Anderson announced plans to open a meat-and-three restaurant in Granville.) In addition, longtime pastry chef Spencer Budros, co-owner of Pistacia Vera, was nominated for Outstanding Baker. Though neither chef was named a finalist, the nominations ended an eightyear James Beard drought for Columbus.

Birria tacos went off.

The birria trend has arrived in Central Ohio in a big way. Hailing from the Mexican state of Jalisco, birria tacos are distinctive for their almost orange hue and—the kicker—an accompanying beef consommé meant for dipping. The buzz is justified— birria tacos are delicious, like a Mexican French dip. The Clintonville taco truck Los Agavez Taqueria is probably most responsible for igniting the trend locally.

Other trucks serving the distinctive tacos have joined the fray, including Las Tapias Birria, which plans to open a restaurant on the West Side this winter, as well as AJ’s Birria Tacos, Taquiando and Columbus Birria.

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the former Elevator Brewing space at 165 N. Fourth St. A developer-chef duo continued to bet on Downtown Columbus.

Between COVID-19 and the summer’s protests, Downtown Columbus has taken the brunt of 2020. Si Señor, Plantain Café and Nancy’s Home Cooking all shuttered their Downtown eateries. But recently, some good news for Downtown dining: In November, Veritas chef-owner Josh Dalton

told Columbus Monthly that he and developer Jeff Edwards of The Edwards Cos. plan to bring three new ventures to the heart of Downtown. A Parisian-style bistro is set to enliven the former Brioso Coffee space on the northeast corner of Gay and High streets. Across the street, Speck Italian Eatery will fill a street-level restaurant space in Edwards’ luxury apartment building, The Nicholas. And inside The Citizens building, a new wine shop called Accent by Veritas will fill the vacant spot across from Brioso’s new coffee bar. ◆

photos: top, erin edwards; bottom, courtesy wolf’s ridge brewing

Craft breweries continued to grow, and some added delivery.

When the pandemic began, the beer kept flowing. Breweries like Wolf’s Ridge Brewing, Seventh Son Brewing Co. and Nocterra Brewing Co. began home delivery for the first time. In addition, COVID19 hasn’t stopped some breweries from making their debut in Central Ohio.

Cleveland’s Saucy Brew Works opened its first Columbus location in Harrison West.

Newcomer Edison Brewing launched in Gahanna, boasting a stunning sunset vista on Science Boulevard. Spires Social Brewing Co. came online near Polaris. And Jackie O’s fulfilled a longstanding wish of local beer drinkers, announcing that the Athens-based brewery would open a 15-barrel brewhouse in Columbus. It’s expected to open Downtown next year in

Above, the Meat + Tato sandwich from Emmett’s Café; below, the Wolf’s Ridge Brewing delivery van

Columbus Monthly DECEMBER 2020

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SHORT ORDER Dining

Hidden Kitchen No More Kirin Noodle Bar’s offerings already impress, with more on the way.

photo: jodi miller

photos: top, erin edwards; bottom, courtesy wolf’s ridge brewing

By Bailey Trask

Kirin Noodle Bar can be difficult to find. The restaurant (in the same Clintonville shopping center as Hot Chicken Takeover and Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams) presents itself to High Street passersby as Chatime, a franchise of the Taiwan-based bubble tea chain.

Aside from a monitor showcasing images of Kirin’s dim sum and noodle-based menu and a few paper menus at the register, there are few clues that a full-fledged restaurant kitchen (hidden behind a curtain) coexists with the bubble tea shop. But that is all going to change. As the bubble tea scene in Columbus has expanded exponentially, owner Ryan Lu (who also owns Ramen on High, 2060 N. High St.) plans to retire Chatime and make Kirin a full-service restaurant, complete with a liquor license and an expanded menu. It was a change Lu originally planned for March before the pandemic hit.

Kirin currently offers dine-in, takeout and delivery through Grubhub, Seamless, DoorDash and others. The menu features a blend of Chinese and Japanese comfort foods (crafted by a Japanese chef), and Kirin makes it simple to host an at-home dim sum feast.

On the dumpling side of the menu, the fried pork dumplings ($4.50 for six) should not be missed. Featuring a crisp outer edge, they’re topped with sesame seeds and green onions, and they travel well for carryout. The pork xiaolongbao soup dumplings ($5) may congeal in transit, but the meat inside the handmade purses is delightfully sweet, making them a musthave. If you’re going for a trifecta, the delicate, crystal shrimp dumplings ($5 for four) can round out the order.

Other dim sum offerings include four thin scallion pancakes ($4) that add brightness to the array of otherwise meat- and dough-heavy dishes. And the steamed, sweetly fragrant and fluffy char siu pork buns ($4.50 for two) are filling but worth it.

Sweet-and-sour pork rib noodle soup

The steamed broccoli with braised pork sauce ($5) brings a crisp green to the mix, without abandoning the pork theme. An order will bring balance and a feeling of a healthy accomplishment to the meal.

Two noodle dishes rise to the top of Kirin’s offerings. The dan dan noodles ($10), topped with fried pork and al dente carrots, resemble a Sichuan spaghetti. While the dish usually includes peanuts or peanut butter, this version is nut-free, a nice accommodation for those with allergies.

And the sweet-and-sour pork rib noodle soup ($12) is my favorite offering on the menu. Tender, sweet, fall-off-the-bone

Kirin Noodle Bar 4227 N. High St., Clintonville, 614-867-5356, facebook.com/ kirin.noodle614

pork ribs join a few pieces of bok choy over a pile of fresh noodles. The broth is more sweet than sour and packed with umami. It truly makes the dish. (Of note, the broth is served in a separate container, preventing sogginess and making it simple to divide the contents of the soup at home for sharing.)

While Kirin is already a delight, it’s exciting to think about the restaurant’s potential. When Kirin’s doors reopen after a few weeks of renovation in December, customers will find much more variety, including more noodle dishes, soups, rice bowls and a whole lot more magic happening behind that curtain. ◆ DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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Dining copy & Taste

From left, siblings Dino Carfagna, Julie Riley and Sam Carfagna are pictured outside the longtime Northland location of Carfagna’s Market.

By Erin Edwards

Openings & Announcements North Side institution Carfagna’s Market announced it will relocate next spring to the Polaris area, bringing its market and restaurant locations together under one roof. The family-run Italian market has operated at 1405 E. Dublin-Granville Road in Northland since 1971; that location will be closed once the market moves. The new facility at 1440 Gemini Place (previously Earth Fare market) will be designed with an Italian piazza marketplace in mind—complete with a butcher’s shop, pizzeria, bakery, gelateria, Illy Café, farmers market, bar and an expanded wine department.

By mid-November, four vendors had opened at the new North Market Bridge Park (6750 Longshore St.) in Dublin. Coastal Local Seafood (Page 64), Market Bar, Dos Hermanos and Reuse Revolution were the first vendors to make the new market their home, with more expected to open on a rolling basis through the end of the year.

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Downtown workers have a new sandwich shop option courtesy of chef Stephan Madias (formerly The Crest Gastropub).

Wario’s Beef and Pork is now open at 111 W. Nationwide Blvd., across from Nationwide Arena. The East Coast-style sandwich shop replaces Arena Sandwich Co. Sexton’s Pizza recently added a second Central Ohio location at 943 E. Johnstown Road in Gahanna. The tavern-style pizzeria, owned by brothers Jamey and Joey Sexton, got its start in Reynoldsburg last year.

The Ethiopian restaurant Nile Vegan opened a second location at 1223 Goodale Blvd. in Grandview, replacing Red Hook Grill. Nile Vegan’s first location opened a year ago at 1479 Worthington St. in the South Campus area.

The new vegan deli by Seitan’s Realm (Page 65) held its grand opening in early November. The deli replaces A Common Table at 3496 N. High St. in Clintonville.

Milo’s Catering has taken over the event spaces vacated by Juniper and Dock580 in the historic Smith Bros.’ Hardware building, located at 580 N. Fourth St. The three event spaces will be called Post 4, Brick & Mortar

and — on the rooftop — Revery. Juniper and Dock580 closed for good in June amid the economic fallout from COVID-19.

Mala Hot Pot has opened at 3777 Park Mill Run Drive in Hilliard. Located next to CAM International Market, the new restaurant specializes in Chinese hot pot — a communal dining experience in which customers cook their own soup at the table using a variety of soup bases, meats, veggies and sauces.

Meshikou Ramen’s new sister business, Meshikou Chikin, is now open next door.

Located at 1504 Bethel Road, the new spot serves a simple menu of fried chicken with the choice of several Asian sauces and spice rubs.

Closings After a tumultuous move from Clintonville to Downtown this year, Nancy’s Home Cooking permanently shuttered its new Lynn Alley diner this fall. Owner Rick Hahn has shifted operations to a delivery-only kitchen at the CloudKitchens’ facility on Essex Avenue.

To keep up with the latest restaurant/bar openings and closings, check out The Scoop at ColumbusMonthly.com or go online to subscribe to our food newsletter, Copy & Taste.

photo: Gaelen Morse

The Scoop

Columbus Monthly DECEMBER 2020

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people Dining

Photo: tim johnson

After Hours with Chakeyla Anderson Chakeyla Anderson’s business career has taken her all over the world, including to South America, where the Indiana native developed a deep appreciation for coffee.

About 18 months ago, her job in business risk and liabilities landed her in Columbus.

After getting her family settled, Anderson sought out a business to invest in and stumbled across Bottoms Up Coffee (1069 W. Broad St.), a Franklinton coffee shop that raises money to combat infant mortality and promotes local authors and artists.

“Between the investment opportunity, the work in the community and my love for coffee, those three things culminated here, and I decided to buy it,” says the mother of three.

For now, Anderson says the coffee shop’s menu will remain largely the same as before: Brioso Coffee roasts, espresso drinks like the Canary Island latte, pastries from Happy Little Treats and sandwiches

by Tupelo Doughnuts.

We asked the new Columbus resident to share some of her personal favorites.

—Erin Edwards First food memory: “My grandmother was an amazing cook and baker. My first memory of food was eating my first fried chicken leg with my cousin in a rocking chair at Granny’s house. It was a family tradition to take a picture of each grandchild’s first chicken leg.”

Comfort food: “Comfort food for me is a bowl of mustard greens with hot water cornbread.”

Go-to bar: “I love the limoncello at Vittoria.

It’s difficult to drink just one.”

Favorite new restaurant: “The Royce. I love the Cajun flare and hospitality.”

Hidden gem: “I love fresh fish and recently discovered Frank’s Fish & Seafood on the West Side. The red snapper is life.”

Favorite travel destination for food: “By far Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the

seafood and steak restaurants along Puerto Madero.”

Thing that Columbus needs more of: “I love Georgian food, especially the cheesy breads and dumplings. I think Eastern Europe food would mesh well here.”

FIVE STAR PROFESSIONAL

Who will be named a 2021 award winner?

photo: Gaelen Morse

Find out in a special section of the June issue.

Tell us about your home professional today — they could win the Five Star award!

Go to www.fivestarprofessional.com/homesurvey or call 651-259-1865.

DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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Dining drink

Changing of the Guard Camelot Cellars undergoes a rebrand that mirrors the community it serves.

By Earl Hopkins

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Renard Green, owner of Camelot Cellars

says walking in the rebranded winery was a completely new experience. “It’s very innovative,” he says. “It’s a nice twist on a traditional winery, and it may be what more wineries look like in the future.”

Green, who’s worked as a business consultant for 13 years, took up the ownership role from previous owner Janine Aquino, whom he helped advise while she ran the long-standing winery.

He wanted to create an environment that reflected his interests and truly felt like a Black-owned business, prompt-

ing the official switch to Camelot Cellars Urban Winery.

He also recognized the potential for additional revenue streams. Green stepped in with a new mission in mind: making it four businesses in one. Instead of solely relying on in-store sales, the new owner has focused on distribution, high quality service and making the venue a backdrop for events. The winery now hosts Wine Down Wednesdays, Fish Fridays and live musical performances throughout the week.

“There’s a lot that can be maximized, and

photos: jodi miller

When Renard Green took over as owner of Camelot Cellars in early March, he knew a change was fitting for the 15-year-old wine bar. Nestled in Olde Towne East, Camelot has now become a thriving urban château, a far cry from its previous look and feel.

Before Green acquired the local spot, Camelot was known for its deep-rooted Italian influence, winning 41 medals in national and international wine competitions. Through numerous ownership changes, Camelot largely took up the same décor and style, offering classic Italian dishes to pair with its stockpile of housemade wines and imported wines.

But the new owner wanted to veer away from the stylings of conventional wineries.

Instead, Green swapped out charcuterie boards and chandelier-filled ceilings for vibrant lights, a blaring hip-hop and R&B playlist and a menu filled with Southern comfort favorites such as collard greens, gumbo, po’boys and sweet potato cake.

“People are looking for places that are culturally different and give them a chance to experience that culture,” Green says. “And I think that’s what we’ve tried to do with Camelot that’s very specific to us.”

Wines are still made on premises, favoring a list of fruit-forward and semi-sweet white wines and dry reds. In addition, Camelot offers a make-your-own-wine program that’s ideal for groups. And with the addition of a full-scale liquor bar, featuring tropical cocktails as well as domestic and craft beer options, the winery has become a more well-rounded late-night social space.

Patron Tyler Armstrong, who’s lived in the Olde Towne East area for seven years, Columbus Monthly DECEMBER 2020

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photos: jodi miller

Clockwise from top left, Blacker the Better cocktail; crab po’boy; Camelot Cellars in Olde Towne East

Green says. “We’re still in the middle of a pandemic, let’s be clear. What you’re seeing from my business is only 40 percent of what we could do, so think about how that until I maximize all of it, then I’ll think we changes revenue.” aren’t making any money. We got a bunch of While the winery has received pushback different stuff we can do there,” Green says. from former customers, Marlon Platt and But just weeks after he acquired the other area business owners have embraced long-standing bar from Aquino, the busiCamelot’s new direction. Platt, co-owner ness faced restrictions due to the COVID-19 of Our Bar & Lounge, which sits across Oak outbreak, forcing Green to rely on carryStreet from the urban winery, met with out and wine sales for nearly five months.

Green to help ease his transition into the When they weren’t taking in orders from historic neighborhood. After the two men Postmates, Green and his girlfriend made connected, they held a collaborative brunch deliveries with “two bottles of wine and event as a part of their growing partnersome hope” to keep the business afloat. ship. “I’m all about community support,” Despite the uncertainty surrounding the Platt says. “The fact that their business is pandemic, the winery resumed dine-in on in the same neighborhood as mine, I kind Aug. 29. Green says the reopening speaks of already know the stuff that he’s going to his hustle, a mindset that’s desperately through with trying to grow and develop needed during these times. “In COVID, you the business as a Black business owner.” have to have 35 hustles,” he says.

Platt says Camelot stands out because Outside the effects of the coronavirus, it mirrors the people that frequent the Green says the bigarea’s latest developgest challenge has been ments. The winery joins adjusting expectations.

Our Bar and Lifestyle Camelot Cellars Urban Winery Camelot’s rebrand has Café as the three Black901 Oak St., Olde Towne East, 614-441-8860, camelotcellars.com been met with criticism owned businesses on the from longtime patrons, corner of Oak and South many of whom still favor 18th streets. “It’s a natuthe more traditional setup. Coupled with ral synergy, so it’s truly like a Black-owned state-mandated limitations on occupancy, corner,” Platt says. access to funding and drops in revenue, the To strengthen the support of Blackwinery has yet to reach its true potential, owned businesses in the area, Green

joined the Olde Towne East Neighborhood Association to ensure he can influence some of the potential changes being made, encouraging Platt and others to do the same. “I definitely want to have more of an intentional relationship, because we are a unique place,” Green says. “We need to strategize about how we can be more instrumental in some of the decisions that are happening.” ◆ DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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let’s eat our guide to the best restaurants in columbus

Editor’s Note: While some Central Ohio restaurants have reopened for dine-in service, others remain carryout only.

Our listings include restaurants that are open for dine-in, carryout, delivery or all three. This is not a comprehensive list.

Given the fluid nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, please call restaurants to check hours and menu availability.

Addis Restaurant Ethiopian | 3750 Cleveland Ave., North Side, 614-2698680. The injera here is about as good as it gets with traditional Ethiopian dishes like tibs, kitfo and doro wot. LD $$ Akai Hana Japanese | 1173 Old Henderson Rd., Northwest Side, 614-451-5411. This entertaining Japanese bento shop boasts some of the city’s best sushi and a wide range of Japanese and Korean entrées. LD $$ Alchemy Café Juicery | 625 Parsons Ave., Schumacher Place, 614305-7551. This café is no protein shake shack. It’s simple, healthy food that’s familiar and whole, with recipes created by a registered dietitian. The menu is vegetarian-friendly and includes smoothies, toast, açai bowls, sandwiches, juice, and grab-and-go salads and snacks. BLD $

Arepazo Latin American | 515 S. High St., Brewery District, 614-914-8878; 93 N. High St., Gahanna, 614-471-7296.

Owners Carlos and Carolina Gutierrez serve tapas and entrées in a chic and casual atmosphere with a focus on Venezuelan and Colombian fare. LD $$ Asterisk Supper Club American | 14 N. State St., Westerville, 614-776-4633.

Owner Megan Ada offers teatime and suppertime in a bibliophile’s dream atmosphere. Craft cocktails are served at a handsome bar, while the eclectic menu leans on comfort foods like deviled eggs, meatloaf and chicken pot pie. LD $$

Bexley Pizza Plus Pizza | 2651 E. Main St., Bexley, 614-237-3305. With 22 specialty pizzas and 41 toppings, the options are endless at this Bexley pizzeria. LD $ Borgata Pizza Café Italian | 5701 Parkville St., North Side, 614-891-2345; 2285 W. Dublin-Granville Rd., Northwest Side, 614396-8758. A neighborhood Italian eatery specializing in New York-style pizza, scratch-made pastas, calzones and panini. Try the ricotta cavatelli with marinara or spicy stuffed peppers—tender Cubanelle peppers with marinara and gooey mozzarella cheese. LD $$

Bake Me Happy Café & Bakery | 106 E. Moler St., Merion Village, 614477-3642. This 100-percent gluten-free coffee shop and retail bakery is an extension of Bake Me Happy’s growing wholesale business. The cheerful café offers coffee from local roasters, nostalgic treats and some savory offerings. BL $

Brassica Mediterranean/Middle Eastern | 2212 E. Main St., Bexley, 614-929-9990; 680 N. High St., Short North, 614-867-5885; 1442 W. Lane Ave., Upper Arlington, 614-929-9997. From the owners of Northstar Café comes this build-it-yourself eatery with a focus on fresh vegetables and proteins spiked with bold Middle Eastern and Mediterranean spices. LD $$

Bamboo Thai Kitchen Thai | 774 Bethel Rd., Northwest Side, 614-326-1950.

This bright spot in a drab strip mall offers well-executed Thai staples like som tum (green papaya salad), flavorful green and red curries and pad thai, plus some Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese dishes. LD $$

Buckeye Donuts Bakery | 1998 N. High St., Campus, 614-2913923. A Campus legend since 1969, Buckeye Donuts is open 24 hours to satisfy cravings for classic doughnuts and diner-style cuisine at all hours of the day.

BLD $

Ambrose and Eve Contemporary American | 716 S. High St., Brewery District, 614-725-2080. Catie Randazzo runs this dinner party-inspired restaurant inside a former antique shop.

The menu elevates comfort foods like liver and onions, chicken and dumplings, and fried chicken. D $$$

Bangkok Grocery & Restaurant Thai | 3277 Refugee Rd., East Side, 614-231-8787.

A family-owned grocery and eatery specializing in authentic Thai fare for more than 30 years. Go for some of the city’s best pad thai, tom yum soup, nam tok and Thai curries. LD $

Buckeye Pho Vietnamese | 761 Bethel Rd., Northwest Side, 614-4512828. Venture to this strip mall eatery for high-quality Vietnamese fare with modern décor. LD $

Ampersand Asian Supper Club Asian | 940 N. High St., Short North, 614-928-3333.

Megan Ada’s Ampersand serves ramen, donburi rice bowls and more in new Short North digs. This sister restaurant to Westerville’s Asterisk Supper Club also offers craft cocktails and a variety of sakes. LD $$

Barcelona Restaurant & Bar Spanish | 263 E. Whittier St., German Village, 614-4433699. Longstanding Barcelona is a classic for approachable Spanish tapas and other palate-expanding fare with an American influence. The patio is one of the most charming in the city. BRLD $$$

Cap City Fine Diner & Bar American | 6644 Riverside Dr., Dublin, 614-8897865; 1301 Stoneridge Dr., Gahanna, 614-478-9999; 1299 Olentangy River Rd., Fifth by Northwest, 614291-3663. Cameron Mitchell’s popular, stylish diner serves retro fare with an upscale twist. Think American cuisine, like meatloaf, chili dogs, pork chops and homemade pies and desserts. BRLD $$

Amul India Restaurant Indian | 5871 Sawmill Rd., Dublin, 614-734-1600. One of Central Ohio’s most elegantly decorated Indian restaurants serves a full menu of Northern Indian dishes from tikka masala to chicken sabaji, a favorite among Indian patrons. LD $$

Belle’s Bread Bakery | 1168 Kenny Centre Mall, Upper Arlington, 614-451-7110. Tucked away in the same complex as Akai Hana, this French-inspired Japanese bakery is known for its outstanding pastries, cakes and treats.

BL $

Chapman’s Eat Market Contemporary American | 739 S. Third St., German Village, 614-444-0917. Chef BJ Lieberman’s debut on the local dining scene fills the original home of Max & Erma’s in German Village. The newly renovated space is fun and sophisticated, sporting a palette

Alqueria Farmhouse Kitchen Contemporary American | 247 King Ave., Campus, 614-824-5579. This rustic yet refined neighborhood restaurant is the work of two veteran chefs. Expect fine cheeses and charcuterie to start, plus entrées like buttermilk fried chicken and walleye with heirloom grits. The bar offers several cocktails and takes care in selecting its craft beers and wines. LD $$$

Let’s Eat comprises Columbus Monthly editors’ picks and is updated monthly based on available space. If you notice an error, please email eedwards@columbusmonthly.com.

$$$$ Average entrée $26 and higher $$$ Average entrée $16–$25 $$ Average entrée $11–$15 $ Average entrée under $10

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- Valet Available - Kitchen Open Late Outdoor Patio Seating

B Breakfast BR Brunch L Lunch D Dinner

Critics’ Choice Columbus Classic

NEW! Restaurant has opened within the last few months.

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of rose pink, green and bold wallpapers. Diners can expect a chef-driven menu with options like lamb shank barbacoa, karaage chicken sando, fresh pasta and homemade ice cream. D $$$ NEW! Coastal Local Seafood Seafood | 6750 Longshore St., Dublin, 614-6838782; 59 Spruce St., Short North, 614-929-5701. In addition to fresh seafood for cooking at home, this North Market fishmonger offers lobster rolls, chowder, lobster poutine and more. LD $$ The Crafty Pint Gastropub | 2234 W. Dublin-Granville Rd., Northwest Side, 614-468-1675. The Crafty Pint is a gastropub offering rustic American food, craft beers (with a heavy emphasis on local brews), creative cocktails and a large outdoor patio. It’s all wrapped in a playful setting where beer samplers are built from old license plates and checks are delivered inside Dr. Seuss books. LD $$ Cravings Café Soup & Sandwiches | 114 N. Front St., Downtown, 614670–4439. This café from Matt and Lindsey Tewanger offers sandwiches made with locally sourced ingredients, house-baked brioche and roasted meats. Also featuring small-batch coffee and breakfast pastries. BL $ Dosa Corner Indian | 1077 Old Henderson Rd., Upper Arlington, 614-459-5515. A family-owned, Southern Indian “fast food” spot that specializes in thin, pancake-like dosas made with rice and lentil flour batter with a choice of vegetarian fillings. LD $ Due Amici Italian | 67 E. Gay St., Downtown, 614-224-9373.

Exposed brick walls and modern black and white furniture give this Downtown Italian eatery an upscale feel. BRLD $$ The Eagle Southern | 790 N. High St., Short North, 614-745-3397.

This Southern-style restaurant from the Cincinnatibased owners of Bakersfield features Amish fried chicken, spoonbread, craft beers and a large patio along High Street. LD $ Flip Side Burgers | 3945 Easton Station, Easton, 614-472-3547.

This burger and shake joint with a heavy emphasis on local ingredients (burgers are made with Ohio-raised, grass-fed beef) serves great cocktails and boozy milkshakes, plus craft beers. LD $ Forno Kitchen + Bar Italian | 721 N. High St., Short North, 614-469-0053.

Located in a historic building in the Short North, this restaurant features pizza, sandwiches and shareable appetizers, plus house-made cocktails. BRLD $$ Fox in the Snow Café Coffee & Desserts | 210 Thurman Ave., German Village; 1031 N. Fourth St., Italian Village; 160 W. Main St., New Albany. A bakery and coffee shop offering pastries made in-house daily and coffee from Tandem Coffee Roasters. BL $ Fukuryu Ramen Japanese | 4540 Bridge Park Ave., Dublin, 614-553-7392; 1600 W. Lane Ave., Upper Arlington, 614-929-5910. Jeff Tsao, whose family owned the Kahiki Supper Club, brings his Melbourne, Australia, ramen shop stateside.

It’s quick, modern, bustling and adds a little rock ’n’ roll to traditional Japanese fare. The Signature Tonkotsu and Red Dragon ramens are standouts. LD $$ G. Michael’s Bistro & Bar Low Country | 595 S. Third St., German Village, 614-464-0575. This historic German Village eatery promises fine dining with a low country influence.

Expect bold flavors in dishes layered with components and exceptional sauces. Preparations and ingredients change with the seasons. D $$$ Gallo’s Tap Room Pub Grub | 5019 Olentangy River Rd., Northwest Side, 614-457-2394; 240 N. Liberty St., Powell, 614-396-7309.

A dark, modern sports bar brimming with top-notch beers and an updated pub grub menu featuring burgers, wings and pizza. LD $ Geordie’s Restaurant Irish & British Pubs | 1586 S. High St., Merion Village, 614-674-6004. Chef-owner Glen Hall-Jones brings the flavors of his native northeast England to Columbus. At dinner, pair a pint with Cornish pasties or the fish and chips. Weekends bring brunch, featuring a full English breakfast, and Newcastle United on the TV. BRD $$ Giuseppe’s Ritrovo Italian | 2268 E. Main St., Bexley, 614-235-4300.This unfussy Bexley restaurant is the place to go for classic Italian pasta dishes, such as Gamberi Diavola and Fettucine Calabrese. Italy plays just as big a role behind the bar with a lengthy wine list, a solid amaro selection and outstanding craft cocktails. LD $$ The Good Kitchen 614 American | 1485 Sunbury Rd., Northeast Columbus, 614-258-4663. A carryout-only spot serving affordable soul food classics like smothered pork chops, fried fish (whiting, perch or tilapia), collard greens and more. LD $ Goodale Station Contemporary American | 77 E. Nationwide Blvd., Downtown, 614-227-9400. Topping Downtown’s new Canopy by Hilton hotel is this bar and restaurant led by executive chef Tripp Mauldin. Boasting a handsome rooftop patio, the restaurant’s soaring city views are complemented by a large bar, high-end cocktails and dishes that hint at the chef’s Southern roots. D $$$ GoreMade Pizza Pizza | 936 N. Fourth St., Italian Village, 614-725-2115.

It’s all about the pizza here at Nick Gore’s modest spot. Thin-crust pies are wood-fired in an oven imported from Italy, and seasonal toppings are locally sourced. Enjoy solid cocktails and salads while you wait. D $$$ Harvest Bar + Kitchen American | 940 S. Front St., Brewery District, 614-9477950; 2885 N. High St., Clintonville, 614-947-7133.

From the owners of Harvest Pizzeria, these locations offer the same wood-kissed pies plus salads, sandwiches, burgers and more. LD $$ Harvest Pizzeria Pizza | 2376 E. Main St., Bexley, 614-824-4081; 45 N. High St., Dublin, 614-726-9919. Some of the best woodfired pies in Central Ohio are served at this pizzeria owned by Grow Restaurants. LD $$ Hong Kong House Chinese | 1831 Henderson Rd., Upper Arlington, 614-

538-9288. Don’t let the name fool you. Hong Kong House actually serves some of the most authentic Sichuan fare in town. The roomy restaurant now offers $$ dim sum. LD Hoof Hearted Brewery and Kitchen Brewpub | 850 N. Fourth St., Italian Village, 614-4014033. This collaboration between A&R Creative (The Crest, Market Italian Village) and popular Marengo-based brewery Hoof Hearted represents all the good things happening in Columbus right now: lots of craft beer and locally sourced food in a cool, modern space. BRLD $$ Hot Chicken Takeover Southern | 4203 N. High St., Clintonville, 614-754-1151; 4198 Worth Ave., Easton, 614-532-7435; 59 Spruce St., Short North, 614-800-4538. Head fryer/owner Joe DeLoss jumped on the Nashville hot chicken trend and hasn’t looked back. HCT does an excellent impression of Prince’s, the Nashville original—the fried chicken is juicy, super spicy (unless you ask them to hold the heat) and sits on a bed of white bread. LD $$ Huong Vietnamese Restaurant Vietnamese | 1270 Morse Rd., North Side, 614-8250303. Housed in a Northland-area strip mall, this bright and simply decorated restaurant turns out great Vietnamese fare with pho, Bun Nem Nuong and Asian-style barbecue pork. LD $ Indian Oven Indian | 427 E. Main St., Downtown, 614-220-9390.

Friendly and chic eatery serving Northern Indian and Bengali meals. The menu includes palak paneer, tandoori chicken, biryani and roasted lamb shank. LD $$ Jiu Thai Asian Café Chinese | 787 Bethel Rd., Northwest Side, 614-7325939. Located in the Olentangy Plaza shopping center, this restaurant specializes in flavorful, authentic cuisine from northern China. Go for the tofu skewers, lamb dumplings and handmade noodles in generous portions at low prices. LD $ Jonys Sushi Japanese | 195 Thurman Ave., German Village, 614-7064979. The owners of South Village Grille opened this takeout sushi shop right next door. The colorful shop offers appetizers, nigiri, sashimi, classic sushi rolls and a variety of interesting specialty rolls. LD $$$ Kabob Shack Afghan | 4568 Cemetery Rd., Hilliard, 614-742-7054.

Owner Sakeena Bary’s casual eatery offers a cuisine rarely found in Central Ohio. Kabob Shack’s menu includes mantu (Afghan dumplings), lamb chops, kofta kebab, daal, samosas, falooda (an Afghan dessert) and more. LD $$ Katalina’s Soup & Sandwiches | 3481 N. High St., Clintonville, 614-689-8896; 1105 Pennsylvania Ave., Harrison West, 614-294-2233. Expect an eclectic menu of Latinleaning items at this café known for its chalkboard walls, scratch-made salads and sandwiches and killer patio in the warmer months. BLD $ Kirin Noodle Bar Asian | 4227 N. High St., Clintonville, 614-867-5356.

A solid spot for dim sum and authentic noodle dishes crafted with care. Don’t miss the xiaolongbao, dan dan noodles and sweet-and-sour-pork rib noodle soup. LD $ DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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La Chatelaine French Bakery & Bistro French/Bakery | 65 W. Bridge St., Dublin, 614-763-7151; 1550 W. Lane Ave., Upper Arlington, 614-488-1911; 627 High St., Worthington, 614-848-6711. Handcrafted woodwork and a crackling fireplace lend the feeling of a French castle to this bakery, bistro and wine bar with equally inspired dishes that range from beef bourguignon to croissants. BLD $$ La Super Torta Mexican | 721 Georgesville Rd., West Side, 614-9289079. A strip-mall find that specializes in outstanding (and sizable) tortas. The no-frills eatery also serves tacos, gorditas and other authentic Mexican eats.

BLD $ La Tavola Italian | 1664 W. First Ave., Grandview, 614-914-5455.

Chef Rick Lopez owns this popular Old World Italian restaurant in Grandview. Dotted with green and yellow accents, the setting is open and welcoming. The food is simple and rustic Italian with pizzas, housemade breads and pastas. D $$$ Lalibela Ethiopian | 1111 S. Hamilton Rd., Whitehall, 614-2355355. One of the best places for Ethiopian food in the city is Lalibela, a strip-mall restaurant that’s modest on the outside and welcoming on the inside. Request to be seated at a mesob, a colorful woven communal table, and start off with some Ethiopian beer or honey wine. LD $ Lávash Café Middle Eastern | 2985 N. High St., Clintonville, 614263-7777. This quick-service Middle Eastern eatery serves a mix of Mediterranean food, coffee and desserts. LD $$ Los Guachos Taqueria Mexican | 7370 Sawmill Rd., Dublin, 614-726-9185; 1376 Cherry Bottom Rd., Gahanna, 614-471-4717; 5221 Godown Rd., Northwest Side, 614-538-0211. The brick-and-mortar version of the popular taco truck (461 Commerce Sq., West Side) offers all the truck favorites—authentic tacos, tortas and gringas—and, of course, the city’s best al pastor. LD $ The Lox Bagel Shop Café & Bakery | 772 N. High St., Short North, 614824-4005. Kevin Crowley’s cute Short North shop offers handmade bagels that are boiled and then baked over a live fire. The shop’s namesake sandwich and pastrami sandwich are standouts. BL $ Meshikou Ramen Japanese | 1506 Bethel Rd., Northwest Side, 614457-1689. Meshikou is an open-kitchen ramen shop focusing on authentic preparations of noodle bowls, as well as a few Japanese comfort-food starters. Coowner Mike Shek learned the ramen craft under a NYC chef—recipes to which Shek has added his own touch for Central Ohio palates. LD $$ Mi Li Café Vietnamese | 5858 Emporium Sq., North Side, 614899-9202. The tucked-away North Side eatery is famous for its authentic, made-from-scratch banh mi, the first and one of the only remaining items from the original menu. It’s since expanded, offering a heartier list of Vietnamese classics. LD $ Min Ga Korean Restaurant Korean | 800 Bethel Rd., Northwest Side, 614-4577331. This friendly strip-mall spot serves Korean

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specialities like kimchi, bibimbap, bulgogi and gopchang. LD $$ Mitchell’s Ocean Club Seafood | 4002 Easton Station, Easton, 614-416-2582.

With wood-paneled décor, live piano music and martinis shaken tableside, the Ocean Club evokes the Rat Pack era. On the menu, expect high-end seafood like yellowfin tuna, teriyaki salmon and jumbo lump crab cakes. D $$$$ Momo Ghar Nepalese/Tibetan | 1265 Morse Rd., North Side, 614749-2901; 59 Spruce St., Short North, 614-495-6666.

Phuntso Lama’s modest lunch counters inside North Market and Saraga International Grocery specialize in momos, the handmade dumplings that she and her crew make by the hundreds, weekly. No trip is complete without the best-seller, jhol momo. LD $ Natalie’s Music Hall & Kitchen Contemporary American | 945 King Ave., Grandview, 614-436-2625. This exciting addition to Grandview is the sister restaurant/music venue to Natalie’s in Worthington. The dining room offers pizzas and a chef-driven menu complemented by excellent cocktails. Live music events are scheduled through the fall on Natalie’s outdoor pavilion. D $$$ NE Chinese Restaurant Chinese | 2620 N. High St., Old North, 614-725-0880.

Authentic dishes from the Dongbei region of China are the specialty at this unfussy Old North spot. Go for the Cumin Potato, Spicy Twice-Cooked Fish or any of the hot pots. LD $$ Paulie Gee’s Short North Pizza | 1195 N. High St., Short North, 614-808-0112.

A Brooklyn-based pizzeria with Neapolitan-style pies and craft beer. Offers traditional and eclectic pizza toppings with names like the Hog Pit Brisket, the Greenpointer and the Ricotta Be Kiddin’ Me. D $$$ Pistacia Vera Café & Bakery | 541 S. Third St., German Village, 614-220-9070. The crème de la crème of Columbus dessert shops, with macarons, Pistachio Mascarpone Dacquoise torte and Chocolate Bombe. BL $ Plank’s Café & Pizzeria Pizza | 743 Parsons Ave., South Side, 614-4457221. Plank’s bakes some of the finest pies in the city with a notoriously sweet sauce and thin crust. BLD $ Poong Mei Asian Bistro Asian | 4720 Reed Rd., Upper Arlington, 614-273-9998.

This popular spot boasts a sprawling menu showcasing Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Korean-Chinese dishes, plus plenty of sushi and soju to choose from.

Check out the fresh noodle dishes and spicy beef hot pot. LD $$ Portia’s Café Vegan | 4428 Indianola Ave., Clintonville, 614-9283252. This Clintonville café serves only vegan and gluten-free options with an emphasis on raw foods.

The menu includes dips like hummus and guacamole, falafel, soups, salads, wraps, smoothies and veganfriendly Cheezecake. BRLD $ Ranchero Kitchen Latin American | 984 Morse Rd., North Side, 614985-0083. Previously located in Saraga International Grocery, this Salvadoran eatery specializes in pupusas, thick tortillas stuffed with savory fillings. LD $

Ray Ray’s Hog Pit Barbecue | 424 W. Town St., Franklinton, 614-4049742; 2619 High St., Old North, 614-753-1191; 41 Depot St., Powell, 614-441-1065; 5755 Maxtown Rd., Westerville, 614-329-6654. James Anderson’s barbecue truck, parked in the Ace of Cups lot, serves up top-notch eats from the smoker. Anderson is now up to four locations. Expect barbecue fare, with ribs, pulled pork and beef brisket sandwiches, plus sides.

LD $ Rooh Indian | 685 N. High St., Short North, 614-972-8678. A San Francisco import serving high-end, “progressive Indian” fare. Go for the inventive cocktails, buzzy atmosphere and conversation-stoking small plates.

D $$$ The Rossi Kitchen & Bar American | 895 N. High St., Short North, 614-5250624. A popular Short North hot spot, diners flock here for inventive bar food (think gourmet pizza, lamb lollipops and grilled Caesar salad) in a new-meets-old atmosphere straight out of Manhattan. D $$ Sassafras Bakery Café & Bakery | 657 High St., Worthington, 614-781-9705.

Owner A.J. Perry got her start at the Olde Worthington Summer Farmers Market and now serves home-cooked desserts (grab a slice of apple pie), pastries, quiche and soup using locally sourced ingredients in her Worthington shop. BBRLD $ Tiger + Lily Bistro Asian | 19 E. Gay St., Downtown, 614-928-9989. This inviting Downtown eatery features modern takes on Pan-Asian cuisine, such as lemongrass chicken or teriyaki tofu in a rice or salad bowl, chicken brothbased ramen, bubble milk teas and seasonal crêpe cakes. BRLD $ Veritas Contemporary American | 11 W. Gay St., Downtown, 614-745-3864. Chef Josh Dalton’s modern, tasting-menu-style restaurant celebrates the art and science of cooking while offering one of the finest dining experiences in town. Located in the Citizens Building at Gay and High streets, Veritas prides itself on excellent service and exhilarating cocktail and wine lists. D $$$$ The Whitney House American | 666 High St., Worthington, 614-396-7846.

Casual enough for the whole family yet upscale enough for date night, the sleek Whitney House takes familiar American classics up a notch. The Daily Plates specials rise above the standard fare, and a solid cocktail and wine list make this Olde Worthington spot a good stop any night of the week.

BRLD $$$ Wolf’s Ridge Brewing Contemporary American | 215 N. Fourth St., Downtown, 614-429-3936. French- and Californiacuisine-inspired Wolf’s Ridge is a truly delightful reflection of how we enjoy fine dining today—a happy marriage of high-end small plates, pints of housecrafted beer and craft cocktails. BRLD $$$ Woodhouse Vegan Café American | 851 N. Fourth St., Italian Village, 614-3902410. The Woodhouse family offers plant-based comfort food at this cute brick house in Italian Village.

Highlights include the Caesar salad, loaded nachos and West African peanut stew. D $$

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The Upper Arlington native and self-styled bad girl never achieved the Hollywood superstardom she probably deserved.

But she made the most of every role, including the one she played in real life: a woman defined by love.

BY PETER TONGUETTE

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PHOTO: MANFRED BAUMANN

BEVERLY D’ANGELO HAS NO REGRETS COLUMBUS MONTHLY DECEMBER 2020

DECEMBER 2020 COLUMBUS MONTHLY

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ove affairs kept finding her. In 1986, she embarked on a romance with Irish director Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game”), who, two years later, cast her in the comedy “High Spirits.” Then he wrote a movie for her, 1991’s “The Miracle,” in which she finally had the sort of meaty, juicy, showy, tailored-to-her part her supporters felt was long overdue. She played a woman who travels to an Irish town and bewitches a young local lad … to whom she happens to be related. A Harvey Weinsteinled Miramax bought the film, but according to Peter Biskind’s book “Down and Dirty Pictures,” Jordan thought that Weinstein “dumped” it during release. Besides, D’Angelo feels that her performance was off because her romance with Jordan had ended before shooting began.

In 1990, she met British production designer Anton Furst, famous for designing the blasted Vietnamese city Hue in Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” and gothic Gotham City in Tim Burton’s “Batman.” “I fell in love with Anton,” she says, but then he called the relationship off. When D’Angelo was in Texas making a TV miniseries about a black widow serial killer, Furst contacted her again, but the call went badly. The following week, D’Angelo’s best friend, Carrie Fisher, rang to say that Furst had thrown himself off a building and died. She was still shooting the miniseries. “I had to do that with cue cards,” she says.

Fisher and D’Angelo bonded over their sometimes-fraught personal lives, says Todd Fisher, Carrie’s brother and also D’Angelo’s friend. “Carrie at times would be off balance from something, and Beverly would be in balance at that moment,” Fisher says. “Other times, the other way around. They had a really beautiful sort of way of helping each other always.” Together, his sister and D’Angelo, he says, were “almost like too much flammable material in one space.”

“I thought that I loved all of these people,” D’Angelo says of her relationships with men. “I did not know what love was until I had kids.” That came in 2001, when, with

her then-partner Al Pacino, she had twins Anton and Olivia, soon to turn 20. She is no longer with Pacino. “I observed her many times handling Al,” says Todd Fisher. “He was way out of his league—I mean, literally, she was just too much to handle.” But D’Angelo has called Pacino a close friend and described the four of them as a family unit. She thinks of herself and her son as the more cerebral of the bunch, while Pacino and their daughter “kind of navigate through an emotional force field.”

Sometime in the late 1990s, the industry started to wise up to D’Angelo’s combustible abilities. She began getting better parts—as the mother of a neo-Nazi in the 1998 drama “American History X” or as the super-agent in the HBO series Entourage. “She’s still got that same kind of wide-eyed innocence from where I first saw her, which was ‘Vacation’ when I was a kid, but she’s also got that tough side that really worked,” says Entourage creator Doug Ellin.

D’Angelo is sanguine about her place in Hollywood. She is familiar with that famous Pauline Kael quote but doesn’t sound sorry about declining to play a game she never signed up for. “Now it’s like, if you’re an actress, you have a perfume line, you have a clothing line,” she says. “If you don’t do that, and you don’t have social media and you don’t do all of that business-oriented part of show business, you’re not responsible.” But D’Angelo wanted to be footloose and fancy-free.

She’s not the retiring type, though. Unlike her peer Debra Winger, who became elusive and mythologized when plum parts dried up, D’Angelo has kept working, even in projects she knows are, at best, so-so. Not everything can be “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

“My real skill was figuring out how to take a bad script and a nothing role and turn it into something that was meaningful to me,” she says.

Besides, her creativity doesn’t necessarily depend on others. She has written an unpublished novel called “Once Upon a Nanny.” “That was about a woman who gives birth to twins at 49, and at 52, she’s a single mother traversing a crazy landscape,” she says. Publishers, alert to autobiographical resonances, offered to bring it out if she wrote it in the first-person.

“Nope—see you later,” came the answer.

Now ready for something like a memoir, she hopes that the world will be sufficiently back to normal by 2022 to mount her onewoman show, which she describes as an “embodied memoir” with archival videos and live music. She says she might try it out first in Columbus.

D

uring our first call, D’Angelo tells me she sees the lockdown as a chance to simplify her life. “The first thing I did was get a spaghetti machine,” she says. “You make the dough and you put it through and make the strands. It was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re locked down? Well, better get back to basics.’ What are my basics?

It’s homemade—homemade.”

It turns out “homemade” pretty much describes her, too. “You know what they say: You can either go all around the world to learn everything, or you can stay in one place and you’ll learn everything,” she says.

“I’ve kind of done a combo. … The foundation of the community that I was a part of is really the only reason that I have happiness in my life.”

Not that being the free spirit of the family has been easy. D’Angelo’s mother recognized early on that her daughter was going to do as she pleased. “She made her own way literally, living in Canada with occasional visits with us,” Priscilla said in The Dispatch in 1976, reflecting on her daughter’s Broadway debut in “Rockabye Hamlet.” “She has, admirably, tended to the specifics of her career, working with her friends and associates of like mind and inclination.”

The patrician Priscilla’s high-minded turn of phrase (“friends and associates of like mind and inclination”) contrasts sharply with her daughter’s uninhibited style. Yet, rounding the bend toward 70, D’Angelo speaks with honest appreciation of her mother’s life and choices, as well as the buttoned-up town that made her. “I come from a place where honesty matters,” she says. “If you’re a bad person, you don’t get business.” She attends high school reunions, noting that most of her class married each other.

“I ran away from there, and even badmouthed it—it was like part of my rap,” she says. “But that foundation that I got there was responsible for any rock-solidness that I have.”

After our marathon two hours on the phone, we exchange some more emails and then, in September, we do another half-hour. Like so many others in the movie business, she sounds antsy to get to work. She’s about to act in two new projects. I cram in some random questions, but soon our time is up. She is, as ever, on the move.

She repeats what I now know is her mantra: “My life has been a series of relationships guided by love. Everything I’ve done is because I’ve loved someone. I gotta go.”

And we hang up—and D’Angelo is on to yet another new chapter. ◆ DECEMBER 2020 Columbus Monthly

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CeaseFire Columbus leaders Deanna Wilkinson, Frederick LaMarr, Cecil Ahad and Dartangnan Hill outside Family Missionary Baptist Church

WHEN THE KILLINGS STOPPED

By Theodore Decker

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FOR THIS MARCH, they will head west, to the spot where a bullet ended the life of Jaleel Carter-Tate five days earlier.

It is Sunday, Oct. 4, and about 25 people have gathered at the Family Missionary Baptist Church on Oakwood Avenue, the starting point for this monthly plea for peace. A gusty storm front races toward Columbus from western Ohio, but no one talks of canceling the event, the 132nd march against gun violence held by a grassroots collective known as Ministries 4 Movement. Today marks 11 years of marching, through 44 seasons, and a discouraging weather forecast isn’t about to end the streak.

Carter-Tate was 25 years old when he died on the South Side on Sept. 29, in the 800 block of East Whittier Avenue. Columbus police were called before 10 p.m. and found him bleeding from a gunshot wound. He died on the scene, becoming the 116th victim of homicide in what is shaping up to be the bloodiest year on record in Ohio’s capital city.

The marchers stop at the spot where Carter-Tate fell. A nearby street sign has become a roadside memorial. Mylar balloons are tied in a tangle to the post, and crowded below is a cluster of stuffed animals. At first blush, they seem like an odd tribute to a man in his 20s, seated as they are among an assortment of liquor bottles. But teddy bears are common at memorials marking deaths that are as untimely as they are violent. They are futile bids to turn back the clock.

A few speakers step forward. One man says a dispute over a sports bet may have caused Carter-Tate’s death. If true, it is in keeping with the trend that most of these killings are not the result of the drug trade, as many would have you believe. They inevitably arise from what criminologists call “interpersonal disputes,” a catchall term for an array of petty beefs and more serious grievances that in some instances fester for years before exploding on the streets. A bumped arm in a packed nightclub leads to a spilled drink, then to words, and finally gunfire. Trash talk on social media inflames tensions between rival teens. A young boy sees his older brother killed and waits until he is grown, sometimes for years, to impose street justice on a shooter who avoided arrest.

But what happens if an outsider steps into these volatile situations, someone from the neighborhood with street cred, good intentions and impeccable timing?

Vulnerable young people might regain control of their emotions, stopping themselves from acting on violent impulses. The people involved in this march can attest to the power of these interventions because, well, they’ve done them. Nearly a decade ago, they launched a short-lived pilot program called CeaseFire Columbus that coincided with a dramatic drop in violence in a 40-block section of the South Side.

This group was within striking distance of a strategy that, if it had been embraced by

Am I right or wrong?

You’re right!

Is my faith still strong?

Still strong!

PHOTO: TIM JOHNSON

What a short-lived experiment on the South Side of Columbus can teach a city struggling with gun violence

COLUMBUS MONTHLY DECEMBER 2020

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According to Recreation and Parks Department annual reports, APPS defused about 400 potentially violent incidents throughout the city between 2016 and 2018.

Ginther, then a City Councilmember and chairman of the Safety Committee, did not support the CeaseFire proposal at the time because he thought APPS was a better fit.

“Through APPS, the city was able to offer social programming and violence intervention in cooperation with nonprofits,” Robin Davis, Ginther’s director of media relations, says in a prepared statement. “The only piece we didn’t have at that time was the ‘call in,’ where a select group of violent offenders who are likely to continue down that path would be offered social services and workforce development to change their likely trajectory. We have since added this through our Safe Neighborhood initiative.”

Still, the local CeaseFire group persisted, seeking private donors and federal grants to get off the ground. Without the endorsement of city leaders, they never got enough of either to establish their full vision. They carried on anyway—and got results. Between 2011 and 2014, in their core 40-block area in the 43206 ZIP code, shootings dropped by 76 percent. All of 2011 and 2012 passed without a gun-related homicide within those boundaries. In the preceding two years, four gun homicides occurred in the neighborhood, with three more recorded just outside it.

This new run of peace was remarkable, considering the neighborhood’s previously violent history. Between 2007 and 2009, incidents of gun violence in the quietest city police precinct occurred at a rate of 13.5 per 10,000 people, Wilkinson found. In the precinct that included CeaseFire’s core neighborhood, gun violence incidents during the same time period were reported at a rate of 200.5 per 10,000 people.

The front arrives, and the rain starts, big heavy drops that fast become a downpour. Pastor LaMarr ducks under the umbrella of a fellow marcher. Those without cover will be soaked from head to toe by the time they return to the church, but they take the rain in stride and resume the 76

call-and-response chants led by Minister Aaron Hopkins.

Before the march, Wilkinson set up several outdoor tables filled with produce grown by gardening program participants. The tables are heaped with bags of jalapeños, tomatoes, squash and honeydew melon. She urges marchers to take what they want; any donations go to the family of the boy she’d mentioned during the march. But in the deluge, most run straight for their cars, and Wilkinson is left to load much of the produce into her Nissan Leaf hatchback. At the same time, Fournier Alsaada’s car battery is dead, stranding her in the church lot. Wilkinson hops into Fournier Asaada’s car and the pair catch up while Ahad runs home for jumper cables.

All seem unfazed by an afternoon gone slightly awry. When you are out to save lives, particularly young ones, the setbacks can be heartbreaking. With stakes that high, a dead car battery and a cold, driving rain barely register as inconveniences.

Violence intervention takes 24/7 dedication, fearlessness and honesty. If Ahad tells a young man to call him before doing anything rash, he has to answer when that call comes in at 2 a.m. If LaMarr promises to be there for a young man’s court appearance, he had better show up or he will lose that young man’s trust. “People can be at their breaking point at any moment,” LaMarr says.

Derrick Russell, onetime leader of the Short North Posse, spent 13 years in prison for his role in the notoriously violent gang. When he was locked up, he says he wrote to about 50 pastors looking for guidance. Just one wrote back. “That was Pastor LaMarr,” he says.

Russell now works with Ministries 4 Movement and on his own initiatives to mentor city youth. “People see our sincerity,” LaMarr says.

“The main thing is that we continue to do it.

We continue to support people not just when they’re ‘right’ to help them get better, but when they’re ‘wrong’ to help them get right.”

“You gotta go deep,” Ahad says. “You can’t just go out on the corner and hold a cookout.”

Many well-meaning intervention efforts “don’t go deep enough,” he says. “They don’t know them guys, the real shooters.”

Ahad has theories why the city ignored the fledgling Columbus CeaseFire, which ended in 2014 when its cobbled-together funding dried up. He knows that the involvement of Hill, the former gang leader, made some public safety officials uneasy and others

angry. He, LaMarr and Hill also painstakingly documented and reported to city officials the corruption of a particularly notorious member of the police gang unit who is no longer with the division. Asked specifically about Ahad’s suspicions, Davis says Ginther was unaware of either issue at the time and that neither factored in his decisions.

Whatever the reasons, Ahad says, “The city people shied away from us. It was like we were hands-off.”

Wilkinson hopes city leaders embrace Kennedy’s approach, where law enforcement plays an active and more traditional role than in the Chicago model that she and the others championed. “There is still very strong control over the message of public safety in the city,” she says. “The Kennedy model is more palatable to a place like Columbus.”

And it can work if properly implemented and funded. But fickle political winds, changes in police administrations and dwindling financial support have eroded progress in cities that have seen gains using both Kennedy’s and Slutkin’s models.

Dr. Jonathan Groner, medical director of the Center for Pediatric Trauma Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, is optimistic that the city will shift from a piecemeal approach to a more comprehensive plan. “I do worry about funding,” he says.

“There’s no Pelotonia for firearm injuries, [and] the community that is most affected is the least empowered.”

They begin the 133rd march by heading east. It is early November, the Sunday before Election Day. There are twice as many marchers today as in the previous month, and they are led by a teen drum corps instead of Hopkins’ call-and-response. The marchers walk in pairs along the sidewalks and eventually turn south to Whittier. Since the October march and prayer at CarterTate’s street memorial, the homicide count in Columbus has risen to 140, and the young man’s murder remains unsolved.

“It’s so big, it gets to be disheartening,” Ahad acknowledges. “There’s just so much to this.” But he pushes aside those darker thoughts whenever they intrude.

Today it is too cold for rain; the first snowflakes of the fall fly around the marchers.

Back at the church, they keep things short, though not because of the weather. Many are headed to the Franklin County Board of Elections before it closes at 5 p.m. They know what it takes to bring change. They know it can come slowly, maddeningly so. But with the right mindset and constant pressure, they believe it is inevitable, as certain to arrive as the turn of seasons. ◆

Columbus Monthly DECEMBER 2020

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City Quotient

Morning Glory

Steaks, organ music and power breakfasts at the Clarmont

BY JEFF DARBEE

I recall a restaurant called the Clarmont that was pretty popular but closed a while ago. I think it was on High Street. What can you tell me about it? The Clarmont (no “E”) opened in 1948 and was the haunt of political and business dealmakers as well as just regular folks. It was at 684 S. High St., where a Panera is today, and was owned by Frank Kondos and Ray Milner, owners of the Tremont a few doors north. They wanted a larger “white tablecloth” restaurant close to Downtown, where their customer base worked, but easy to reach by car (it boasted a secure “lighted parking lot”).

It didn’t take long for the Clarmont to become the city’s “legendary power breakfast spot,” where local movers and shakers could be seen (as well as keep an eye on their peers). Dinnertime offered “prime steaks broiled to order” and pan-fried chicken.

The place was known for the fact that servers memorized diners’ orders instead of writing them down. It was also known for 80

the generous offerings of its large cigar case. And not to be missed was “Vivian at the Organ”—Vivian Boeshaar, who began at the Tremont in 1945 and played for many more decades at the Clarmont.

But things change. Barry Zacks, founder of Max & Erma’s, bought the Clarmont in 1972, and it was sold several more times before succumbing in 2012 to high costs and changes in the business. Then came Panera. The restaurant chain easily could have cleared the site but instead chose to remodel the building. Best of all, its “postwar modernist” sign stayed, too. Instead of “Seafood and Steak,” the sign now declares “Bakery and Café.” And even though the organ music is gone, a bit of old Columbus lives on.

For quite a while now, I have seen crews from New River Electrical working on Downtown streets. What is this company and what is it doing Downtown? The New River Electrical Corp. was started in 1953 by Sherrill W.

Stockton, a chief electrician in the U.S. Navy.

It’s headquartered in Virginia (its name derived from a major river there) but has an office in Westerville. The company provides contract services to electric utilities, completing its very first project, a small electric substation, for Ohio Power Co., part of American Electric Power today. New River is owned by its 1,100-plus employees and does business in 38 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

So what has New River been doing down there under our streets? Long ago, the city and AEP had the foresight to put electric wires and cables underground to prevent the view of the cityscape from being marred.

Today, that infrastructure has been in tunnels and conduits for as much as 30-plus years, and AEP has engaged New River to replace the cables and related equipment, doing it proactively instead of waiting for a major failure. Such incidents have been rare, and we do have a pretty reliable electric grid, but making it even more reliable sure seems like a good idea.

Jeff Darbee is a preservationist, historian and author in Columbus. Send your questions to cityquotient@ columbusmonthly.com, and the answer might appear in a future column.

ILLUSTRATION: BRETT AFFRUNTI

Sources: columbusunderground.com; dispatch.com; many breakfasts at the Clarmont; newriverelectrical.com; phone conversation with New River Electrical Corp.

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