Freedom a la Cart Gets a Home

It has been a big year for Freedom a la Cart, the acclaimed catering company that employs victims of sex trafficking. The nonprofit, which we profiled in the Winter 2019 issue of Edible Columbus, moved its entire operation from a North Side corporate park to a Downtown building complete with a café that opened to the public in April.

The two-story building at 123 E. Spring St. gives the organization a place to bring together its commercial kitchen operations with space for support services for victims. Being Downtown provides a central location for catering, puts the organization closer to many of the people it serves and offers foot traffic for the café. The café, in turn, provides the first retail experience for Freedom’s workforce development program.

“It feels like we finally have a real home,” said CEO Paula Haines. “It’s such a beautiful, bright space. We’re excited to have people come and see it.”

The pandemic delayed remodeling of the building last year at the same time that office closings and state restrictions on gatherings knocked out much of the catering business. In response, the organization launched Freedom at Home, a subscription service that lets customers have a premade meal delivered to them once a week. That service has been a success and will continue, Haines said.

The new café serves breakfast and lunch on weekdays 7am to 3pm and Saturdays 8am to 3pm. The menu, overseen by Executive Chef Laurie Sargent, features quiche, sandwiches, salads and bowls, as well as a variety of baked goods made on site, from croissants to cookies.

Columbus Food Adventures owners Bethia Woolf and Andy Dehus, with their daughter, Zoe

Walking tours return

Columbus Food Adventures has started to offer its walking tours again, more than a year after suspending them due to the pandemic. The weekend tours had been a major part of the company, which owners Bethia Woolf and her husband, Andy Dehus, built over 10 years.

Tours began in May for German Village, Grandview Avenue and Old Worthington and include stops at multiple restaurants. There also are tours available for Franklinton and the Brewery District, which require participants to be at least 21 because they include brewery stops as well as restaurants.

Reservations are required. Tours cost $58 to $62 a person and can be booked at columbusfoodadventures.com. The company also offers a self-driving taco truck tour on Saturdays. Its van-driven tours, which cover larger areas, remain suspended at this time.

The business is continuing to offer its innovative Trust Fall dinners, which Edible Columbus wrote about in the Fall 2020 issue. The program delivers a meal for two from an immigrant restaurant to your door. The “trust” part is that you don’t know in advance which restaurant it will be.

M at Miranova has closed permanently.

Fine dining challenged

The area’s fine-dining restaurants have been slow to rebound from the pandemic threat and state restrictions, since many were not set up to offer carryout service. Some prominent restaurants have only recently begun to welcome back customers, while others remain shuttered.

The Guild House, Martini and some other Cameron Mitchell restaurants opened last June after a three-month closing. Veritas began limited weekend seatings in August, and The Refectory reopened its dining room in September.

Comune, whose plant-based menu had drawn high praise, recently announced it would open in late May for dinner only. Service Bar, another local favorite, has not reopened to diners but does offer carryout.

Basi Italia, always listed among the city’s best restaurants, has spent the pandemic time remodeling the small restaurant and planning a retail wine operation. A Facebook post said, “We are working hard to reopen the patio for limited seating soon.” The restaurant offers carryout Wednesday through Saturday.

Latitude 41, the highly regarded restaurant in the Renaissance Columbus hotel Downtown, still is listed on the hotel’s website as “temporarily closed.”

The biggest loss for fine dining in Columbus is the permanent closing of M at Miranova, which was announced in May. Opened in 2002, the premier Cameron Mitchell restaurant was one of only two AAA 4-Diamond restaurants in town (The Refectory is the other). It had been closed since March 2020.