In middle school, my first visit to Villa Nova created a paradigm shift. Before then, my exposure to Italian food was exclusively carry out pizza, subs and spaghetti, Stouffer’s lasagna and ubiquitous for the era, Chef Boyardee (fun fact, that product line had its origin in Cleveland). Villa Nova felt like a cavernous grotto in comparison to all other dining venues of my life to date.
It presented menus larger than one page. There were dishes I could not pronounce. The a map of Italy on the paper placemats added an air of authenticity to the operation. In spite of this culinary-cultural information overload, I could still get pizza or better yet, share pizza with others as I devoted myself to a gourmand’s tour of their Italian-American menu items.
Villa Nova, 5545 N. High St. in Worthington, was our place for “fancy” group dinners. The “Nova” fell by the wayside in high school and after. I rediscovered Villa Nova in my misspent 30s when I was informed it had a bar with free food at happy hour. Consequently, my most consistent record of support was in the form of 13 Friday happy hours in a row. In my bachelor days, a late Sunday afternoon lunch, dining on one of their weekend specials, was my hardwired routine. But enough about me, let’s take a trip in the wayback machine to explore the genesis of what some call, the fabulous Villa Nova!
Frank Colleli had a long association with pizza in Columbus, including Frankie’s Pizza in the 1960s on Ohio State’s campus. He later started Franco’s Pizza on North High Street, sandwiched between Clintonville and Worthington. I loved Franco’s as a kid. They showed movie shorts (from a projector, mind you) with a mix of Three Stooges, cartoons and a 17-minute highlight reel from the original Star Wars. This was the first place I encountered the iconic cup and char pepperoni cups that are the obsession of pizza eaters today.
You could order popcorn with your pizza! They squeezed in a pinball machine and a table-top video game in the back by the restrooms to ensure my intermissions were filled with joy. This was my middle school heaven. Frank had sold Franco’s in 1976 (before I discovered the place). When my parents dragged me to Villa Nova (forcing me to wear a button down shirt) for the first time against my will, my disposition changed for the better when they told me that it was a new business by the guy from Franco’s.
In 1978, Frank and his wife Donna converted the former Vogue Lounge from a bar to a restaurant (with a really good bar). The bar and kitchen take up one half of the building and the other half is dedicated to guest seating. The Collelis retired to Florida in 1986. Their son John stayed on with the new owner and worked in the kitchen. John talked his father into buying the business back in 1998. Frank remained a fixture at Villa Nova until his death in 2014. At that time, sons Frankie and John, as well as John’s wife Meghan, took over the operation.
Frank and Donna’s legacy remains on display for guests. Many years ago, Donna bought a few used copper kettles and asked Frank if he could find a few more. The end result was over 350 kettles in the dining room. The prize of the collection is the world’s smallest copper kettle constructed from a penny. It was featured in Antiques Roadshow in 2009.
Frank’s gutso for copper gauges from the 19th and early 20th century started at an early age. His father was a locomotive engineer. Frank served in the Merchant Marines stationed in New Orleans. When he was not on a ship, he worked at an antique store on Bourbon Street where he learned the art of restoring old items. Frank worked hard to restore the kettles and gauges. Each artifact took up to three days of work using steel wool, acid, a sander and two to three coats of polyurethane. Today there are over 300 gauges displayed in the Villa Nova Bar, along with an extensive license plate collection mounted on the walls.
Forty-five years later, Villa Nova is still known for its family-friendly dining room and Italian-American fare. For those new to the menu, a good place to start is their sampler dish which offers several different pastas and choice of meatball or Italian sausage. They still roll their meatballs daily, so my default setting is to order extra meatballs when ordering anything. I have never ordered an entree without choosing their wedding soup as my pregame for the meal. The dusting of meatballs in the soup makes it a mandatory choice.
On the pizza front, size and diameter range from 11-inch personal to 15-inch large. A gluten-free crust and a 10-inch pan crust are available. Supplementing the standard toppings, Villa Nova features a few less common selections which I highly endorse. In addition to sausage crumbles, they also offer sliced spicy sausage. You can get both types of olives – black and green – as well as artichoke hearts. I have found both their White (olive oil, garlic and a dash of Italian spice covered with cheese) and Pesto (olive oil, basil and garlic base topped with cheese) are always worthy of being on your order when selecting more than one pizza and make great appetizers. Villa Nova pizzas are largely classic Columbus style following the template of the pies the Colleli family have been slinging for generations.
One pizza reigns supreme over all of the other choices, though. The Villa Nova Taco Pizza has been a fan-favorite since it was created. It consists of a layer of refried beans over the core pizza crust with additional strata of chopped lettuce, diced tomatoes and a mound of shredded cheddar cheese served with taco sauce on the side. You can’t see the pizza for the cheese and I have no problem with that. I am not sure how I forgot about this award-winning pizza (I was one of the judges that awarded it the best of show prize at a past Slice of Clintonville competition).
Fortune favored me when I ordered this pizza to help me write this article and I mentally flagellated myself for not having this on my heavy rotation for the last decade. All of the flavors featured in the Taco Pizza perfectly complement each other. The only challenge with this item is the impossibility of eating with your hands, even with a traditional square / tavern cut. This is a forkable dish unless you want half of the cheese to scatter to the nether regions when you attempt to eat it like a savage. In this instance, there is no try, there is only fork.
While some may find the Italian-American menu to be too pedestrian for their refined tastes, Villa Nova is still packing guests in seven days a week. To give a sense of how busy it is, many years ago, they purchased the building next door so they could knock it down to double their parking capacity. There are still some days when all spaces are maxed out.
For for the quattro, uno, uno on Villa Nova, visit villanovacolumbus.com.
All photos by Jim Ellison