Italy

On the way out of town Saturday I stopped by La Fornarina Italian restaurant in Fort Mill.  I’d heard the food was supposed to be pretty good and the owner was from Sicily so I figured it was a good possibility for some authentic Italian.  It’s located in what was previously a chain pizzeria location and there are some remnants of that in the design.  You can order takeout or dine in.

The menu is fairly standard looking but they do say they make their bread on site and use fresh ingredients.  I went with their Sicilian Calzone which has cheese, ham, mushrooms and a white sauce in lieu of red sauce but it did come with a side of marinara for dipping.  You can get it baked or fried and I almost went with fried but decided to stick with baked.  It came out golden as you can see with a just a hint of char on the bottom which you can’t.

The crust was nice and crispy on the outside and inside there was plenty of ham, cheese & mushrooms.  The crust did have a taste and texture a bit different that standard pizza crust, more bread like.  The “white sauce” felt more like just some olive oil and garlic but it’s pretty hard to go wrong with that combo.  I enjoyed it and now that I’ve had the baked I will try the fried next time to see what that’s like.

Since I was about to embark on a 4 plus hour drive I figured I needed a palette cleanser and followed up the calzone with a lemonchello gelato.

That was worth the trip all by itself.  Man that was good stuff.  Tart enough to start your mouth puckering with every bite and sweet enough to keep you from making that duck face thing that teen girls do in their selfies.  They have several other flavors too but this one was just the perfect thing to set up the road trip.

Overall I have to say I enjoyed this place and will definitely go back when I’m tooling around the Ft Mill / Tega Cay area and lunch time rolls around.  Another plus and probably a confirmation of what I heard about the owner is that I heard nothing but Italian coming from the kitchen.

I didn’t find a web site but you can Google them to find the address if you are so inclined.  Check out the Tell Me More page for a recipe, music and a little something I bet you didn’t know about Italy.