If you ever called nonna's cooking casual, you’d wind up with a wooden spoon cracked across your backside. Not the case at Rotelli in Gahanna, a proud to be formality-free Italian restaurant with a menu that would still make grandma proud. Pull up a chair at the family-friendliest table with today’s deal: for $8, you get $16 toward your bill at Rotelli. Your Groupon is only good for dine-in, forcing you to suffer through the restaurant’s inviting and friendly atmosphere.

The service is somewhere between leisurely sit down and blazingly fast, a perfect compliment to the restaurant’s middle-ground nature, though the menu definitely takes the high road. It’s full of the eats that little Italian schoolchildren dream about at the moderate prices papas and mammas sing about in the shower.

Begin your feast with deep-fried zucchini ($5.99) or crispy calamari ($8.99). Then you have some thinking to do. Decide if tonight is a pizza, sandwich, pasta, or seafood night, or if everyone should pretend to be 12 and order from the kids' menu. Pizzas come in 10 inches or 16 inches and span the gamut from traditional cheese ($12.99/16-inch) to unorthodox buffalo chicken ($15.99/16-inch). Or you can build your own, starting with a cheese base and adding $1.99 for each additional ingredient (on a 16-inch pie; $1.29 per ingredient on a 10-inch pie).

If you prefer your pizza folded, grab a calzone ($7.99). Or if you’d rather your food not be some sort of pizza variation, snag a sub such as the chicken parmigiana ($7.99) or a veggie wrap ($6.99). The pasta selection is quite extensive and features classics such as manicotti ($13.99) and meat lasagna ($13.99). Seafood fans will fawn over the pelagic depth of oceanic offerings, ranging from linguini with clam sauce ($12.99) to snapper filet ($15.99). On the kids' menu, prices for tikes range from $4 to $8 and are simple dishes, such as butter noodles that are less likely to be thrown back in your face by disgruntled mini eaters.

Not valid with daily specials or early bird offers.

Reviews

Seven Yelpers and three Insider Pagers agree that Rotelli is worth a solid four-star average, and 75% of Urbanspooners recommend Rotelli:

• Rotelli's pizza is BY FAR the best pizza in all of Columbus. – Marlo R., Insider Pages
• The emphasis is on pizza and pasta, but the real winners here are the calzones and stromboli. They are as good as any I've had in Columbus. – Randy S., Yelp