Day Tripping: Columbus Asian Market, the Micro Center and a few good places to eat

An Asian market and a computer store may seem like an unlikely combination for a day trip, but it makes sense to me. While Amy is shopping in the Columbus Asian Market (CAM) in the Bethel Centre on Bethel Road, just west of SR-315, north of Columbus, I kill time cruising the lanes of the Micro Center at the other end of the parking lot.

CAM is a large modern supermarket carrying a wide variety of Asian groceries, including fresh produce, meat and fish and canned and dry goods. If you can’t find it here, you probably can’t find it anywhere in the region. But, you might try the Sunrise Market a few miles away at Reed Road and W. Henderson Rd. in Upper Arlington, or one of the three smaller Asian grocery stores along North High St. between Lane and North Broadway, north of OSU.

The Micro Center is part of a small national chain of computer stores that has everything a computer buff could hope for, from mother boards and memory expansion modules to laptops, desktops, monitors and a wide variety of accessories. They have the cheapest prices I have found for flash drives. They sell them unpackaged like candy from large glass jars at the registers.

You are probably going to want to eat while you’re up here. In the same shopping plaza is the Hometown Deli, an odd name for a Chinese restaurant, but that’s what it is. Unassuming and inexpensive with good food, it’s a convenient place for lunch while shopping at CAM. Less convenient, but with more to offer for the educated palate are Sunflower on Sawmill Road, near the Columbus Zoo and Little Dragons on Morse Road, a couple miles East of I-71. Sunflower is the place to go for dim-sum. We also order from the considerable Cantonese menu. Little Dragons is my favorite Chinese restaurant in Ohio. I usually have the Shanghai dumplings (xiao long bau) and spicy frog legs. The menu is probably best described as Taiwanese. But, the spicy items, and there are lots of them on the menu, are right out of the Hunan and Szechuan provinces.

Sunflower and Little Dragons are a bit of a drive from CAM, in opposite directions. We usually eat first then make our way over to Bethel. If you are going directly to Sunflower, take I-270 toward Cleveland and get off at Sawmill. Turn left off the exit. The restaurant is just a quarter mile north on Sawmill on the right. For Little dragons, go toward Cleveland on I-71 and get off at the Morse Road exit. Make a right on Morse. The restaurant is in the Patio Shopping Plaza on the left about two miles east.