Brewerton, N.Y. — In a region awash with Italian restaurants, this small restaurant on the northern edge of Onondaga County has a trick up its sleeve: homemade pasta.
Rolled into sheets for lasagna or cut into wide strips for fettuccine to be tossed in one of several housemade sauces, that homemade pasta is one of the many reasons The Cafe Bella Luna begins filling with diners as soon as it opens at 4 p.m. for dinner service.
With its brown brick façade and pair of lightbox letterboard signs largely untouched since the building’s past life as Mariachi Mexican Restaurant and before that, Fratelli’s pizzeria, one could hardly fault motorists on busy Brewerton Road who, thinking nothing has changed, pass by without giving this unassuming spot a second thought.
But to do that would mean missing out on some of the best Italian food in the area.
Owners Marc and Giovanni Muratore opened the restaurant in November 2021. As the menu states, Giovanni runs the kitchen, while Marc handles the front of house.
The menu is short — a couple of appetizers, soups and salads, and an entree selection built around pasta with a few Italian-American favorites, like chicken parmigiana and veal marsala, rounding out the offerings.
Meatballs are ubiquitous at Italian restaurants and thus are a good barometer of what to expect from the rest of the menu. A good meatball should be tender, yet not crumbling apart; deeply savory and flavorful, not just little balls of ground beef that someone forgot to press into a slider burger.
As an appetizer, two meatballs ($9.95) come covered in tomato sauce and melted mozzarella, served in an earthenware bowl that Marc, who doubled as the sole server on the night we dined, warned us was searing hot. The meatballs were fairly large — roughly the size of your average tangerine — but fork-tender and rich with flavors of garlic and parmesan cheese. A split in half revealed uniform texture and specks of green herbs distributed consistently throughout.
Entrees are served with a choice of soup or salad. On this night, the soup options were Italian wedding and cream of broccoli. The Italian wedding featured miniature versions of those same flavorful meatballs, along with ditalini pasta and vegetables, in a chicken broth. As anyone who’s made a pot of chicken noodle soup could tell you, noodles cooked and kept in a pot of soup will often turn mushy. But the tiny tubes of pasta in the Italian wedding soup still retained a bit of firmness, an indication that the pasta was likely cooked separately from the soup before being combined right before serving.
Cream of broccoli is admittedly not the most glamorous of soup choices, but any preconceived notions and memories of school cafeteria lunches quickly went out the window after one bite. Broccoli, carrots and other vegetables provided great flavor and texture to the soup, though it was the strong punch of garlic that did the heaviest lifting.
The soups were served with warm rolls and traditional butter, as well as a small ramekin of black garlic butter, just in case we didn’t get enough garlic with the soups. It was a welcome treat, though with only enough black garlic butter to spread on one or two rolls, I do wish there was more in the cup.
At its simplest, fettuccine Alfredo should include high-quality pasta, lots of parmesan cheese and a creamy sauce that coats each noodle without weighing the dish down. Despite its short ingredient list (or perhaps because of that), there’s a fine line between a flavorful Alfredo sauce that compliments the pasta, and a heavy, stodgy burden, or worse, a broken sauce that leaves an oil slick of regret on the plate.
At Cafe Bella Luna, they walk this line masterfully. There’s no shortage of cream, butter and parmesan cheese in the Alfredo sauce that dresses the thick-cut, properly al dente fettuccine ($22.95). Our leftovers solidifying into a solid brick the next day all but confirmed that. But yet another heavy dose of roasted garlic brought brightness to the sauce, which was perfectly creamy without being gloopy or too heavy. I would caution that the sauce is salty. Not too salty, per se, but it tiptoes close to the line.
Available add-ons include chicken, shrimp, Italian sausage, meatballs, mushrooms and broccoli. We opted for the shrimp, which at $5.95 for around 10 large, nicely cooked shrimp, was a good value.
The Trio Bella Luna ($24.95) features tastes of the restaurant’s lasagna, along with chicken and eggplant parm. Like the fettuccine, the lasagna is built with sheets of the restaurant’s housemade pasta, layered with cheeses and that same meatball filling. Thicker than your average supermarket lasagna noodles, the housemade lasagna sheets gave the dish heartiness and structure.
Both the eggplant and chicken are breaded and fried and retain their crispiness even after being topped with sauce and cheese. The thinner end of the chicken cutlet was a touch dry, but the eggplant was uniformly tender and unlike many eggplant parms I’ve had, was not the least bit soggy and the breading did not fall off.
There was just one dessert option, but it changes daily. That night, it was tres leches cake ($6.95), topped with whipped cream and strawberries. The vanilla cake was light, but just firm and sturdy enough to withstand being soaked in the whole milk, evaporated milk and sweetened condensed milk that gives the cake its name.
Dinner at Cafe Bella Luna is not fast food. The two owners appear to shoulder the weight of just about every task in the restaurant and unless you arrive just as the doors open, there will likely be a wait. Knowing of this skeleton crew operation, we arrived for an early dinner around 4:40 p.m. on a late Saturday afternoon and were promptly seated, though owner/server Marc told us it would be around 20 minutes until he could serve us.
All told, dinner took around two hours, but we, and seemingly everyone else in the dining room that had quickly filled up, were fine with the relaxed pace. The restaurant is active on Facebook, where the owners frequently post about hiring more staff to keep up with their growing demand. The posts are candid and don’t sugarcoat nights that the restaurant closes early, overwhelmed by the outpouring of hungry diners.
As much as I hate to contribute to that stress, I can’t help it — the Alfredo is just too good.
The Details
The Restaurant: The Cafe Bella Luna, 9633 Brewerton Road, Brewerton
Takeout/Delivery? No, currently dine-in only.
Reservations? No
Credit cards? Yes, with no added fees.
Noise level: Overhead music could be a little louder. The restaurant was extremely quiet when we arrived, but grew to a moderate noise level as the small dining room filled up
Accessibility: The restaurant has its own parking lot with spaces right outside the front door. Ample space to move around inside.
Parking: Free lot parking.
Special diets? Gluten-free pasta is available and a menu notice states other food allergies can be accommodated.
Children’s menu? Yes, separate menu.
Hours: Wednesday to Saturday, from 4 to 8 p.m.
Cost: Entrees range from $20 to $28. Dinner for two, with a starter, entrees, beverages, dessert and tax, plus a 20% tip, was $94.28.
Jacob Pucci is a food and restaurant critic for syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. You can reach him at puccijacob@gmail.com and follow him on Facebook, Instagram, Threads or Twitter/X. Sign up for our free weekly Where Syracuse Eats newsletter here.
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