Buonasera Restaurant & Pizza — Restaurant in Butler

This week, we gave Buonasera Restaurant & Pizzeria a try in Butler, NJ right off Rt. 23 North. This was once "Pizza King" which had a good slice but shut its doors several years ago. We were looking to try this place but were on hold as it has been temporarily closed due to COVID. Well, its now open and we were excited to try a another new spot. As always, we are ordering a Magherita pie and if you've been following us we've found some pretty great pies thus far. Before we get to that, an interesting overview of the menu..no Sicilian, Grandma or any other kind of square pies you can think of. This was a first for us. Don't get us wrong. We have come across many pizzerias that don't offer specialty pies like a Margherita (which we have to pass on since that's not part of our challenge). Anyway... let do this. The Margherita. Upon opening the box, we were happy. Thinly chopped tomatoes within the sauce, fresh basil cut into strips baked onto the pie, and then the fresh mozzarella baked on regular mozzarella? What the..? This is only the second time we've seen something like this. The fresh baked on a regular. Very odd and unfortunately it does hurt this pie. There is a great opportunity here. Remove the regular mozz so that the sauce and fresh mozz meet for that perfect taste! The other issue with this pie was the crust; soggy. We do want to end on a good note though... great sauce. The plum tomato sauce was terrific, no acidic taste, sweet, and the basil complimented it perfectly. We do believe that with just the fresh mozz and a crispier crust, this should be a 4 star...

We go to Buonasera pretty often, the food is always delicious. Usually the service is ok, on Valentines night the service was poor at best. Not for lack of amount of servers. The servers were polite and friendly but it was obvious they aren’t trained by anyone profession. Besides ignoring new sat tables for more then 15 minutes before anyone stopped by to drop off bread or water. Many times servers walked past my table and others empty handed not removing empty dishes. Or asking if we needed anything. Our dinner plates were empty for a long time before I finally stopped a server running past us empty handed to remove them. When it came time to pay after dropping off the bill a long time passed before I finally stopped someone to take it. I had to ask multiple times if they could get me my change. Yes we paid with cash, so old fashioned!

We will be back because the food is very good, if the service doesn’t get better we will probably take the food to go or have...

We have ordered takeout from here and the pizza and antipasto salad were delicious.

Friday night, we decided to dine in and enjoy byob. The restaurant is decorated in a simple, but elegant style, and was warm and inviting.

Menu has lots of options to choose from. We ordered the crab stuffed mushrooms- which were generous size and filled with crabmeat. The mozzarella en carozza was tasty as well. Be sure to use the tomato sauce for dipping!

For entrees, we had lobster ravioli with shrimp and the branzino with crabmeat special. Portions see generous and food was outstanding.

Finally, we shared the frutti de bosco desert special and some coffee. Not only was everything delicious, but the service was friendly and very attentive.

The best part is we live close by, so this is added to our list of local go-to places. We can’t wait to bring our family here for dinner so they can...