Bella Napoli — Restaurant in Kansas City

Luca and I stopped by bella napoli Italian Restaurant in Brookside Kansas City Missouri today. I have heard a lot of good things about this resturant so I thought we would give it a try. I was raised in a Sicilian family and I am pretty particular about Italian food. Napoli is in Naples Italy. If you look at a map of Italy it looks like a boot. Naples is the ankle. Each region of Italy has different flavors.

The resturant has a deli, they sell Italian food products etc. When you walk in there are three rooms with tables. To the right is a dining area with regular wood small four tops. To the left there is a dining room with white table cloths and in the middle where we were seated a few tables in the middle of food racks.

A young man by the name of Mike Carullo was our waiter. Mike is the nephew of the owner of Carullos at The City Market Kansas City Missouri. Mike was fantastic.

I had an espresso and we had Bruschetta. The Bruschetta was really hard. Like had to cut with a steak knife struggling hard. The topping was great just a little to long in the toaster for the bread.

I ordered lasagna with red sauce, "Sugo", a side of meatballs in sauce and a link of Italian sausage. Luca had a pasta dish and we ordered two margarita personal pizzas to go. One coke, one coffee.

The reason I mentioned the different regions of Italy earlier is each region has its own flavor. Sicily has more of a sweet Sugo which I prefer. The sauce on the lasagna was ok. The spices in the sauce not so profound. It wasn't bland but felt like it was lacking something. But thats my taste. Overall it wasn't bad.

Luca was happy with his pasta. My meatballs ok, not great, not bad. The italian sausage was burnt and then covered in sauce. The pizza crust was hard.

I talked with the manager and asked if I could take pictures inside the restaurant. She agreed.

Our bill $81.00. I left the waiter a $19.00 tip. Mike our waiter was worth it. They had an ample amount of wait staff on hand. The restaurant was moderately busy.

I have eaten at hundreds of restaurants all over the USA. I have to give bella napoli a 2.5 star.

$81.00 for two people with no cocktails and no desserts with ok food is not good. I have had much worse food, I just expected...

Will start with the good news… This was our first time visiting and the expectation was high based on previous reviews. Ambiance was charming with a nice outdoor seating area. Our meatball appetizer was incredible as was the wine. That is where the goodness stopped and the cloud of disappointing service began. Our waitress cast a wide shadow over what could have been a spectacular evening. She did not arrive to our table until approximately 15 mins after we were seated. When she did arrive, she advised how tough her day was in as much as the restaurant accepted too many “walk in’s” and when the guest with reservations arrived the wait staff became overwhelmed. Although frustrating, a shortage in talent in todays environment is understandable. Unfortunately she then pointed out a table directly across from us with two customer and described how much they disliked her and continued to stare at her… (not something I was interested in hearing). After taking our order, (without taking any notes), she had to ask us to repeat the order… Not a good sign. After the meatball appetizer arrived we asked about the bottle of wine we ordered and by the look on her face you could tell she forgot.. again. This was corrected a few minutes later so no harm no foul. When the wine arrived we ordered a pizza. After 20 mins went by and we had not seen our waitress since she dropped off the wine we asked another waitress to check on the status of our pizza. A few minutes later our waitress showed back up. When asked about the pizza she advised she forgot to put in our order…we cancelled the pizza and asked for the check.. I understand our waitress was only 2 weeks in to her new career and suspect this place is much better than our initial experience. As such we will give them another go in the...

We have been wanting to try Bella Napoli since we heard it from another foodie. I was so excited to try it because of all the good reviews and also because we are preparing to go to Italy. Here’s my honest review about it.

The atmosphere was cool. We went on a nice Saturday evening. The restaurant was bustling. It’s a cute little restaurant. On one side of it they had a section where they sell Italian goods. The front part was their deli section. The staff was very nice. We really enjoyed our server, Katie. She was very welcoming and gave us recommendations for it being our first time there.

It started off great. We ordered the limoncello spirits and Negroni to drink. We then ordered the arancini which was awesome. Cooked perfectly and was very delicious with the sauce and the side salad. I ordered the carbonara and my husband ordered the short rib pasta. I agree with one of the reviewers. My carbonara was SUPER salty that I couldn’t eat it and had to send it back. They asked me if I just wanted less pecorino but I asked for the Amatriciania instead. The amatriciana was definitely so much better than the carbonara although I did ask for less pecorino and they didn’t add very much guancale to the dish probably because of my review of their carbonara being very salty. My husband was also pretty disappointed with his short rib dish. He also thought his was salty but not as salty as mine, it didn’t seem to have very much short rib and he just thought the sauce was overpowering. I thought his dish tasted fine but do agree that there wasn’t a whole lot of short rib. We decided to skip dessert. The free limoncello shot at end was a nice touch.

Would we try it...