The Bella Rose Cafe was featured in an United Nations of Food
Article titled "Bella Rose Cafe and Other Surprises of Rockland County".
Here's an excerpt from the review. (
Full version can be found here.)
In an attempt to recover from our shock at finding such great Peruvian and Mexican food in the Hudson Valley ‘burbs, we ducked into a place called Bella Rose Cafe. We weren’t hungry. We just wanted to soothe our bulging bellies with a bottle of wine.
And completely by accident, we found my new favorite New York Italian restaurant.
Here’s the thing: Bella Rose Cafe is a gorgeous place, with exposed Haverstraw brick and high ceilings and classy artwork and artfully chosen music… and places that look like Bella Rose usually serve overpriced pretentious food. And I hate overpriced pretentious crap.
But don’t be fooled by the classy decor. The friendly, charismatic brothers who own Bella Rose serve their Italian grandma’s recipes, and every platter of food is designed for the appetite of a hulking bricklayer. The meatballs and grilled polenta border on divinity, and most of the desserts–espresso brownies, nutella cake, and fresh biscotti, among other delights–are baked onsite by the owners’ Italian mom. The lasagna is probably the best I’ve ever eaten, and the “regular cut” is roughly the size of my Manhattan apartment; for $2 extra, you can order “John’s cut”, which includes a gigantic meatball and is probably the size of my mother’s farm in Iowa. If you leave Bella Rose Cafe hungry, you screwed up.
The craziest thing is that the prices are incredibly reasonable. Sandwiches (including an Italian grilled cheese with prosciutto and red peppers) start at $6.95; most of the (gigantic) entrees range from $9 to $15, including prosciutto-spiked asiago mac-and-cheese for $8.95 or an epic platter of lasagna for $14.95, including salad or a cup of soup. The beer/wine/liquor options are carefully chosen and inexpensive–a great bottle of pinot grigio from a small Italian vineyard costs less than $25. There’s a happy hour with $2.50 beers, and a creative array of liquor-spiked coffee drinks for $7. We ate there three times in less than 48 hours. It was that good.
Maybe I’ve been ruined by Manhattan, but nothing about Bella Rose seems normal to me. You can sit around drinking a cup of non-overpriced coffee all day, or you can get bombed on excellent-but-inexpensive wine, or gorge yourself silly on some amazingly inexpensive homemade Italian food. And no matter what, nobody is going to look at you funny for occupying a table for several hours. If anything, they’ll treat you like family if you hang out all day. That’s not normal. And that’s a huge compliment.
