By Jim Duncan CVFDude@aol.com

The first thing I noticed about Bella Italia was its bustle. This strip mall cafè seems always to be busy, even at odd hours. Delivery guys trot in and out, while customers wait for a table, and staff scurries around with heaping plates of food. It's only two months since Tony and Becky Arafa opened here, and their restaurant in Pleasant Hill is already a local legend, referred to simply as "Bella's" on the East Side.

The second thing that caught my eye helps explain the first - the size of the servings. In this era of all-you-can-eat buffets and epidemic obesity rates, I figure nothing new can surprise me by the sheer force of excessiveness. But that hasn't happened yet. The first time I visited Bella Italia, I gawked at a lady's plate of spaghetti on the next table. After I noticed that she had caught me staring at her food, I apologized, remarking that the hefty size of the serving kidnapped my gaze.

"And this is just a children's portion," she informed me.

I assumed she was joking. She wasn't.

The third remarkable thing about "Bella's" is the service, a throwback to another era, when Italian restaurant owners would always stop by every table and ask how everyone is doing. And when entire staffs were empowered to anticipate and expedite diners' needs. Tony Arafa owned two restaurants in Delaware, where he met Becky, who grew up on the East Side. But he works his floor like an old South Sider, personally checking on every table. As soon as one sits down, bread sticks are served, hot from the oven and accompanied with marinara. That sauce has both tomato skins and seeds. Some would think this is a bit lazy, but in this day of over-processed foods, it makes me giddy with joy. It means the sauce is homemade from fresh tomatoes, not to mention fresh herbs and garlic. Burgers, meat balls, all sauces and pizza dough are also homemade from scratch. Sausage is from Graziano's.

Tony said that half his family came from Italy, the mother land of pasta, and half from Egypt, where bread was invented. Fittingly, every category on Bella Italia's menu is an homage to wheat - pizza, calzones, burgers, gyros, subs and pasta. Even the salads were buried under a mound of homemade croutons.

Don't expect California pizza; this is old-style Des Moines. Toppings include sausage, pepperoni, chicken, ham, bacon, meatballs, burger, steak, mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes, onions and olives. Notice there are no sun-dried artichokes, goat cheeses, or squid ink. The most popular pizza is the "Meat Lover's." Still, these pies are about the bread, heavy as a loaf of white bread on the edges, thin in the center and versatile to all tastes.

To the heavyweight side of the pizza, calzones defy description. The menu suggests they "serve 2 to 3 people." Such statements are why the English language desperately needs an antonym for "hyperbole." Tony admitted his scale isn't big enough to weigh a calzone, but that one includes a pound and a half of cheese and probably weighs in at close to 4 pounds. They are photogenic, too, browned like blue-ribbon pie crust.

Man can't live by bread alone. So, house-marinated chicken is also featured. The most popular special is Chicken a la Vodka, char-grilled and served with penne in a pink sauce. "Bella's" offers beer and wine only, plus $1 delivery to Altoona, Pleasant Hill and 50317 zip codes in Des Moines.

Food Skinny

Cici's opened its second Des Moines location recently on Merle Hay Road, specializing in "all you can eat" buffets of pizza, garlic bread and salad, for $4.49. We are not making that up...Hal Jasa's underground restaurant is up and running again. The first feast of the season was held on the roof of Brown Camp lofts, the second is this weekend. Contact:
foodforthought515@excite.com. CV

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