Bella Mia Ristorante

We have been going to San Carlos, Son. every Nov since 2003 and having dinner here has become a tradition. We have NEVER been disappointed! Great food!

Nice place located in shopping are of Nogales. Pleasant staff, attentive, food delivery well timed. I had chicken parm, little over done but tasty, included a generous portion of fettuccine Alfredo and house salad. My wife had the chicken Marsala and said it was delicious. She also substituted roasted veggies for pasta and they looked amazing. We will definitely go there again.

This is STILL one of the better restaurants in Nogales. Funny, how I read GREAT reviews for Nona Vinni, but bad reviews for Bella Mia. Bella Mia is clearly SUPERIOR to any restaurant in Nogales. Been around for about 20 years.

Meh… maybe I liked it so much the first time because I was surprised to have Italian food in Nogales. Having had such a pleasant experience then, I recommended it for our team dinner again a few years later.
We started with the fried zucchini and the antipasto platter. The fried zucchini was heavily breaded and looked like it came from a bad. The antipasto had a lot of salad with some cheese sticks, sliced charcuterie, and olives. I ordered the Bowtie Florentine di Pollo, and it was just blah. The chicken was overcooked, pasta was overcooked, tomatoes were mealy. I will say the portion was quite generous. I only ate half of it, and the server encouraged me to take it with me, almost insisting despite my saying that I didn’t have a place for it in the hotel. All the other mains seem to come with fettucine alfredo, which looked like the delicious full-​fat version as my co-​workers slurped it down. The breadsticks were essentially flavorless.
I should have just eaten the whole antipasto mixto plate as my main. That’s what I’ll do next time, since I’m sure we’ll be back, considering the mixture of places to eat in the area.

I can’t think of any possible situation in which I would recommend this restaurant. I’m pretty sure their marinara sauce comes straight out of a can, and I can pick a better jar of sauce off the shelf at the Walmart up the street for half the price. I came here with three other people, and we all agreed that probably nothing they serve was made fresh in the restaurant, so again, why not make it at home? The service wasn’t very good either and the décor was average.
One person said this restaurant has «gone way downhill» since they were last there. That is really sad because there isn’t a lot of variety in the restaurant scene in this area.

The food was fine. Not great, but you don’t go to Nogales for great Italian food.
What was baffling was the utter lack of service. It started out okay, although our server kept forgetting there was a fourth person in our party for whom we were waiting, and no, we do not want to order yet. Then our she forgot to bring us the breadsticks we asked for, and strangely only took orders for soup/​salad from 3 of the 4 people, even though all the entrees we ordered were supposed to come with it. There were two waitresses and only 5 tables of people, yet they let us sit there, totally ignored, for about half an hour after we’d finished eating, while they stood around in full view of our table. Finally, one of them came over and we asked for boxes to take home our leftovers. You’d think this would be a clue we might be ready for our check, but after dropping off the boxes they ignored us for another full half hour. Obviously we could have waved them down if we’d been in a hurry, but luckily none of us was. In fact, they never offered to bring us our check — when we were ready to leave, we had to walk up to the counter to get our bill (even though I’d seen them bring a bill to another table, so this clearly wasn’t standard practice). The service was so bad, the person who paid decided to not leave a tip for the first time in her life.

This is definitely one of the better restaurants in Nogales. I have been here a few times and have always been very happy with my food. I absolutely LOVE the eggplant lasagna. The downside is the décor/​location. And I agree with one of the other reviewers that they need a better wine list.