Bella Italia is, like all chain restaurants, carefully crafted inside to convey whatever mood is necessary at any given time. The walls are lined with mass-produced prints, replicas of advertisements for wine, spirits, and other items that feature women in seductive poses curling around bottles and various pieces of fruit. The interiors are painted to look like terracotta and mud-brick stone, with fake vines and trellises acting as walls between seating and the bar, as if you were actually dining in the courtyard of some Venetian café. Of course, all this is obscure the minute the lights go down and the candles are lit, obscuring everything except for your artistically prepared meals and the faces of your dining companions.
As expected, the dishes are cookie-cutter chain restaurant fare. Like Bertucci’s or the Olive Garden in the U.S., you can walk into any Bella Italia in England, and if you order the spaghetti bolognaise or linguini rustica, you’ll get the same dish, prepared the same way, with the same garnish. Same goes for the garlic bread, which appears to be freshly baked by some old Italian baker but in reality probably is the same ciabatta loaf with garlic and butter you can get at ASDA for a quid.
That said, however, there are many reasons for someone who holds chain restaurants in the same regard that I do to at least try Bella Italia, and the tiramisu is foremost among them. As someone who loves Italian food, I consider myself an expert on the subject of tiramisu--a connoisseur of the dessert, if you will. To date, I’ve tried nine different Italian restaurants—some chains like Bella Italia and Olive Garden and some independent, family-run cafes in the Italian sections of Baltimore and New York. Of all the places I’ve tried, Bella Italia wins my vote hands-down for the best tiramisu I have ever tried. If there’s a place which has better tiramisu, I’d love to try it.
There are, of course, other menu items to savor as well as the desserts. The pizzas are incredible, to begin with, and for pesto lovers, the linguini rustica cannot be beaten. I highly recommend the cannelloni with ricotta and spinach, even for those who can’t stomach the vile weed, and while I abstain from red meat myself, my dining companions on several different occasions have raved about the meat lasagna.
Bella Italia has two locations in Manchester: on Market Street and on Deansgate, across from Kendels. With monthly meal specials, you can usually score drinks and dessert along with your main course for less than twenty pounds, which is a great deal, considering the Pizza Hut across the street will run you about the same price for half the quality.