 Where to Dine: Barbara Helish's Bella Luna  We
visited Barbara Helish at Bella Luna Restaurant in Royal Oaks, MD, not
far from Easton and St. Michaels. Fresh, remarkable regional Italian,
catering, and Barbara demonstrates how to make fresh mozzarella for
caprese in a video. See FoodTube
& Where
to Dine.(All you have to find is cheese curd, but we're working on that. Meantime. pick up Barbara's mozzarella at the restaurant and at farmers markets in Talbot County.) - Chesapeake Foodie July/August Issue If you ever happen to find yourself in this neck of the woods (or ocean I guess) I highly recommend coming here. We went here for dinner with a group of 13 people whose diets ranged from avid meat eater to vegan and the chef was sooooo accommodating. She makes a lot of the food from scratch, from the pasta to even the mozzarella. There are all sorts of hard to find food items in the market and the espresso is oh so tasty. This place is definitely one of a kind in an area that is saturated with mediocre seafood restaurants. - Amanda W, Yelp.com Review Although a tiny bit off the beaten path, our Italian sandwiches were stellar, and the pasta salad that came alongside was absolutely delicious, a nice change from the tasteless pasta salad one usually gets. They recently acquired a liquor license, although we don't drink. And Italian sodas can be had. Browse in the junk and antique shop across the small road, or bike to Bellvue and Ferry it into tony Oxford. - Yahoo Review Bella Luna does Italian right The man sitting next to us is determined to mop up every morsel of his dinner, deliberately cleaning his plate with a chunk of bread, one long stroke at a time. There's no way to tell which has him more enamored: the fresh, crusty hunk of bread studded with olives, or the red wine sauce left from a plate of boneless short ribs. By the end of his routine, the plate returns to the kitchen cleaner than when it was pulled from the shelf earlier in the day. Bella Luna has that kind of effect on diners. Located in Royal Oak (population 605), about halfway between Easton and St. Michaels, Bella Luna was created three years ago from the shell of the old Royal Oak General Store. The front of the house is the restaurant and bar, a 12-table space in which to enjoy a fat lunchtime panini and page through an even fatter menu of Italian wines. The back of the house is a miniature Italian market, offering pantry staples such as sea salt and olive oil, and sweet treats like lady fingers and panettone. A deli case holds dozens of cheeses from around the world, and a book to explain the nuances of each of them. The restaurant menu changes often. "We may print it a few hours before we open," said our server, "depending on what she had time to prepare during the day." She is referring to chef/owner Barbara Helish, a petite woman who emerges from the kitchen throughout the evening to pour wine for her customers and dish on local happenings. "You'd be surprised how much traffic we get," she says when we ask how the tiny restaurant survives in such a tiny town. On cue, another group of diners walks in the door. We begin by sharing a plate of plump, sweet, taste-of-the-sea Kumomoto oysters topped with a bit of caviar. At $3 a piece, the oysters can be a pricey appetizer, but a good one. A starter plate of roasted quail wrapped in prosciutto proved difficult to aneuver, but the Italian ham kept the bird moist, so the few bites we did manage to retrieve were worth the effort. There is no comparison between freshly made, soft pasta and the prepackaged stuff on grocery store shelves, but there's no guessing here - all of Bella Luna's pasta is house made or it doesn't show up on the menu. Ribbons of pasta -- fettuccine is the noodle of the day -- appears at our table topped with home-made Bolognese sauce: chunky, spicy, sausage, a bit of tomato and spices. Or Helish will toss the pasta with grilled shrimp, olives and orange wedges for a lighter dish. Or sausage and sundried omatoes in rosemary cream. Diners who require a little more heft on the plate can sample the short ribs, slice through a Kobe strip steak with sautéed onions or luxuriate in a grilled veal shank in marsala sauce, served over firm polenta and wilted spinach. Don't be in a hurry when dining at Bella Luna -- dinner on a weekend, can be a three hour experience. Excellent service keeps the meal on track, and nice touches make it even more enjoyable: olive tapenade served with various breads (we finally had to stop our server from bringing plates of it to the table), a slice of real leu cheese on our salads, red wine served in a decanter. While Bella Luna doesn't require reservations -- it would be foolish to make the drive without them. Helish resists the temptation to cram as many seats as she can into the space, but there is only so much room. Food is also served at the bar. From our seats, we can see the old General Store sign hanging over Bella Luna's front porch. In a nifty bit of recycling, the back of the sign was painted with "Bella Luna" and turned toward the road. The rest of the décor is typical Italian restaurant -- red linens, votive candles and the requisite Baroni and Cinzano posters on thewalls. Travel to Royal Oak after dark, and the white rope lights wrapped around the porch may be the best way to find the place. Or roll down the windows and follow the scent of garlic -- cliché, but true.
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