[part of the Tuesday for Travel blog series – reviews, recommendations, and stories based on our travels and excursions]

After we stuffed ourselves at Jack Flaps, we spent the day checking out some of the sites in Cleveland.  We visited Lake Erie (more on this next week!), The Christmas Story House, and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.  While we love to travel, Chris and I are pretty avid “country folk”.  We feel much more comfortable and at home in towns with only a handful of stoplights and more green space than buildings.  We appreciate lots of activities to try and new restaurants to enjoy but could never imagine living in a busy city.  A few days is enough for us!  That being said, we were continuously impressed with all the empty space in Cleveland.  We came expecting a tightly packed city, but in reality there are some rather desolate areas and more open spaces than we anticipated.  Of course, there are areas that are denser than others, but overall Cleveland isn’t all that crowded.

Our late afternoon sugar crash from the breakfast/dessert we had earlier in the day prompted us to research our next destination.  When I saw that Cleveland had a Little Italy section, I instantly knew we would have dinner there!  Italian is my #1 favorite food…probably because I grew up living on Ciro’s in my hometown.. 🙂  We chose Mia Bella because they won several awards for “Best of Little Italy”.

 

The weather was a perfect 75 degrees and sunny for our whole trip.  We welcomed the opportunity to enjoy our meal outdoors on the patio.  I tried a blueberry pomegranate martini. Yum!

The menu was decorated with award-winning dishes, so we obviously chose to try those.  Starting off… Shrimp Saganaki …

We’ve yet to figure out exactly what the components were, but this SAUCE…oh, my!  Our waitress warned us that we would need some extra bread to soak up the left over sauce that we wouldn’t want to go to waste.  She was oh so right!

For dinner, Chris chose the Mia Bella Pasta, their spin on traditional marina sauce, with sausage.  I had Cheese Tortellini with tomato cream sauce, peas, and prosciutto.

We’ve tried quite a bit of Italian food, and often times we aren’t incredibly impressed.  It is usually good, but nothing amazing to write home about.  I usually think that this is because we’ve grown up with such awesome Italian here at home.  Well, that story completely changed after this trip!  We left agreeing that we had both just eaten the best Italian meal of our lives!  Mia Bella is positioned on a neat brick side street in Little Italy.  The small area is about 3 blocks long and is a nice location for a little stroll.

Definitely check this place out if you are ever in Cleveland!

I love to hear from you.  Comment below.

– Nikki