“There’s not a lot of places to eat on this side of town. There’s plenty of people, but there isn’t a whole lot of choices,” said Elizabeth Corrado Weizman, who owns the catering company with her sister, Gail Corrado Okafor.
Credit: Submitted Photo
Credit: Submitted Photo
The sisters have worked with Ferguson Construction on the build-out of their new, 3,500-square-foot restaurant on U.S. 40 between Esther Price and the Kleptz YMCA.
Bella Sorella is a casual, sit-down restaurant that’s family-friendly. Weizman said they’re hoping to create a warm atmosphere where everyone feels welcomed. Plans include seating for about 50 people inside, plus 30 on a patio.
“It’s a privilege and honor in Italy to work at a restaurant,” Weizman said. “We want to try to lean on that a little bit. We want it to be as Italian as we can make it because that’s really who we are.”
Customers can expect a menu of pizzas, salads, sides and desserts. A bar program is planned.
The kitchen will serve the restaurant and all three mobile units and is being built for easy expansion, Weizman said.
Bella Sorella was started in 2013 as the first wood-fired pizza food truck in the Dayton region Over the years, Bella Sorella has evolved to a catering company.
Bella Sorella means “beautiful sister” in Italian. The sisters, who grew up north of Dayton and went to Chaminade Julienne Catholic High School, come from an Italian heritage.
“Food is the center of life when you grow up Italian,” Weizman said. “We’re eating one meal and thinking about what we’re eating the next.”
When they were growing up, they ate a lot of pasta and had family recipes for tomato sauce and meatballs. Homemade pizza wasn’t a huge thing.
“Pizza was something we kind of had to figure out on our own,” Weizman said.
The hardest thing to figure out when starting their business was the perfect dough recipe, especially because they were mobile. Their dough is made fresh weekly, using only four ingredients.
“Our crust is the perfect texture because it’s chewy and it’s crunchy at the same time,” Weizman said. “It’s always well baked with the char and everything, but it’s also our ability to use the freshest of everything. We grow a lot of what we put on our pizzas at our farm.”
Weizman grows all of the herbs they use on the pizzas and many of the vegetables such as peppers, tomatoes and eggplant. The items she doesn’t grow they get from local vendors.
The sisters have been working on opening a brick-and-mortar location for at least five years.
“We were almost ready to commit to something and I called it off because I didn’t know what was going to happen with me,” Weizman said.
In 2020, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that attacks bones. She has had two stem cell transplants and has been in chemotherapy for five years.
“It kind of all worked out at the right time because I’m doing so much better now,” Weizman said.
MORE DETAILS
For more information, visit www.bellasorellapizza.com or the business’s Facebook page (@bellasorellapizza). A behind-the-scenes look at the progress of the restaurant will be available on Instagram (@bellasorellapizza).
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