Hello everyone!
I’m making my way toward the end of the semester and I was having a hard time picking a final restaurant to review. I went to my trusty source Google and decided to find “best south jersey restaurant”. One restaurant that popped up a few times on some listings was “Luna Rossa Biagio Lamberti“. It just so happens that this restaurant is only 15 minutes away from campus in Turnersville and is on one of the major main streets known in South Jersey, the Black Horse Pike.
My sorority sister and I decided to go for lunch one day. I was super excited because when I was looking at their lunch menu they had a variety of options for an affordable price; all their entreés were around $15 or less so that’s good news for a college student. I also love Italian food so I was super stoked. Because it’s located on Black Horse Pike, it was super easy to get to. We went around lunch time and when we arrived there, there weren’t many people there, probably because they just opened for lunch.
We were greeted by the host who was an older gentlemen. He escorted us to our table which happened to be in the first dining room (there were two dining rooms). He gave us our menu and we both started looking through it. I liked the menu itself because it was very official, hard covered menu and I love when there’s descriptions for the entreés, that way I don’t have to keep asking the waiter, “what’s in it?”. Below is a panorama view from our seats and the menu:
While we were trying to decide what to eat, our waiter brought us bread to snack on:
2 pieces of the bread were plain and the other 2 pieces had some marinara sauce on it. I liked this idea because I was super hungry and I could eat the bread while I wait for my food to come out. However, what I would’ve liked was some bread, olive oil, and herbs, kind of like the break that comes out in Carrabba’s Italian Grill (if you haven’t been there, I recommend you go). I’ve been to other Italian restaurants that has served bread like that and I love it.
Our waiter had an accent, I think it was Italian, and I could kind of tell he was new to serving because he was kind of being a bit slow. I decided to order some bruschetta for my appetizer and eggplant parmesan (one of my favorites) for my meal and my sorority sister ordered chicken parmesan (I know, we are #basic). My meal came with a side salad so that was a cool addition, I just got the house salad and house dressing.
The bruschetta came out first:
It was overall good but when I bit down on the bread, I felt like it was toasted too long and it kind of tasted a bit burnt every time I bit down into it. I even looked at the bottom of the piece to see if they burnt it and there were no burnt marks but it still tasted kind of stale.
Before I knew it my salad came out followed by our entreés. The salad was pretty good, you know, just your typical salad before a meal haha. The eggplant parm was not bad (I had better, at a small local Italian restaurant). However, for the time being, it was satisfying. I immediately got full because well it was carbs that I was mostly eating. I couldn’t finish it all and it became dry so it was kind of unpleasant to eat. I asked for more sauce so I could take it home.
The waiter took our food and packaged it up for us, which was very nice of him. He gave us the check book and we were figuring out our payments. I took the paper he wrote on for our order to see how much the food I ordered was and noticed a writing on the back:
“Short lady”, how nice to describe me haha. My thing is that, how was he supposed to know I was shorter than my sorority sister by us sitting down? I don’t know, but I thought that was really funny, I couldn’t stop laughing when we went to the restaurant. When I was looking online, “Luna Rossa” has a variety of other menus for different things like: dinner, catering, party trays, & more. I may have liked it better if we went during dinner time because the pictures I saw looked a lot more appetizing. I think I might want to come back during dinner time.
If you’re looking for a decent restaurant to go to for lunch around the area and want a bang for your buck, you can try out this restaurant!
-Elisa
Just getting back from my visit to Nifty Fifty’s! Very cool place to go to that’s really close to campus! I decided to bring along two of my sorority sisters for this awesome adventure. As you can see from the image to the right, Nifty Fifty’s is only a 15 minute drive from campus if you’re traveling by car. This route takes you through the suburbs of Washington Township, NJ with really easy directions.
neighborhood bites 