Bellino – Pasta & Cafe

DELICIOUS food and appetizers. The owner and chef are so kind and inviting. Everyone here is so nice. The bruschetta is amAAAzing and the pastas are to die for! Gelato to top it all off. Definitely coming back!

Best Italian in Hillsboro by far. Good service, good atmosphere, great food. Great gelato as well.

I had lasagna and my boyfriend had spaghetti and meatballs. Let me tell you, this was the best italian we’ve ever had. Amazing service and amazing food!

Food was decent. I would have liked to try again, but it was way too pricey. $ 55 for 3 lunch dishes and a very small salad.
It was neat, and the owner was courteous.

It’s great to see a new Italian restaurant out in Hillsboro, and with good food, good service and modest prices. My wife and I ate there with friends last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The bread was good. The salad, served family style to the entire table, was fresh. My pasta Bolognese was very satisfying and I left nothing on the plate, as I noticed was the case for everyone else in our party. The spaghetti and meatballs across from me looked very good. My wife said she very much enjoyed her squash ravioli. The bottle of red ordered was around $ 30 and just fine. The tiramisu I shared with my wife was very good. The staff were all very friendly and seemed to enjoy the restaurant, which gave it a good feel too. I appreciate the effort it must take to bring this kind of restaurant to Hillsboro and we will definitely be back.

Excellent food and great prices! We will definitely be going back.

Always satisfied with their Authentic Italian dishes. The owner is very nice and friendly too. :-) When I crave Italian foods this is THE place to go.

Food and service was really good. Came here for lunch and had the lasagna. When you first sit down they serve you bread and olive oil. For dessert I had tiramisu and a café latte. Very good! Now I am full.

Just ok. I had the special, sauce was too thin had to ask for a fork after it was served. Generous portion. I was hoping it was one of those little hideaway Italian places with great food… alas, nope.

My second visit for lunch and so pleased to see that it’s even better than before. This place should be on Main Street and hopefully will one day at this rate. Had fresh mussels in a marvelous sauce of garlic, wine and just enough tomato to not overwhelm. The chef owner is attentive and service is warm and welcoming. Also restaurant is immaculately clean. The bread is also the best chewy crust and reminds me of San Francisco. Bravo !

Pasta are awesome and the owner is so friendly, what a lovely Sunday rainy afternoon! @_@

A wheel alignment on special
… and some lasagna
That’s not a tag line. That’s reality. I needed a wheel alignment, and I found one at a good price at the dealership where I purchased my car and then was hungry on the heels of a visit to the shop, slightly after the lunch hour. I had read my friends’ reviews of Bellino Pasta Café (the restaurant with that name in Hillsboro) and bookmarked it as someplace to get a quick Italian lunch should I ever get service at the dealership on TV Highway in Hillsboro. It finally happened.
Bellino Pasta Café is actually close to the heart of Hillsboro and where Cornell Road makes that horseshoe curve to travel from TV Highway back up toward Tanasbourne, tech, and the freeways. It sits in a strip mall behind a 7-​Eleven, so keep your eyes open for that 7-​Eleven.
The exterior is nondescript and the interior is small, with murals of Italian countryside vistas inside faux arches. Upon entering, one faces what appears to be a bar or reception counter, with table seating all around them.
There are numerous pasta dishes to choose from. Typically, I like pasta that is not in strands, opting for penne, fusilli, etc. instead, and in a sauce that is not marinara, so that would be pesto, tomato cream, carbonara, etc. Bellino did have some of those dishes but I landed on the lasagna. To cut to the chase, the lasagna had a wonderful texture and was also very tasty. I drove off thinking about the lasagna I just ate. To the plate of lasagna, I added a cup of hot tea. Note that they have other drinks, such as imported Italian ones, and also desserts and a few flavors of gelato in the case.
There was a well-​traveled couple who lived in the area sitting at an adjacent table who began speaking to me when they saw me taking photos. They told me they came there a lot and that they find many of the menu items to be very good. Benito of Bellino Pasta Café also wants to you to be happy with your meal and talks to the patrons to see how they like their food.
In closing, let’s go with the motto «Oh thank heaven for 7-​Eleven.» Now, that’s not because you’ll be going into some 7-​Eleven to buy a Slurpee or some gum from someone who might just sound like a character on «The Simpsons,» but because it serves as a landmark to more easily locate this low key but very good little Italian restaurant in the burbs.

Wow! I’m in Italian Heaven! Yes, finally someplace in Hillsboro with ONO (delicious) Italian Grinds!
Service was attentive, our waitress was quick to greet us, and she offered her expertise on some of the dishes on the menu as I wasn’t sure what to have. She also paired a glass of wine for me that was superb!
We ordered the following:
Penne Pesto w/​chicken — OMG, it was amazing! The flavors on point!
Chicken Tortellini w/​Pink Sauce — oh, my! Talk about melt in da mouth!
Lasagna — delicate perfection!
These guys are overall amazing! We will be back for sure!

I really wanted to like this place. Italian in Hillsboro would be really good. Good Italian would be even better.
Especially in this strip mall of somewhat mediocre restaurants.
Yah. Not today I’m afraid.
Dining companion and I arrived about 4pm on a Sunday. There were two four top tables occupied. There were also two four tops with dirty dishes and the rest of the tables were pushed together in two groups of 3 – 4 tables and covered with dirty dishes and glassware.
The nice lady scrambled to clean up the table by the window for us. She put clean butcher paper on top of the dirty tablecloth. Yuck.
The two grouped sets of tables stayed unbussed until we were ready to leave. I’m pretty sure only the nice lady and the cook were working today. But still. Yuck.
Brought us menus, bread, and a carafe of water which dining companion noted had some black specks in it. After I found a lemon seed in my water we figured there was probably lemon in it. But no obvious slices. We decided to attribute the black matter to the absentee lemons.
We call that compartmentalization. It’s a coping skill.
The menu looked good. Heavy on the beef. Companion does not eat beef. He ordered penne pesto. I ordered squash ravioli with marinara thinking maybe it’d be zucchini squash inside? They were out of calamari so we started with scampi. Salad would have been preferable but it was expensive I thought.
Five nicely cooked shrimp arrived in a pool of garlic butter with a piece of garlic bread. The shrimp had some kind of slimy coating on them I decided was garlic and friend declared was cornstarch. They tasted good. Pet peeve: shared appetizers should be in even numbers. I had to cut the fifth shrimp in half. Lame.
The penne in the pasta pesto was not al dente. A little over. And the pesto lacked that brightness of basil dining companion expected. He thought the pesto was maybe from frozen? It had a weird slimy texture. Like baby food.
My ravioli were, on the other hand, a touch under. Filled with blue cheese and butternut squash, they arrived on a sloppy plate with marinara, an oil slick, some burned sage some fried some twigs, and some little chunks/​some gratings of parmesan. So… I didnt notice menu saying blue cheese. To be fair I may have missed it. Blue cheese and marinara don’t go together nicely. Browned butter would have been better. Hold the tomato.
Some of the ravioli were really blue cheesey some werent. Super uneven. Some tasted better than others.
I pointed out that meant they were homemade cuz manufactured ravioli would be uniform, right?
Even though an adorable old lady next to us got birthday tiramisu that looked good, we skipped it.
Done.
Why three points?
Nice server lady.
Water carafe no waiting for water refills.
Reasonable pacing of food.
Food was hot. It had potential. (Yah I date like this too)
Bread was good with generous refill.
I may or may not go back. I’ll watch Unilocal reviews to see if things change for the better. A girl can be hopeful.
Dining companion disagrees. Says to tell you Noodles and Co has better pesto. Or go to Caro Amico or Piazza Italia.
He’s not completely wrong this time.

I’m really torn about the rating to give. Three stars feels a bit mean, but truly, I don’t think the place was worth four.
The food was… just okay.
The atmosphere was barely okay.
The waitstaff was okay.
The food was actually better the next day when I was home & there was salt to add to it. I had the Rigatoni Bolognese. It desperately needed salt. Husband had Fettuccini Alfredo & while he liked it, son & I tasted it, & we both thought the flavor was a bit off. Son said this lasagna was good. We split the antipasto plate before dinner. The meats were good, though not very plentiful, we didn’t enjoy the one kind of olive on the plate, & the chunks of cheese (Parmesan?) were horrible. Not an appetizer worth $ 10.
I also HATE having to ask to have my water refilled.
They had several flavors of Gelato, but none appealed to me. The guys said theirs were okay.
So overall, dinner was okay, & yes, we did have an appetizer, 3 dinners, & 2 small desserts, but it’s a little tough to mentally justify spending over $ 60 at a strip mall restaurant.
A few other reviewers compared this place to Piazza Italia in The Pearl, but Piazza NAILS the atmosphere & authenticity. Bellino’s falls a bit short.

To be honest, there’s not a lot of good Italian food in the area. I was very pleased to visit this place for the first time and have an excellent experience. The chef is really friendly and genuinely wants you to have a special experience in his restaurant.
I ordered the lunch special, which was spaghetti with calamari and clams in the shell. I honestly don’t know why I chose it, since I usually dislike clam sauce pasta. It turned out to be a surprisingly great decision! It was a light red sauce instead of the usual creamy white sauce in seafood pasta, and the spaghetti itself was very fresh.
I have heard some mixed reviews from other patrons, and the only answer I can think of is that most people are probably more used to American Italian food, which is heavier in flavor. I like that too (I eat Pizza Hut a lot haha), but it is very refreshing to have a real (and affordable) Italian restaurant in Hillsboro.

We found this nice little Italian place very close to us. Really good food and an amazing story of working hard to become chef and owner. They are very personable as well. They catered to us as if we were family. Very hard to find that nowadays.

We have been meaning to drop in, you know how you pass a place and think «We should try that…» but you never do? Well, they’ve been here 8 months. It’s right up the street, and I pass it all the time, but today, we decided, let’s just do it!
Glad we did. Pasta is the thick spaghetti, I prefer angel hair, but it was okay. The sauce was very good, and the meatballs are homemade. My daughter had the special, wow, house made spinach noodles with tomatoes and mozzarella – fresh mozzarella. Yummy.
Since it was our first visit, he supplied a salad, which we appreciated because we’d have split one. And it was good. The gelato was nice, and he also made for my husband a great ice cream coffee drink… He announced it was wonderful. We even got some Italian lessons!
Fun little place. I enjoyed it for lunch. The bread was wonderful.

Great food in a cute little café. The food is very authentic Italian! I had fettuccini alfredo with prawns. Lots of garlic and huge fresh prawns.
Their bread is super good and the Tiramisu is to die for.
I would have liked some fresh parm at the table and butter with the bread instead of olive oil — but I’ll just ask for that next time. Overall it was great — we will be back. I’m already thinking about another piece of that tiramisu!

3 stars out of 5 overall. Room to improve for sure.
Taste: 4 out of 5.
Service: 5 out of 5.
Odd-​factor: 2 out of 5. :(Sorry.
I decided to stop in for some dinner out and came across this place… They’ve just been open for less than a week! Figured.“Why not give it a shot? Pasta sounds good.” My usual stops are Thai Princess or Kokiyo Teriyaki.
First impressions: TV showing a soccer match in Spanish? Really? I thought wait a second. Is this place an Italian restaurant, or what? Ok. «Pasta & Café». Not Italian restaurant. Ok give them a pass on that one.
Meal: Spaghetti cooked aldente just the way I like it. Meatballs tasted fresh. Tasty sauce. No complaints on taste. One thing that bugged me though is that a soup or salad wasn’t included with the entrée. Or even the option for a $ 2 side-​salad.
Dining room: Tables are great I like the black cloth and the chairs were comfortable. I dunno… maybe I expect a little Italian music or lights on a dimmer… but I keep forgetting «Pasta & Café»…not Italian restaurant… The fridges in view with all the bottled beverages… I have mixed feelings about… it’s not a 7-​Eleven folks!
If I’m in the mood for some pasta, good bread, olive oil & balsamic. I’ll come back for a visit. Otherwise I’ll wait to head over to the Old Spaghetti factory for a more authentic Italian meal. :) The food is good don’t get me wrong… beats frozen pasta meals from the grocery… but the whole package just left me wondering…“What are they going for here? — other than high margins? (Pasta & Coffee drinks)”