Bella Italia Ristorante - SUN PEAKS

The service was friendly but that 's the best I can say about this place. Everything tasted like it came from a box or jar. We had the Caesar salad to start which was ok. The pizza pretty sure it was frozen, premade flatbread for crust. My husband wasn 't impressed. I ordered the Lemon chicken. The description of the chicken on the menu is this: Tender Chicken Breast with Lemon Butter Caper Sauce served with Creamy Risotto and Cheese baked Tomato . What arrived was a tiny, rubbery, tough piece of chicken accompanied by grainy risotto that had a crust around it, both covered in a gluey sauce with a smattering of capers. The cheese baked tomato had a couple of slices of cheese that burned and hardened rather than melted with three asparagus spears. The only redeeming quality of the meal was the asparagus. My first meal in Sun Peaks and Bella Italia did not represent a very promising future for other meals.

There are only a few restaurants in the village at Sun Peaks, and this one was fine. The service was good and the food was OK.

The owners are so sweet and accommodating, the atmosphere is cozy and inviting. The artwork is interesting and captivating. They make all their pasta daily, so if you've got your heart set on something and it's a busy night, come earlier in the evening, otherwise you may miss out! The staff show enthusiasm and are great conversationalists which makes you feel welcomed, it's nice when you can tell they enjoy their job because then you know you're supporting a great business.

Starter spinach salad was nice. But after that, it was all downhill. My glass of white wine came warm. I had to ask the server for a bucket of ice to cool it down. So I ended up with 3 oz of warm wine, 3 oz of cool wine, and 3 oz of properly chilled wine. I should have just insisted on a replacement glass at the start live and learn. Our server told me, after I had ordered the Spanish Chicken with polenta, that the restaurant was out of polenta. She offered extra vegetables as an alternative, which sounded great. However, the extra vegetables turned out to be extra tomato sauce with a lot of olives. I am a committed olive lover, but calling dozens of olives in tomato sauce extra vegetables was a stretch, and not really that palatable. My husband ordered pasta with meatballs. He was fairly certain that the meatballs were the frozen kind, of the Costco persuasion. Sad that the standard for food is so low in Sun Peaks it is actually difficult to go out for a nice meal!

Mid-Summer lack of business led to very poor quality food. Old prawns on an otherwise boring salad. There was no effort in making this special. It looked like they poured the lettuce out of a bag and set some tired prawns on top. Not a lot of other options in the summer though.