Get By With the Help of My Friends

Just try to catch the owner between the lunch and dinner rush, “There are no in-betweens since we started doing these grand reopening specials this week,” a smiling Tom Moloughney exclaimed. Moloughney is the owner of Nauna’s Bella Casa, the Italian eatery and Montclair institution, which was closed by a roof fire on July 5^th. “But the good news is that it gets worse,” he added. “ By tonight there will be lines out the door.”

Moloughney was thankful for these kinds of problems after spending the last month orchestrating the repair and renovation to the restaurant that has been opened for 26 years before the fire. When the insurance company informed him that the investigations, inspections and rebuilding would take two to three months, Moloughney responded, “If I waited for the insurance company, we wouldn’t be open yet. My priority was to get my staff back to work and paid again because they were out for a whole month. I am funding everything myself until the insurance company pays and I’m in up to about $140,000."

Moloughney thanks his friends and family, many of them licensed contractors, who stepped up to work all hours to get the restaurant reopened in such a short time.

In order to get the customers right back once Nauna’s was reopened, Moloughney decided to offer $4.99 dinners for chicken parmigiana, penne vodka, or a large pizza, have tee-shirt give aways and charge only fifty-cents for a slice of their award-winning pizza. The special offers will end after Thursday. “Tuesday alone we sold close to 300 chicken parmigiana dinners. That’s close to ten times more than on a regular day. We made 400 pounds of chicken today and we probably made over 1000 pizzas in the last two days,” according to Moloughney.

As an added attraction, Nauna’s offered a free, 42-inch, plasma screen television to the 1000^th customer who came in since the reopening. Indicative of how busy the restaurant has been, the television was awarded on Tuesday evening, somewhere between 8:45 PM and 9:00PM to John Sweeney of Montclair.

Moloughney continued, “I went the extra mile to replace the pizza ovens that were destroyed by the smoke and water damage. We now have a state of the art, four-tier pizza oven that makes 28 pizzas at one time, continuously rotating them, without taking any shortcuts. We also still have our big steam kettle for our signature marinara sauce. There is no direct flame under our sauce so you can never over cook it. It has a steam jacket around it to keep it at the right temperature constantly."

Many of the recipes came from Moloughney’s mother’s family who were Italian. Those recipes, in addition to the recipes of his chefs, were always evolving since the first Nauna’s opened across the street on Valley Road. “Talk about getting by with the help of my friends,” he concluded. “It’s nice to know that my friends, family, staff and customers were all there to help us get through this.”