Italian food truck rolls into Bella Vista

Keith Bryant/The Weekly Vista Pasta A La Vista, located off U.S. Highway 71 in front of the Artist Retreat Center is open from 3 to 7 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday and is closed Sunday and Monday.
Keith Bryant/The Weekly Vista Pasta A La Vista, located off U.S. Highway 71 in front of the Artist Retreat Center is open from 3 to 7 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday and is closed Sunday and Monday.

Pasta A La Vista opened earlier this month outside the Artist Retreat Center, just off U.S. Highway 71.

The compact restaurant's chef, Randy McGuffin, said he's been in the restaurant business since he was 14 and he attended the Baltimore Culinary Institute roughly 30 years ago.

He previously ran the Blackboard Cafe on Riordan Road, a restaurant with blackboard menus that changed daily. He also had Basil's in Rogers for a few years, he explained.

More recently, McGuffin said he got into the food truck business when he opened The Crazy Pear, a health food focused truck in downtown Bentonville, with his girlfriend Sherri Simpkins, who he said makes this operation possible.

"I've had a lot of fun with it," he said.

But while he's run restaurants all over and set up a variety of global menus, McGuffin said he keeps coming back to Italian.

He recently redid the former health food truck, he explained, to build Pasta A La Vista.

The menu is entirely made to order, he said, and he makes everything fresh in-house.

"There's not a can in here, everything in here is from scratch," he said. "Every pasta is made to order by hand."

After cooking out of a truck, McGuffin said he doesn't intend to go back to a typical restaurant -- though he might build a bigger truck down the road.

There's a lot of work when the kitchen is a one-man-show, he said, but there's also a certain amount of peace that comes with cooking alone.

"All you do is create and cook," he said.

General News on 04/10/2019