Longtime Myrtle Beach-area restaurateur opens new pizzeria in Pawleys Island
The owner of Bellissimo Italian Pizzeria in Conway is embarking on her next restaurant adventure this fall. After selling Bellissimo earlier this year, she’s opening a new business down in Pawleys Island.
Rose Misseri plans to open Rosie’s Pizzeria close to Thanksgiving. The Post & Courier Myrtle Beach first reported on the business’ plans last month. This is Misseri’s third restaurant she’s owned in the area. Her other previous restaurant, which she sold at the same time as Bellissimo, was The Original Valentino Italian Restaurant in Surfside Beach. She’d originally gotten out of the restaurant business to relax and focus on her kids, but after a year at home, she wanted to get back to work.
Misseri said Rosie’s will focus on having the freshest ingredients possible. If it comes prepackaged in a can, she doesn’t want it anywhere near the restaurant, as she’s had to tell her suppliers repeatedly.
“This has been in my blood because my grandma, my grandmother, she’s the one who taught me the cooking,” said Misseri, who was born in Sicily, Italy. She moved here when she was 12 and was raised by her grandparents. “We used to make a lot of homemade pasta. Homemade bread. Made sauce from scratch where you do your own canning and jars. That’s how I learned all my cooking. I never went to culinary school.”
The menu will also focus on simplicity, using the fewest ingredients possible to let them all shine, Misseri said.
“A lot of (restaurants) used too many herbs. I hate when they use all those herbs. You don’t need to,” she said. In many cases, all an Italian recipe needs is garlic, basil and olive oil, she attests. “You don’t need all those extras. You are going to ruin the taste of your tomatoes, the taste of your pasta.”
Like so many businesses, Misseri has struggled with supply-chain issues as she’s tried to get the restaurant open. It tooks weeks to get her pizza oven. The first two she ordered showed up broken. The third only arrived a few days ago, and she just got it installed. Her original plans to open the restaurant by the beginning of November have now been pushed back to either just before or right after Turkey Day.
The restaurant will obviously serve lots of pizza, but Misseri plans to also offer subs and pastas. Her personal favorite is Rosie’s Special Pizza: white pizza with cheese, spinach, broccoli and blackened chicken.
This is Misseri’s first foray into opening a restaurant in Pawleys Island, and it’s dozens of miles away from Surfside Beach and Conway where her last two businesses were. But, in just a few weeks there, she’s already fallen in love with the area.
“It was like I was like I was in Sicily,” Misseri said. “In Sicily, (people) come and introduce themselves and say, ‘Hi, how are you? How’s everything? If you need any help and here’s my number.’ They’re the same way here! They’re actually pretty nice.”
Rosie’s Pizzeria is also her biggest restaurant yet, which is intentional. The other two didn’t have a lot of seating, so it made it hard for people to bring big families to eat there.
“I had a lot of families that would come in and they were disappointed,” she said. “I didn’t want a bigger restaurant, but all my customers that follow me, they’d always tell me, ‘If you get a bigger place, I can bring my whole family here because I love to come there and eat dinner there.’”
Rosie’s Pizzeria will be located at 10225 Ocean Highway on Pawleys Island.
This story was originally published November 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
