Most Cannoli in Orlando Are Not Worth Ordering
Walk into most Italian restaurants in the Orlando area and the cannoli you get is a pre-filled tube that has been sitting in a cooler for hours. The shell is soggy. The filling tastes like sweetened cream cheese. It bears almost no resemblance to what you would eat in Sicily, where cannoli are filled to order and the shell shatters when you bite into it. That is the standard, and almost nobody in Orlando meets it.
Ciao Italia Ristorante is one of the few places in Orlando where cannoli are treated with the respect the dessert deserves. The shells are crispy and golden, and the ricotta cream filling is smooth, sweet, and made in-house. When you crack through the shell and hit that filling, you understand why this dessert has survived centuries of Italian cooking. It is simple, but only when done right.
What Makes a Real Cannoli
A proper cannoli starts with the shell. It needs to be fried until it is deeply golden and structurally sound enough to hold the filling without bending. The filling is a mixture of fresh ricotta, powdered sugar, and sometimes a touch of vanilla or citrus zest. The key is texture: the ricotta has to be drained and whipped until it is light and creamy, not dense or grainy. At Ciao Italia, the Navarra family has been making them the same way since 1991, and the consistency is what keeps people coming back.
The restaurant sits at 6149 Westwood Blvd, just minutes from SeaWorld and the Orange County Convention Center. It is the kind of neighborhood Italian restaurant where the family is in the kitchen every night, which is exactly the kind of place where a dessert like cannoli gets made properly instead of ordered from a food service catalog.
