Tucked away behind the Hi-Lo grocery store on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain and surrounded by a colorful mural is Bella Luna Restaurant and the Milky Way Lounge.

Nearly every inch of the restaurant’s walls and furniture, including the appetizer plates, are also painted in vibrant hues.

People have been flocking to Bella Luna Restaurant since it opened in November 1993. The restaurant serves nearly 70,000 customers a year, said Sarah Clapham, a JP resident and dining room manager at the restaurant. “JP is a warm, nurturing and open-minded community, and it doesn’t feel like Boston at all.

“You won’t ever see a McDonald’s in JP,” Clapham added.

The restaurant’s four owners – Pierre Apollon, Carol Downs, Katherine Mainzer and Charlie Rose – made the leap into the restaurant world after working to stop violence in the nonprofit arena, Clapham said.

Bella Luna started as a 19-seat facility serving gourmet pizzas, sandwiches and salads. Since 1993, the restaurant has expanded three times. Today, the restaurant can seat 40 people upstairs in its bistro-style atmosphere and 70 people in the downstairs Milky Way Lounge.

“We can hold as many as 200 people for a party in the Milky Way,” Clapham said.

The Milky Way has a bar, a stage, a dance floor, a DJ booth, pool tables and candlepin bowling.

“Bella Luna is great,” said Catherine Williams, a JP resident and a graduate student in the College of Communication. “They have the best gourmet pizza in town and the coolest bar ever.”

The Milky Way Lounge ‘ Lanes features a retro-meets-outer-space decorum in the basement, different from the celestial feel of the upstairs dining room. The bowling alley features seven lanes with original wooden ball returns. As you walk down the stairs from the restaurant, past the bar and toward the waitress stand, you can look through picture windows and see the 70-year-old machinery that runs the lanes, with candlepins nesting and ready for the next round.

Facilities Manager Dave Geschwind said candlepin bowling is for anyone to play and enjoy.

“These lanes have been around since 1914, and no one has ever bowled a perfect score in candlepin bowling,” Geschwind said. “It isn’t as easy as it looks.”

The orange and green bowling balls are only four inches in diameter and weigh less than four pounds. The balls do not have holes for your fingers like regular bowling balls. A bowler gets three chances to clear the pins.

“The great thing about Bella Luna and the Milky Way Lounge is that we are a restaurant with a bowling alley, not a bowling alley that serves food,” Geschwind said.

Geschwind said that Bella Luna and the Milky Way Lounge are good places to hang out because it is “eclectic [and] there is activity going on all around you.

“It is fun, and you can have a friendly competition, all under one roof.” With nightly entertainment, there is something for everyone.

Upstairs in the dining room, Molly and Scott Wetterschneider were surrounded by stars hanging from the ceiling and the soft glow of the lights as they ate dinner.

Molly, a COM graduate student, and Scott said they heard about Bella Luna from a friend.

“I wouldn’t come out to JP every weekend, but this was fun,” she said. For dessert, the couple had the Pan-Seared Peanut Butter Pound Cake Sandwich, a new specialty from Chef Omar Jae Ramirez.

“This is something Elvis would eat,” Scott Wetterschneider said.