Italian L.a.

The 20 Best

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Cal-Ital

You will never find cooking exactly like Gino Angelini’s in Italy, where the greens tend to be tougher, the rabbits plumper, the basil more pungent and the best beef leaner than it is in California. Pigeon in Italy tends to have the stink of the forest about it, even when it is raised instead of hunted, and ducks are pretty low in fat. A good chef in Italy probably wouldn’t use balsamic vinegar unless he happened to be cooking in the Modena area, and it would be rare for a reputable menu to include both Genovese pesto and osso buco alla Milanese. When the late Mauro Vincenti installed Angelini behind the stoves at Rex nearly a decade ago, he was already an accomplished chef in coastal Tuscany, and he brought with him an individual Italian cuisine unlike anything else that had been served in Los Angeles. What Angelini is attempting at La Terza may be no less than re-imagining California food through the prism of his advanced Italian technique, re-imaginingCalifornia as an Italian province that happens to have a few agricultural virtues of its own, produce that translates into supple pastas, complex salads and the subtle vegetable purées with which Angelini enriches his sauces. And look at those meats: glistening, wood-smoke-infused slabs of pork belly; drippingly rich duck with figs; mahogany-skinned squab enveloping a rich stuffing of shiitake mushrooms and its own liver. Sometimes there is even trifolati, a traditional Italian stew of kidneys, melted down in warm olive oil and simmered in red wine. In Viareggio, trifolati may just be lunch. In Los Angeles, it is a revelation. 8384 W. Third St., L.A., (323) 782-8384.

Location Info

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Valentino Restaurant

3115 Pico Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90405

Category: Restaurant > Italian

Region: Santa Monica

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Luxe, Calme et Mackerel

Like a Rolex, a Fendi baguette or a fitted Prada shift, Capo is an advertisement for itself, a raw-beamed icon of tasteful luxury so understated that a typical Giorgio Baldi regular might not see it as luxurious at all. The silver is French, the steak knives from an old Scarperia firm, the gaily painted bread plates from a Deruta workshop that has been making them for more than 500 years. The light is nuanced in the soaring, intimate dining room, falling in the glowing sheets that characterize Holbein paintings. The wine list, as rich in Burgundies and old California Cabernets as it is in Italian wines, is stunningly rich, including ancient vintages of Barolo that are basically unavailable anywhere else in town, although you can turn through pages and pages of it without finding much under $100 a bottle.

As at his old West Beach Café, which brought food, art and Westside trustifarians together in the ’80s, Bruce Marder may have created a restaurant more about curationthan about cuisine, but Capo is one of the most serious Italian kitchens in the United States, assembling peppery chicken alla diavolo, cooked in the fireplace, that is as thin and as crisp as a Chinese scallion pancake; lozenges of toasted polenta laminated with cellophane-thin slices of lardo; delicate ravioli stuffed with porcini; house-cured duck prosciutto; risottos made from scratch and a warm grilled-mackerel salad that could be the specialty of any two-star restaurant on the Mediterranean coast. You will pay for the privilege — course for course, this may be the most expensive restaurant in Santa Monica — but if you are comfortable shelling out $44 for a plate of simple grilled fish, Capo feels like the most delicious club you could join. 1810 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-5550.

Here There Be Dragos

Celestino Drago has been the king of pasta in Los Angeles since the day we all stopped eating SpaghettiOs, the duke of carpaccio, the baron of squid-ink risotto. His casual, pan-Italian yet rigorous cooking at his various dining rooms helped define the way Angelenos think about Italian food, and the late all-Sicilian restaurant l’Arancino, which some critics viewed as his mature statement of purpose, is still one of the most ambitious experiments in regional Italian cooking the city has ever seen. A lot of his early successes — beet risotto with goat cheese, spaghetti al cartoccio (cooked in parchment or foil), the supple tortelloni stuffed with sweet pumpkin — live on at the restaurants Celestino, Il Pastaio, Panzanella, all run by his brothers, and at his own elegant wine bar Enoteca Drago. He even supports a bakery.

But you will most often spot his mournful, bearded countenance at the seat of his empire, Drago, working the door, barking at a sous-chef, following a bit of roast venison or stewed boar out into the dining room as if he had shot it himself. Drago is a passionate hunter who can go on for hours about wild pigs in Northern California and birds in North Dakota, the many uses of hare blood and the sweetness of doves who fatten themselves on autumn fruits. Shot game is illegal in U.S. restaurants (except for imported Scottish game for some reason), so he isn’t likely to have killed what is on your plate, but the careful braising and sweet-and-sour flavors that are characteristic of Drago’s style really come into focus when he is stuffing boned-out quail with dense sausage, cooking pheasant with mushrooms for a pasta sauce or simmering boar until it all but collapses under its own molecular weight. 2628 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1585. Also Enoteca Drago, 410 N. Cañon Dr., Beverly Hills, (310) 786-8240; Celestino, 141 S. Lake Ave., (626) 795-4006, Pasadena; Il Pastaio, 400 N. Cañon Dr., Beverly Hills, (310) 205-5444; Panzanella, 14928 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, (818) 784-4400.