Italian L.a.

The Fresca Generation

Evan Kleiman’s Angeli Caffè crystallized the affinity of Angelenos for casual Italian cooking — the spaghetti alla checca, roast chicken and minimally garnished pizza that a Sienese teenager might eat for dinner at the trattoria down the block on the nights his mother didn’t feel like turning on the stove, but which was essentially unobtainable to those of us on this side of the sea. The books Kleiman co-authored with Viana LaPlace — Cucina Fresca, Pasta Fresca, Cucina Rustica— were immediately absorbed into the database of every caterer and deli-case manager in America, and her aesthetic of simple, accessible freshness became our aesthetic. Suddenly, one out of three restaurants on the Westside turned into a neo-Tuscan caffè, and the city, then the nation, became awash in warm panini, salads dressed with balsamic vinegar, spaghetti aglio e olio, tiramisu, biscotti — almost none of which were even remotely up to the standard set by Angeli’s rustic simplicity. The restaurant’s heat may be decades behind it, and Kleiman’s repertory of artisanal olive oils, summertime bread salads and goat cheese pizzas may no longer be novel, but sometimes there is no place you would rather be than behind a table at Angeli, contemplating a glass of Sangiovese and starting in on a plateful of ravioli with melted butter and sage. And they deliver! 7274 Melrose Ave., L.A., (323) 936-9086.

Location Info

Map

Valentino Restaurant

3115 Pico Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90405

Category: Restaurant > Italian

Region: Santa Monica

Photos

0 user reviews	Write A Review

Related Content

• The Taco Madness Tournament Returns to L.A. Taco
  March 22, 2013
• Father's Day Food Drink Specials
  June 14, 2013
• A Six-Stop Los Angeles Burger Tour for National Burger Day
  May 28, 2013
• 10 Best L.A. Restaurants That Closed in 2012: An Elegy in 10 Parts
  December 27, 2012
• What's In Season at the Farmers Market: Giant Purple Artichokes from Suncoast Farms
  March 8, 2013

More About

• Mauro Vincenti
• Nancy Silverton
• Venice (Italy)
• Main Dish Recipes
• Ethnic and Regional Cuisines

Radicchio Bunker

When Madeo first opened two decades ago, it was noted for a dish of wilted local dandelion greens — I always imagined the Vietina brothers, who own the place, picking them from a neglected corner of their lawn each morning. Madeo, an understated industry hangout a few blocks from Cedars-Sinai, resembles a businessmen’s restaurant in one of the northern suburbs of Rome, from its shiny, vaguely disco-era décor to its bunker-like location a few steps below the street, from the food-laden display tables to the effortless grooming of its lunchtime customers. It’s not a culinary destination, exactly — the famous specialty is simple roast veal, and they sell a lot of linguine with clams — but there is an air of satisfied calm about the place that comes with everybody knowing they are going to eat well: spaghetti with shavings of bottarga, dried mullet roe; the tomatoey fish stew caccuccio, which is the Tuscan ancestor of California-style cioppino; and grilled langoustine fragrant enough to perfume the room with garlic. The blistery pizza is fine. And you can’t miss with the gnocchi — luscious, featherweight clouds of pure potato flavor, dressed with pesto, tomato sauce with basil, or a slightly gooey Gorgonzola cream. The dandelion greens, alas, are no longer on the menu. 8897 Beverly Blvd., W. Hlywd., (310) 859-4903.

Over a Barrel

La Botte is named after a wine barrel, paneled with former wine casks, and is as thick with actual wine bottles as your niece’s room may be with Bratz paraphernalia. The wine list is a serious one, the kind where you feel a little like a kid whose ball has been taken away if you lack the bank balance to play around with $156 bottles of Serpico or verticals of Amarone. Antonio Mure’s cooking — hearty, wintery north Italian stuff like stuffed pheasant, taglioline with crumbles of quail sausage, fried sweetbreads with polenta, or spaghetti tossed with lentils — seems almost engineered to bring the best out of a young Brunello or a bottle of San Leonardo, a Friuli red with the muscular presence of Sassicaia. Coda alla vaccinara, the famous Roman oxtail dish, is superb, large, pillowy hunks of tail nestling into soft, yellow puddles of polenta, gooey on gooey and rich on rich — exactly what you want with a glass of Barolo if somebody else is paying. Is Mure’s cooking, which you also may have tasted at Piccolo in Venice or Wilson in Culver City, a bit severe for the sybaritic climate of Santa Monica? Perhaps. But it also may be just what we need. 620 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 576-3072.

Glub

Fish, man — raw fish — from Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market and jetted right to you, careful slabs of yellowtail, tuna, fluke, sprinkled with salt and drizzled with olive oil, Italian sashimi on a pretty glass plate. Il Grano’s crudo, Italian sashimi, hasn’t the pleasure in it that you’ll find at, say, David Pasternack’s Esca in midtown Manhattan — there isn’t the pinpoint marination, the balance of flavors, the grind of salt matched exactly to the texture of each fish — but the sourcing is careful and the presentation is true, and when you try Sal Marino’s squid ink pasta with sea urchin (also an Esca dish), the particular brininess of the unirings clear. 11359 Santa Monica Blvd., W.L.A., (310) 477-7886.

Black Sheep

Brentwood, it has been noted, is as thick with neo-Tuscan restaurants as the Casbah is with spice merchants, streets built on arugula salad and paved with tagliata, awash with herbed roast chickens, pizza margherita and bean soup. Sor Tino, Osteria Latini, Pizzicotto, Toscana, Palmeri, Divino, La Scala Presto — they may not, as has been rumored, all feed into a secret communal kitchen, but I would defy most people to tell the cooking apart blindfolded. Pecorino, at the eastern end of the strip, shares more than a few characteristics with these pleasant, nondescript dining rooms. You will not be deprived of your burrata, your giant steak or your tiramisu. But the cuisine is at least nominally that of the Abruzzi, southeast of Rome, and the bean soup is made with puréed chickpeas — delicious. There is an abundance of cherry tomatoes in everything from the marjoram-scented sauce on the eggplant-stuffed tortelloni to the salt cod with rosemary, and both artichokes and the namesake sheep cheese are ubiquitous — in the stewed tripe, over the carpaccio and in the egg-enriched casserole of lamb. 11604 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood, (310) 571-3800.