Italian L.a.

The 20 Best

Comments (0) By Jonathan Gold Tuesday, Feb 6 2007

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Crust Never Sleeps

Can there be a substance on the planet more delicious than a pizza pie from Casa Bianca straight out of the oven, a crisp, pliable crust speckled with burnt bits of cornmeal, slightly acid tomato sauce, a gooey mantle of cheese, optimally with nubs of house-made sausage and a handful of deep-fried eggplant sticks scattered over the surface? Does anything go better with a glass of sour red wine or a bottle of Moretti beer? Is it worth waiting an hour in line for a crack at the wedge-of-iceberg-lettuce salad encrusted with chopped olives and tomatoes, the salad whose DNA is borrowed by every steak house in town? Casa Bianca, run since the early 1950s by former oil painter Sam Martorana (who obviously transferred his artistry to the crust) and his wife, Jennie, is the premier checked-tablecloth restaurant in Los Angeles, a monument founded on dough. The pasta is authentically of the 1950s and the mushrooms on the pizza are canned, if that sort of thing bothers you, but no matter: Casa Bianca is a city treasure. When Barack Obama attended nearby Occidental College, people say, his favorite Casa Bianca pie was the one with pineapple and ham.1650 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock, (323) 256-9617.

Location Info

Map

Valentino Restaurant

3115 Pico Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90405

Category: Restaurant > Italian

Region: Santa Monica

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Not the Olive Garden

The Slow Food guys would be horrified. I’m sort of surprised myself. But I am begrudgingly fond of the C&O Trattoria by the Venice Pier, a vast, beachy warren of tented patios teeming with families, beach dwellers, college kids and everybody else trying to squeeze the maximum amount of fun from a minimum amount of money. The house Chianti, which you draw yourself from coolers set around the perimeter of each dining room, is served on the honor system, and is drinkable. Most of your calories will be consumed in the form of so-called “killer garlic rolls,” which arrive hot at your table at approximately 30-second intervals. Appetizers and pastas are big enough to share; if you chip in a couple bucks extra for the “gargantuan” portion, they’re big enough to share with a lot of people. And although sauces tend to be on the creamy side, the quality of the cooking is higher than you would imagine it would be at a place that is obviously more about mass feeding than fine dining — linguine with lobster that doesn’t taste like something out of a drum; Sicilian chicken salad that is at least as much chicken as salad; and vast platters of overfried calamari that disappear as quickly as pistachio nuts. 31 Washington Blvd., Marina del Rey, (310) 823-9491.

My Own Private Tuscany

Tuscany, the mammoth Italian province most famous for Gucci, the Renaissance and Da Vinci Code tours, has a cuisine that stretches from steak to beans and back again. You will occasionally find vegetables in a Tuscan restaurant, a roasted bird or two, and pasta sauced with the remnants of a wild boar. But mostly there is meat. It is not accidental that Solociccia, where celebrity butcher Dario Cecchini serves up to a dozen courses of meat in a single meal, is located in the heart of Tuscany. Located in the heart of Little Tuscany, a Brentwood neighborhood where you are never farther than a block or two from a $400 sweater or a bowl of spaghetti pomodoro, Toscana pumps out plate after plate of steak and beans, as well as the tricolor salads, flattened chickens and four-cheese pizza that have come to define “Tuscan” cooking in Los Angeles. Toscana’s imitators are legion. But the alpha wolf of Los Angeles Tuscan is probably Ago, co-owned by Toscana czar Agostino Sciandri and a host of Hollywood dudes including the Weinstein brothers and Robert De Niro, where it all comes down to steak and beans: big, juicy, profoundly blackened ribeyes and fiorentini grilled in the smoky wood oven. Night after night, Ago is as packed as the Donatello room at the Uffizi on a summer afternoon. 8478 Melrose Ave., W. Hlywd., (323) 655-6333.

It’s a Man’s World

Matteo’s is the most beautiful living restaurant from Hollywood’s golden age, lipstick-red booths, clown paintings, leopard-print carpet and all. The flattering pink light makes the aging Sammy Glicks who frequent the joint look almost dewy, which is why they’ve been coming here since 1963, to listen to Sinatra, eat steak Sinatra and stare lovingly at the oil portrait of Sinatra hung over what may or may not be his usual table. Don Dickman, the former chef of the innard-intensive Santa Monica trattoria Rocca, was brought in to sweep the cobwebs from the menu, so in addition to the familiar roll call of New Jersey Italian cooking, there are Dickman’s masculine takes on regional Italian cuisine: sunny-side-up eggs rolled in coarse bread crumbs and fried crisp around pencil-thin asparagus; a Little Italy–style pasta Norcina with gooey pockets of sausage, roasted peppers and molten mozzarella; and spaghetti carbonara made with the real, authentically stinky bits of cured hog jowl that are essential to any true conception of the dish. As at Rocca, Dickman’s ideas are too often sabotaged by sloppiness in execution — short ribs were undercooked and chewy rather than melting and luscious, and a dish of scallops was way overcooked — but it is all done so cheerfully that you wish the restaurant well. The wine list has been colonized by the Italophile mysterians over at Wine Expo, which means that it is rich in Bonardas and short on Merlot. This is a good thing. 2321 Westwood Blvd., Wstwd., (310) 475-4521.