Where to Eat Now: New to the List

Santa Monica/Brentwood

Joe's PizzaWhen we lived in Greenwich Village, my daughter and I stopped at least a couple of times a week by Joe's Pizza on our walks home from school. Isabel would get a cheese slice, and I would spring the extra few bits for a slice made with fresh mozzarella instead of the traditional aged stuff. Now there is a brand-new branch of Joe's Pizza in downtown Santa Monica, wedged in next to a yogurt stand, looking as if it has been holding down the location since Taxi Driver was in first run. Joe's basic cheese slice, ballasted with sweetish tomato sauce and annealed with a microthin cincture of cheese, is as authentically New York City as the smell of the West Fourth subway station in mid-August. When it's available, the slice with juicy, fresh mozzarella is actually better than it is at the Village original, where the cheese is blasted into flat, white ovals, and the Sicilian slice, like oily foccacia glazed with tomato sauce and cheese, is first rate. 111 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 395-9222 or www.joespizza.com. Sun.-Thurs. 10 a.m.-mid., Fri.-Sat. 10 a.m.-2 a.m. No alcohol. Delivery. Street parking and nearby public lot. Cash only. Pizzeria.

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Orochon Ramen

123 S. Onizuka St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Category: Restaurant > Japanese

Region: Downtown

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Pitfire Pizza Company

108 W. Second St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Category: Restaurant > Pizza

Region: Downtown

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• Culver City
• Christiano Bollini
• Santa Monica
• Thai Food and Cooking
• Meat

La Botte 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. Lunch Fri. 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m.; dinner daily 5:30-10:30 p.m. Beer, wine. Valet parking. Major CC. Italian.

Pecorino 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 tiramisú. 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. Lunch Mon.-Sat. 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; dinner Mon.-Thu. 5:30-10:30 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 5:30-11 p.m., Sun., 5-10 p.m. Beer, wine. Valet parking. Major CC. Italian.

Warszawa Los Angeles isn't exactly Chicago or Greenpoint, Brooklyn, when it comes to Polish cooking — the local Polish community just isn't that big. But you can find Polish salamis and cured meats at any number of Eastern European delicatessens, or even the East Hollywood location of Jon's supermarket. Warszawa in Santa Monica, one of the better Eastern European restaurants in the country, is more refined, a bit expensive and quite delicious: crackly skinned roast duck, the hunter's stew called bigos, and about a million different kinds of vodka to wash it all down with. 1414 Lincoln Blvd., Venice, (310) 393-8831. Tues.-Sat. 6-11 p.m., Sun. 5-10 p.m. Full bar. Street parking. Major CC. Polish.

Marina del Rey/Venice

Antica Pizzeria L.A.'s notorious sushi-bar Nazis have nothing on Pepe Miele, the proprietor of Antica Pizzeria above the Gelson's in Marina del Rey and, more importantly, the man who brought the elaborate bylaws of the Vera Pizza Napoletana movement from Naples to the United States. As far as I know, Miele has never booted anybody from the premises for daring to order a pizza with duck sausage and goat cheese, but I suspect it could happen. If you get to Miele's pizza the second it emerges from the oven, there is a faint smokiness to the crust, and a mild crisp skin that yields to a pleasant, bready chewiness underneath. Even if you prefer muscular Brooklyn-style pies, the crust is unimpeachable. Still, the rigor of the basic structure is not necessarily carried through when it comes to the rest of the pie. The basic margherita tends to become soggy by the time it makes it to the table, and a topping of sausage and broccoli rabe just lays there like yesterday's spinach — you need to cook those particular ingredients together to bring out their succulence, not just toss precooked clumps onto a freshly baked crust. 13455 Maxella Ave., Marina Del Rey, (310) 577-8182. Sun.-Thurs. 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 11:30 a.m.-10:30 p.m.Beer, wine. Lot parking. Major CC. Italian.