Top Pesto Chef!

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Vincenti’s potato gnocchi with lobster, asparagus, cherry tomatoes and pesto

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Vincenti Ristorante

11930 San Vicente Blvd.
Brentwood, CA 90049

Category: Restaurant > Italian

Region: West L.A.

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• Genoa
• Nicola Mastronardi
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Still — there was Mastronardi's all-pesto dinner afterward, which included a grilled langoustine with pesto that reminded me of why I had named Vincenti the best Italian restaurant in Los Angeles in an extensive Weekly survey two years ago. Mastronardi can flat-out cook. And when I returned to the restaurant, eager to visit those sections of the menu that did not necessarily include pulverized basil, I remembered why I liked it so much. A composition of grilled squid and cuttlefish sang with the flavors of salt, clean ocean and smoke, unmarred by so much as a sliver of lemon zest or a scrap of parsley; each grain in the saffron-yellow risotto Milanese was distinct, slightly firm, bathed in a micrometer of creamy starch. There was wood-roasted pork shoulder cooked on the spit, crisp and savory, alive with fennel. And in the end, I was unable to stay away from Mastronardi's gnocchi with lobster and pesto — an unconventional sauce, less finely ground than the classic pesto he had made just the week before, less cheese-intensive, suaver but perhaps less elemental. I understood immediately that the changes were intentional, made to cosset the delicate butteriness of the lobster. Pesto is large. It contains multitudes.