Comments (0) Best Pasta - 2012
Angelini Osteria
7313 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
323-297-0070
Walk through the doors of Angelini Osteria on Beverly Boulevard and you'll feel transported. We mean that literally, rather than as some stupid Travel + Leisure cliché. Because there is a real person sitting just inside the door, with a real reservations book. Because there are tables filled not with young women blogging their lunch instead of eating it but with men of a certain age drinking wine by the bottle — tables full of them, discussing politics over whole branzino. Because the servers look as if they've been there since the place opened in 2001, and maybe they have. (No tattoos. No goatees.) And because the pasta is the real thing, glorious stuff handmade in the back of the tiny restaurant: tagliolini and agnolotti, ravioli and tagliatelle and spaghetti alla chitarra. The supple, beautifully chewy pasta arrives at your table in vaguely nostalgic iterations, loaded with duck ragu or sauces built with cream and lots of Parmigiano-Reggiano. (Chef-owner Gino Angelini is from Emilia Romagna.) Maybe it will be topped with shaved black truffles. Maybe it will be filled with Swiss chard and ricotta. But either freshly made or dried, and thus imported from Italy, it will be utterly marvelous. Even, um, transporting. 7313 Beverly Blvd., Fairfax District. (323) 297-0070, angeliniosteria.com.
—Amy Scattergood
