LA Weekly

Imagine your first trip to Italy, the stumbling journey through the airport, the long train ride into Rome, the jet-lagged taxi ride to your hotel. After a quick shower, you realize that the lunch hour is drawing to a close, so you walk a block or two in any direction and settle into a random trattoria; it really doesn’t matter which one. The wine is white, sweetish and slightly fizzy — you weren’t really given a wine list, it more or less appeared — and the bread is milder, yet more profoundly wheaty, than any bread you remember having tasted. The prosciutto — it’s like you’ve never tasted ham before; what an aroma!

And when the pasta comes — lemon linguine, penne carbonara, spaghetti with clams — the flavors are clear, sharp, almost animal, and Rome’s golden afternoon light looks as if it is generated from within. That is the moment of clarity we are looking for in Italian restaurants, and some of us will do almost anything to experience it again.

According to a recent survey, there are 568,000 Italians in the Los Angeles area, making it the fifth-largest Italian community in the United States, ahead of San Francisco, St. Louis and other cities far better known for their thriving Italian neighborhoods. Before Prohibition, Italian winemakers made Southern California the most prolific wine-growing area in the world. Yet there hasn’t really been a Little Italy in Los Angeles since Chinatown displaced it in the ’30s, and there is no suburb as uniquely Italian as, say, Monterey Park is Chinese.

If you were looking for California Italian food in its original form, you could drive up to Bakersfield, where Luigi’s, not far from the old train station, still maintains its century-old menu in a fragrant old dining room decorated with team photographs of Bakersfield high school football teams, a place where your lunch choices basically come down to pasta, beans, or pasta with beans. In the Port of Los Angeles, Canetti’s, gorgeous in its plainness, is the last of the old Italian restaurants that fed the once-substantial San Pedro fishing fleet, although unless you come for the mackerel and pasta fazool it serves on Friday evenings, the only Italian thing you’re going to find on the menu is the sausage you can get with your scrambled eggs in the morning.

In Chicago and New York, the fanciest restaurants tended to be French; here, they could be Scandinavian, Belgian, Italian — or even be famous for their fried chicken. The old Chianti on Melrose may have been the first luxury Italian restaurant in America when it was founded 70 years ago by Romeo Salta, who went on to open the first high-end ristorante in Manhattan. Perino’s, the swankest restaurant of old Hollywood, was Italian. Rex was the grandest restaurant Los Angeles has ever seen. Italian dining in Los Angeles has always been a fantasy, a triumph of self-invention. And that’s just the way we like it.

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The 20 Best


Numero Uno

If you want to know why Vincenti may be the single best Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, you could do worse than to try a plate of burrata and prosciutto, a dish that sounds so dull on paper that I almost stopped my daughter from ordering it the last time I had dinner in the restaurant. Burrata is a kind of cream-stuffed mozzarella that was basically unavailable outside Puglia until the El Monte cheesemaker Gioia started making it a few years ago, but these days it is almost a­ubiquitous local specialty, available in any Los Angeles Italian restaurant more serious than a sub shop. Prosciutto, while delicious, is one of the most standardized meat products on Earth, cured in enormous buildings that stretch the length of a football field, tens of thousands of hams hanging in strictly regimented rows. Your finest meats and cheeses? Sure. Yawn. Bring me another glass of prosecco.

But Vincenti’s Nicola Mastronardi serves his burrata in a state of freshness that can probably be measured in hours, if not minutes, just cool enough so that the slight acidity of the cheese is refreshing, but warm enough for maximum ooze. The prosciutto, aged 50 percent longer than usual and sliced transparently thin, is arranged in attractive ruffles around the cheese. A few drops of fragrant basil oil are sprinkled over the burrata, not quite enough to assert itself as a separate presence but enough to perfume it, marrying it to the cheesy, gamy sweetness of the meat and the slivers of oven-dried tomato that garnish the plate. Tossed together haphazardly, this dish is business-class airline food. Arranged like this, it is close to art.

Vincenti, of course, isheir to the Art Deco ’80s landmark Rex, which is still probably the most magnificent Italian restaurant ever to exist on American soil. Rex’s maestro was Mauro Vincenti, whose widow Maureen runs this restaurant in his honor, and keeps a photograph of him in a minishrine behind the hostess desk. Mastronardi cooked at Rex in its last months, as second to Gino Angelini, who opened Vincenti and went on to run La Terza and Osteria Angelini, which are both on this list.

Valentino is grander than Vincenti, La Terza flashier, and Giorgio Baldi draws a more famous clientele, but Vincenti feels like the spiritual center of fine Italian cooking in Los Angeles, its hearth. And befitting a hearth, much of the food here comes from the big, hardwood-burning ovens, flavored with the presence of smoke, of forests, stone chimneys and chilly afternoons — a scallop, say, sprinkled with bread crumbs and baked in its shell until it sizzles; a magnificent veal chop; soft curls of cuttlefish tucked into an herb salad; a whole, truffle-laced squab. The adjacent rotisserie turns out the best restaurant version of porchetta I have ever tasted in California — loin and belly are wrapped into a spiral, seasoned with fennel, and spit-roasted to a crackling, licorice-y succulence. It is certainly possible to eat several mediocre Italian meals elsewhere in this neighborhood for the price of a single superb one here. At these times, it is good to remember that on Monday nights, pizza also comes out of these ovens. 11930 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood, (310) 207-0127.