Our wide-ranging restaurant critic Jonathan Gold returns to the Westside to take another bite out of Sotto.

Sotto is a different kind of Italian restaurant, a shrine to the awesome heat of its oven, a place where the hot, fresh bread can come with pureed lardo instead of olive oil if you like it that way. A special of pan frattau, a kind of Sardinian chilaquiles made with flatbread instead of stale tortillas, is fried with a butcher's bouquet of lamb's innards. And the bruschetta may be smeared not with olive paste but with ciccoli, a paste of lard pureed with pigskin that is one of the signature preparations of the Italian nose-to-tail thing. Samson and Pollack may be pizzaioli in public, but they really seem to be abattoir jocks instead.

Read the complete story in “Counter Intelligence: Meat lovers' pizza,” and check out Anne Fishbein's photo gallery. If it doesn't make you hungry for a “crisp, sauceless calzone, the size of a Fendi bag and stuffed with escarole, olives and a slug of creamy burrata cheese,” we dont know what will.

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