The 20 Best L.A. Italian Restaurants – Part 2 of 10
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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 a ubiquitous 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.
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Vincenti, of course, is heir 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 mini shrine 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 (roasted suckling pig) 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.
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| Source: Originally published by L. A. Weekly – ©2007 L. A. Weekly |
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