The 20 Best L.A. Italian Restaurants – Part 3 of 10
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Degustation Non Est Disputandum
My favorite Italian restaurants tend to serve perfected country dishes, rustic vegetables and grilled meats that replicate what a gifted grandmother might prepare for dinner in her Umbrian fireplace. But Angelo Auriano's food at Valentino is as far from home cooking as any French chef's: complicated little packets of handkerchief pasta folded around ragouts of braised capon, veal and quail; a delicate risotto, perfectly all'onda, stirred with crunchy minced apple and a pair of tiny veal kidneys; dime-size Mediterranean octopuses in a chile-tinged broth that resonates against the acidity of cold Ligurian wine with a fuzzy bit of sustain Hendrix might have admired. No grandmother is ever going to arrange dense slivers of smoked eel from Lake Garda into a still life with shavings of cerignola olives, garlic cream and a bit of citrus pulp, or scent marinated yellowtail with a few drops of basil oil and sea bottom-pungent shavings of dried mullet roe, or stuff agnolotti with wild boar and garnish it with cured pig cheek and fiasco-simmered beans.
Valentino has always been one of the most controversial restaurants in Los Angeles, loved by foodies who claim to have eaten the best meals of their lives in the dimly lit dining room and loathed by people who claim that the restaurant is a con job, a stuffy, Amarone-lubricated machine designed to separate fools from their wallets. I have at times fallen into both camps — it can be difficult to coax the best from Valentino, and my two meals there before the last one, eaten at a time when chefs were rotating through the kitchen faster than minimum-wage fry cooks at the local Burger King, were pretty bad. But with the return of Auriano, who presided over the kitchen in its best days, the cooking is once again up to the level of owner Piero Selvaggio's massive wine list. Suddenly, although Valentino is quite expensive, the $85 tasting menu (and you're missing the point if you order anything else) seems almost reasonable compared to the $100+ menus at places like Providence, Sona and Ortolan.
3115 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 829-4313.
Cal-Ital
You will never find cooking exactly like Gino Angelini's in Italy, where the greens tend to be tougher, the rabbits plumper, the basil more pungent and the best beef leaner than it is in California. Pigeon in Italy tends to have the stink of the forest about it, even when it is raised instead of hunted, and ducks are pretty low in fat. A good chef in Italy probably wouldn't use balsamic vinegar unless he happened to be cooking in the Modena area, and it would be rare for a reputable menu to include both Genovese pesto and osso buco alla Milanese. When the late Mauro Vincenti installed Angelini behind the stoves at Rex nearly a decade ago, he was already an accomplished chef in coastal Tuscany, and he brought with him an individual Italian cuisine unlike anything else that had been served in Los Angeles. What Angelini is attempting at La Terza may be no less than re-imagining California food through the prism of his advanced Italian technique, re-imagining California as an Italian province that happens to have a few agricultural virtues of its own, produce that translates into supple pastas, complex salads and the subtle vegetable purees with which Angelini enriches his sauces. And look at those meats: glistening, wood-smoke-infused slabs of pork belly; drippingly rich duck with figs; mahogany-skinned squab enveloping a rich stuffing of shiitake mushrooms and its own liver. Sometimes there is even trifolata, a traditional Italian stew of kidneys, melted down in warm olive oil and simmered in red wine. In Viareggio, trifolata may just be lunch. In Los Angeles, it is a revelation.
8384 W. Third St., L.A., (323) 782-8384.
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| Source: Originally published by L. A. Weekly – ©2007 L. A. Weekly |
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