The ANNOTICO Report

The Los Angeles Times compiled a Special Section: LA's  Italian Love
Affair, 12 pages,
on Wednesday, March 9, containing:

Page 3: The Strands That Bind--The Secrets of Sublime Pasta
Page 4: Our Own Heirloom Original--Spigarello, A delicious Broccoli
Relative
Page 5: A Slow Celebration of  Pork--- New Menu Star: Porchetta
Page 7: Chianti's Quiet Revolution--With New Blends, Superior Clones,
Modern Winemaking
Page 8: Heaven, Thinly Sliced--Smoked and Cured Meats, Essentially Italian
Page 8: Our Poet of Renaissance, Alta Cucina--Historical CookBooks
Page 9: Tuscany to Sicily in Three Blocks
Page10:Crema Della Crema: The Cream of Caffè
Page11:A Rare Talent for Crudo--The Italian Equivalent of Sashimi
Page11: Aisles and Aisles Before You Eat--70 Types of Subs, and Delicacies
in Glendale

The article "Tuscany to Sicily in Three Blocks" (Page 9) that discusses 17
Italian Restaurants.
The Editor is taking great "liberties" with the term "Little Italy",
because although Restaurants are
an important part of a "Little Italy", it requires SO much more,... but
we'll take it. There are NOT that many residents of Italian ancestry, but
many mostly younger upwardly mobile professionals.

Brentwood is a Very Nice Upscale Neighbor hood, just to the west of Belair
(Very Posh),
and Westwood, home of UCLA, and the "Gold Coast" Wilshire Blvd, Condo Row.

In just about half a mile along the neighborhood's main street, San
Vicente, on either side of Barrington Avenue, there are TEN Italian
restaurants.Trot up Barrington Avenue to Brentwood Village, and you'll see
FOUR more.A little farther west, there are THREE clustered around the
corner of San Vicente and 26th Street.

If any of these Articles interest you, I suggest you access the Los Angeles
Times, ASAP.
The Articles are FREE for the First 7 Days, with FREE Registration. A
charge thereafter.
GoTo the Home Page at << www.latimes.com >> then to Food, OR
Go Direct to the Food section at
<<www.latimes.com/features/food/?track=mainnav-food >>

Most of the time FREE Registration is required. Sometimes you get lucky and
waltz in.
Once you Register, it will be good forever?

TUSCANY TO SICILY IN THREE BLOCKS
In Brentwood, Italian restaurants are opening faster than you can say
branzino. Pass the pasta.

Los Angeles Times
By Valli Herman
Times Staff Writer
March 9, 2005

It happens in Hollywood, it happens in real estate and now it's happening
in Brentwood. It's a kind of copycat syndrome. In movies, they're called
sequels. In real estate, it's called gentrification. In Brentwood, it's
called an explosion in Italian restaurants.

Just a month ago, when Pecorino opened in the former Zax location, it
became the 17th Italian restaurant in Brentwood. Clearly, even those who
can choose to eat anything they wish are choosing to eat Italian, again and
again and again.

In just about half a mile along the neighborhood's main street, San
Vicente, on either side of Barrington Avenue, there are nine Italian
restaurants: La Scala Presto, Osteria Latini, Palmeri Ristorante, Pecorino,
Pizzicotto, Toscana, Vincenti, Frankie & Johnnie's New York Pizza and Pasta
and California Pizza Kitchen. A few doors south on Barrington, there's the
6-month-old Sor Tino (in the former Rosti spot).

Trot up Barrington Avenue to Brentwood Village, and you'll see four more:
San Gennaro Café, Divino, Maria's Italian Kitchen and Ristorante Peppone.

A little farther west, there are three clustered around the corner of San
Vicente and 26th Street — Pane Fresco, Amici and Louise's Trattoria. (OK,
Amici and Louise's are on the west side of 26th Street, technically putting
them in Santa Monica, but who's counting?)

Italian restaurants are spreading faster than you can say pasta pomodoro.
Within blocks of each other, three new restaurants have opened in the last
six months: Pecorino, Palmeri and Sor Tino. Fifteen months ago, neighbor
Osteria Latini opened. It's getting hard to keep them straight.

"You mean this isn't Zax?" said one confused regular when he opened the
menu on his first visit to Pecorino, where the lightning-quick, bare-bones
remodeling barely concealed the old floor plan. One could be forgiven for
confusing all of them, even though their proprietors insist that each is
different.

Pecorino's exposed brick walls, open kitchen and central Italian cuisine
give it a casual, SoHo sensibility. With the nervous energy of a new
father, co-owner Mario Sabatini warmly welcomes customers to his proud
creation, an intimate restaurant with his chef and twin brother, Raffaelle,
turning out the cuisine of their native Abruzzo. The 19 tables fill with
neighboring business owners, wealthy producer types, foodie gal pals and
curiosity seekers.

A few doors down is the 2-month-old Palmeri. Walk in the glass doors and
you may encounter chef-owner Ottavio Palmeri speaking rapid Italian on the
telephone a few feet away from the long granite bar and wood-burning grill
and pizza oven. With its sleek, spare aesthetic, Palmeri is attracting
urban sophisticates and native Italians, who linger over $12 pizza and
cocktails at the bar, or who snuggle into a corner banquette for spaghetti
with bottarga (Sicilian cured tuna roe), homemade cannelloni or unusual
Sicilian wines.

Around the corner is Sor Tino, where chef Agostino Sciandri of Ago created
a place that feels like a rustic Tuscan country house. Italian families
linger over long Sunday lunches and couples huddle under heat lamps on the
patio. It's also one of the few to promote a takeout menu of four dozen
items.

*
Choices, choices

And Osteria Latini is an eclectic mix of Italian specialties created by
chef-owner Paolo Pasio, a native of Trieste, northeast of Venice. The
former owner of the Hollywood Canteen and the Mulholland Grill set up in
the narrow space with 18 tables. He serves game — venison and boar over
polenta — along with an ambitious menu of more than 30 specials a day.

"I work 24/7," says Pasio, "because I love it." And because he must.

For amazingly, despite the incredible concentration of Italian restaurants,
business seems to be booming.

"I tell you what," says Pasio. "Everybody is busy. Everyone is doing fine."

Depending on the hour, each of the old or new Italian restaurants attracts
a slice of old-timer, old-money Brentwood, trendy young apartment dwellers
or patrons who follow the crowds.

Still, it hardly seems possible that the seats would be filled, say experts
who study these kinds of things. "People won't increase their frequency of
eating a specific ethnicity of food all that much," says Randall Hiatt,
president of the Costa Mesa restaurant consultant firm Fessel
International. "They won't all of a sudden eat five or six times in an
Italian restaurant just because they have that many more choices."

On the other hand, there's a certain critical mass that might just make the
place a destination for those seeking all varieties of Italian.

"It's like Little Italy over here," says Sabatini of Pecorino. Like many of
his fellow restaurateurs, he welcomes his Italian competitors. Sabatini
says that in the few days he's been open, chefs and staff from neighboring
Italian restaurants have come by to eat and offer encouragement. "No one is
complaining," he says. "Everyone is busy."

"It's unbelievable! It's amazing!" says Divino owner Goran Milic of the
unremitting proliferation of pasta. The native Yugoslavian has operated his
upscale Italian restaurant for nine years in a cul de sac in Brentwood
Village and figures Italian food will always be popular, though he
continually searches for new variations to offer.

"My philosophy is that people in L.A. are very clear about what they want
to eat. Fish. Pasta. Salads. It has to be easy to understand," says Milic,
who observed the phenomenon while working in other Italian restaurants all
over town, including Giorgio Baldi in Santa Monica.

The surge in Italian restaurants has been a hot topic of conversation at
the Claudio D'Italia Hair Salon, which is a few doors down from Palmeri and
Pecorino.

"I laugh at this every day," says Larry Cupra, a native Italian who has
co-owned the salon for almost 40 years and watched many restaurants come
and go. "I keep telling people, if we get one more Italian restaurant here,
we'll have to be renamed Little Italy of Brentwood. I'm serious. I'm going
to call the chamber of commerce and request it."

As it happens, the president of the West Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce is
keenly aware of this very issue. The chamber's president for six years, Jay
Handal, also has owned the popular San Gennaro Café on Barrington Place
since 1987.

"The more the merrier," says Handal. "Honestly, my best advertising is my
competition. I'm a firm believer that the more Italian restaurants that
come in, and the more they diversify their menu, the harder I have to work
to make my menu diversified and make my prices better."

He's got a point. Ask anyone and everyone will say that no two restaurants
are really alike. It's all about the niche. Handal's San Gennaro is a
family restaurant, where half of the tables on early Saturday nights
include children. In late spring, teams from the Barrington Rec T-ball and
baseball leagues have their end-of-season pizza parties here (yes, that's
coach Rob Reiner handing out trophies to his players). The paper-placemat
spot is also the destination for budget oenophiles who love his long list
of wines for $10 per bottle.

*
Pizza variations

Even something as near to a commodity as pizza finds variations in the
neighborhood. There's the New York style of Frankie & Johnnie's and
Maria's. There's California's Pizza Kitchen's bounty of creative toppings.
Palmeri, Sor Tino and Pizzicotto cook their pies in wood-burning ovens (but
Pizzicotto's sidewalk tables are prime for walk-by celebrity sightings.)
When the famous are in fabulous mode, they take their brick-oven comfort
food at the elegant Vincenti, where the rich atmosphere bathes them in
flattering light.

What may be fueling Brentwood's Italian explosion is the long-running
success of Toscana and Ristorante Peppone. Indeed, two of Pecorino's owners
are former Toscana staffers. Pasio, of Osteria Latini, says that when he
came to America in 1992, he started as a busboy at Toscana, even though he
had owned a restaurant in Italy. Sciandri, of Sor Tino, is a onetime chef
and partner in Toscana and the Rosti chain. And experienced diners
recognize the same group of Italian waiters hopping from spot to spot
around town.

Successful restaurant concepts have a way of inspiring imitators, says
Hiatt, though few succeed. "The restaurant business is an aspirational
business," he says. "It's an ego business — 'I can do better than that.'
But they may miss something in the formula, whether it's site selection or
the training of the people."

The owners of the new restaurants insist that they aren't out to take a
slice of the pie from Toscana or Peppone, which have their distinct
followings and personalities. Still, the packed tables and high tabs in
those dining rooms must somehow kick-start aspirations.

Toscana is the Hollywood power-dinner spot with snappy service, a long
marble bar and tables set with raw vegetables for pre-pasta snacking. The
atmosphere buzzes with air-kisses, animated voices and the scent of $45 per
order branzino. It's busy for lunch; it's packed for dinner, even though
the prices are somewhat prohibitive, $18.50 for a grilled calamari
appetizer, $39 for bistecca con fagioli, a rib steak with cannellini beans.

>From the outside, Peppone looks fortified, like a private club. There are
no windows, only a small door that opens into a cramped hostess station.
Even on slow weeknights, chauffeurs wait in the strip-mall parking lot,
pacing by the parking meters.

It's a Brentwood institution that owner Gianni Paoletti opened on his own
in 1974, two years after he opened Valentino with then-partner Piero
Selvaggio. Prices in the red-walled, pink and white tablecloth restaurant
are steep — $19.50 for a bresaola appetizer; $35.75 for lamb medallions. If
one didn't know better, one would think the $28 ravioli had once been
frozen, and that the Alfredo sauce came from a jar. The in-place for
Brentwood residents to celebrate anniversaries or just feel cozy on a
Thursday night, Peppone was once known for its list of great Italian wines
at relatively bargain prices. Perhaps there are some great wine values;
it's hard to know when there's no sommelier or anyone knowledgeable to help
with the list.

The point is, it's packed, just as Toscana tends to be. So it's not
surprising that people are seeking serious food that doesn't cost and arm
and a leg elsewhere.

Pasio and Sabatini offer serious Italian cuisine that's less expensive than
Toscana, Peppone or even Vincenti, the most expensive spot where dinner can
easily top $75 a person, twice that if it's white truffle season, or you're
ordering from the Piemonte section of the wine list.

As the competition grows, menus are beginning to include elements from
previously underrepresented regions of Italy, such as the central coast
(Pecorino and Divino). Palmeri's chef-owner says his specialties are
southern Italian dishes and Sicilian wines.

Amici is for those in the mood for elbow-room and deftly prepared,
reasonably priced classics from all over Italy — perfectly light fritto
misto, absolutely correct linguini alle vongole. Italians gravitate here
too, especially on weeknights.

No matter how delicious the ravioli fiori di zucca or fusilloni di
Gragnano, customers won't come back if the service stinks (unless you're a
neighborhood institution). Although at Peppone no one bothers to come
around to see if you're enjoying your cardboard-like veal Milanese, at the
newer restaurants, they're all open arms and warm buon giorno greetings.
Stick around Pecorino long enough for dessert wine and the experienced
waiter might just warn the unmarried women away from the on-the-make single
men he's already seen in action. Bring a picky 5-year-old to San Gennaro,
and the 18-year-veteran waiter knows to show hungry children who order a
"large" pizza the actual 16-inch pan. Relieved parents can then order the
kid-sized 9-inch pizza.

In a business with a supremely high failure rate, the bulletproof formula
of Toscana and Peppone are all the more amazing. So too is the very
existence of so many look-alike competitors in a place such as Brentwood,
says Hiatt. Normally, he says, such clusters of ethnic restaurants arrive
with immigrant populations — Chinese in Monterey Park, Vietnamese in
Westminster and Japanese in Little Tokyo. By that measure, Brentwood should
be overrun with low-carb, nouveau fad food served post Pilates or delivered
curbside directly to the Range Rover.

>From the restaurateurs' perspective, however, Italian cuisine offers what
guys like Hiatt call "a relatively low food cost." That means they make
great profits on the pasta, not so great on the imported branzino and
enough on other menu "fillers" to stay afloat.

In her 40 years at Claudio D'Italia, stylist Linda Asklof has been asked
plenty of times for restaurant recommendations and the list is ever
changing.

"People come in here to find out what's in and what's good," she says. "If
you're not good, you don't last."...
*
Always room for one more?

The proliferation of Italian restaurants in Brentwood makes the
neighborhood a veritable Little Italy.

Amici--- 2538 San Vicente Blvd. Santa Monica (310) 260-4900
California Pizza Kitchen--- Brentwood Gardens Mall---11677 San Vicente
Blvd.(310) 826-3573
Divino---11714 Barrington Court (310) 472-0886
Frankie & Johnnie's--- New York Pizza and Pasta---11753 San Vicente Blvd.
(310) 442-9500
La Scala Presto---11740 San Vicente Blvd. (310) 826-6100
Louise's Trattoria---264 26th St. Santa Monica,  (310) 451-5001
Maria's Italian Kitchen---11723 Barrington Court (310) 476-6112
Osteria Latini---11712 San Vicente Blvd. (310) 826-9222
Palmeri Ristorante---11650 San Vicente (310) 442-8446
Pane Fresco---13050 San Vicente Blvd. (310) 587-0772
Pecorino---11604 San Vicente Blvd. (310) 571-3800
Pizzicotto---11758 San Vicente Blvd. (310)442-7188
Ristorante Peppone---11628 Barrington Court (310) 476-7379
San Gennaro Café---140 S. Barrington Place (310) 476-9696
Sor Tino---908 S. Barrington Ave. (310) 442-8466
Toscana---11633 San Vicente Blvd. (310) 820-2448
Vincenti---11930 San Vicente Blvd. (310) 207-0127

http://www.latimes.com/features/food/
la-fo-brentwood9mar09,0,2678006.story?c
oll=la-home-food

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