RESTAURANT REVIEW : MARIO’S PLACE CREATES A NORTH BEACH FLAVOR

San Franciscans spend a lot of their time down here deploring things. One of their complaints is that you can’t find what they call a little neighborhood Italian restaurant. What they probably mean is that we don’t have a compact Italian neighborhood like North Beach because our cities arose long after the great European immigration that produced Little Italys.

Mario’s Place in Mission Viejo is the kind of reasonably priced, unpretentious place San Franciscans would treasure and maybe not even tell anybody about, because it’s somewhat better than the usual San Francisco Italian restaurant. It even has a view, of sorts. From the handful of outdoor tables, you can see (peeking around a huge Downey Savings sign) the rolling Saddleback Valley and an entertaining mile or so of Interstate 5 from the La Paz Road exit to about Oso Parkway. That’s something they don’t have at North Beach.

Mario Vanetti is a hard-working chef who bakes all his own rolls and makes all his own pasta--even the spaghetti, a very classical style called spaghetti alla chitarra , which is squarish rather than round in cross section and rarely seen in California. It’s a sort of revelation to taste fresh spaghetti, with its fresh-pasta texture and flavor. This is spaghetti that can show up well under the simplest treatments, such as spaghetti with butter and lemon or butter, garlic and cheese. Vanetti also serves it with tomato sauce, meat sauce, broccoli and mushrooms--seven different forms altogether, a surprising one-third of the pasta list.

In contrast, fettuccine, usually the starring pasta in long lists because it’s convenient to make fresh, comes in only four fashions. The favorite seems to be three-color (green, white and orange, by no coincidence the colors of the Italian flag) with a mild Gorgonzola cheese sauce, but the fettuccine Alfredo deserves notice because of the unusually fresh-tasting cream sauce.

There’s an ultranarrow sort of fettuccine called trenette, a fresh version of the corkscrew pasta fusilli, and two very wide pastas, lasagne and malfatti. The lasagne has a rich ricotta and herb filling and a tomato and meat sauce. Malfatti is a lot like fresh manicotti, filled with ricotta and spinach and served with plain tomato sauce. There are also cheese ravioli in a slightly sharp tomato sauce, meat ravioli in a sage-flavored meat sauce, linguine with clams and several other items. All the pastas come with a simple green salad.

Pasta really dominates this menu. There are only seven regular non-pasta entrees, none of them unexpected, but all of them honest. There is a homemade sausage with a fine texture and a strong fennel flavor, which comes sauteed with mushrooms. Veal Marsala comes with a whole lot of mushrooms, and for once a non-syrupy sauce; it seems to have been made with dry Marsala. Chicken Mario is stuffed with ham and cheese and sauteed in a vodka and tomato sauce.

The meat entrees all come with pasta--exactly which pasta depends on what the kitchen is working on when you’re ready to be served. It may be one of the many pastas mixed with the same sauce that’s on your veal or chicken, or it may be a bit of one of the menu’s pasta dishes, such as spaghetti with butter, garlic and cheese or fettuccine Alfredo.

Good as the menu items are, the specials of the day are likely to be better. At times the special might be just spaghetti and meatballs (good spaghetti and meatballs, mind you), but often it is something rather unusual. It may be pansarotti baresi, a pair of large, deep-fried turnovers made of bread dough--rather like Russian pirozhki with a lively Italian stuffing of cheese, onion, olive, tomato and garlic. And who’d ever expect salmon en croute in an Italian restaurant? It’s a chunk of salmon topped with spinach, ricotta and saffron and wrapped in puff paste--a rather elegant dish.

The short antipasto list is not particularly memorable. The fried squid are pretty good and only slightly greasy, but the steamed mussels can be a little tired. Curiously, although the list includes relatively ambitious items like Carpaccio and fried mozzarella, the closest it has to the usual cold antipasto selection is a green salad with ham, cheese and salami.

The best of the desserts is probably the cheesecake, which has a distinct dash of cheese flavor. It usually comes with a fruit topping such as black cherries. Above all, Mario’s really is a neighborhood Italian place. If you order food to go, they recommend that you call ahead and bring your own dish. Open six days a week, Mario’s caters parties of all sizes--including, as the sign painted on the window says, boat parties.

And satisfying the two bottom-line necessities of such a neighborhood Italian place, the portions at Mario’s are rather large and the prices rather small. Some specials like salmon en croute may go up to $10.50, but regular menu items are priced from $3.75 to $8.25.

Mario’s Place, 25922 Muirlands Blvd., Mission Viejo. Telephone 830-1600. Open for lunch and dinner Monday through Friday, for dinner (from 3:30 p.m.) Saturday. MasterCard and Visa accepted.