EVERYTHING’S SHIPSHAPE AT IRVINE’S NEW PREGO

The new Prego in Irvine was surprisingly busy for an opening night. Or maybe not surprisingly. Half the diners, it seemed, were telling everyone how long they had waited for an Orange County Prego so they could spare themselves the drive to Beverly Hills.

It was definitely worth their wait, because the new place is an architectural stunner, a Tuscan villa in rust and yellow stucco with an interior traversed by a dramatic cross-vaulted corridor. Unlike the rather clunky and closed-in Beverly Hills Prego, this is a light, airy place with tall windows on three sides and a lot of attractive outdoor seating surrounded by garden and lawn.

Reproducing any menu above the fast-food level is a tricky business, but they’ve done it remarkably well. There are the same pencil-thin bread sticks that actually taste good, the light, refreshing pizzas, the unusual pastas like tagliolini with “freshwater scampi” (crayfish, I suspect), snails, sweet red peppers and diced cucumber. The grilled meats are simply treated, like rib lamb chops brushed with brown butter and sprinkled with fresh sage and rosemary.

The asparagus was mushy and overdone, and it was hard to get hot (or even warm) cappuccino, but altogether things were remarkably shipshape for an opening night. This looks like a place that can’t miss, a charming villa with remarkably good, reasonably priced food (appetizers $4.10 to $7.95, entrees $5.95 to $15.75) set among the giant office buildings of the Irvine hub. I foresee heavy competition for the outdoor seating come summer.

A lot of diners will feel at sea in this menu, at least to begin with. What are they to expect of rotolo di formaggi ? It turns out to be thin-sliced mozzarella and fontina cheese rolled up with prosciutto and paper-thin ovals of zucchini in a lime, mint and tomato vinaigrette, an appetizer that for once really stimulates the appetite. One of the unusual appetizers--a combination of roast duck breast, feta cheese, delicate lamb’s lettuce and aromatic vinegar--doesn’t quite hold together as a dish, but with a little mental changing of gears I liked it as a sort of oddball antipasto plate.

The pizza, with its light, appetizing crust, would be worth eating with no topping at all, which is practically what you get with focaccia mezzaluna (actually it’s topped with thin-sliced raw onion). This is a thinnish sheet of pizza dough folded over a depth-charge filling of chewy, intensely flavored dried tomatoes. The most exotic thing on the menu may be pizza margherita , a non-Americanized version of the original cheese pizza: fresh tomato sauce and mozzarella with fresh basil and sage. It’s positively springlike in its simplicity and freshness.

This kind of light, stylish cooking makes you think of the original inspiration of nouvelle cuisine, and it’s probably no accident. For all the talk of Japanese influence on modern French cooking--mostly a matter of visual ideas, in my book-- nouvelle cuisine can easily be looked on as the French discovery of the traditional virtues of Italian cooking.

Tuscan cooks have always specialized in quickly grilled meats. Prego does this either simply, as with a lime-and-sage-marinated chicken flattened out for grilling, or ultra simply, as with the fish--or at least the swordfish, which was miraculously moist and tender. Somehow the huge veal chop (lombata di vitello) strikes me as being a little less flavorful than the Beverly Hills model, but the rib-eye steak (costata di manzo al timo) is as good as its progenitor, more tender and flavorful than anything you find in most steak houses.

In general, the most complicated dishes are the pastas, like shell pasta with artichoke hearts, pancetta, cheese and cream, but some are rather homey. The pappardelle alla lepre could pass for egg noodles with stew until you realized the meat was rabbit. I’ve had lighter gnocchi than here, but not by much, and they are very attractive in a serving for two with three sauces: tomato with rosemary, pesto and snappy gorgonzola.

The pasta that puts everybody over the edge is about the simplest, tortelloni di magro al burro : flat squares of fine-rolled pasta with a bit of chard and ricotta filling, basking in browned butter with a bit of browned fresh sage and a bit more of freshly grated, positively chunky Parmesan (pardon me, grana ; they rightly insist on calling it Parmesan only if the cheese is from Parma).

The most irresistible dessert seems, from the reactions at all the adjoining tables, to be meringata alla fiorentina , which consists of layers of meringue, whipped cream and shaved chocolate piled up as a sort of cake without the cake part. I happen to prefer the odd cakes made up of other baked goods, like cioccolato valentino (amaretto cookies with chocolate and espresso) and tiramisu (ladyfingers arranged with a filling of creamy mascarpone, a very elegant filling indeed with its mild cheese flavor; the whole thing is topped with chocolate).

It grieves me that there are a lot of things on this menu I haven’t tried. Trenette with smoked mussels. Pizza alla provola with smoked mozzarella and eggplant. Frankly, I’d try anything on the menu--even the health - foody fettuccine integrali , a whole-wheat noodle with raw tomatoes. PREGO 18420 Von Karman Ave., Irvine (714) 553-1333 Open for lunch Monday through Friday, for dinner nightly. MasterCard and Visa accepted.