Menu Offerings at a New Restaurant in Cardiff Break Little New Ground

The proprietors of the new Bella Via translate their restaurant’s name as “beautiful way,” a fair enough rendering of the Italian, and one that connotes “beautiful life,” or “a fine way of living.”

They could as easily have named the place “Via Bella,” which means “beautiful road,” and would refer most accurately to U.S. 101, the thoroughfare that runs past the Pacific on its way to Cardiff’s restaurant row. Here, on a site that looks across the highway to the waves and sunset, Bella Via occupies a building that has housed several restaurants over the last half-dozen years. The most recent tenant, a place called the Lobster Pond, conducted an interesting experiment in cross-cultural cooking (Maine lobster prepared according to both Japanese and American recipes) that evidently never caught fire.

Bella Via, remodeled since the tenure of its predecessor, certainly is a pretty restaurant, and a very comfortable one. But the problem is that the place takes short cuts, with the menu, the service and the cooking.

The menu, presumably by design, follows a modern approach aimed at cutting costs by limiting the number of food items the kitchen needs to stock. This does not mean that the number of dishes is limited; rather, as many different preparations as possible are elaborated from the relatively brief pantry list. Thus, most dishes arrive finished either with an all-purpose tomato sauce (to which almost any garnish, such as shellfish, can be added), or with a combination of butter, olive oil, parsley and garlic. At times, the two are mated.

Shrimp run through the menu in a surprising number of permutations, but veal, a mainstay of Italian restaurants, curiously appears only once, in the typical parmigiana treatment that calls for plenty of tomato sauce. Pasta finds its way into every meal, as a main course, a side dish, or a bed for a seafood entree.

The difficulty with trying to get too much mileage from a given item is that sometimes the ingredient in question declines to be flexible. Take, for example, the squid steak (calamari) offered in the same parmigiana treatment (breaded, fried, topped with mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce) as the veal. The menu also offers a calamari appetizer, which, instead of the tiny, tender baby squid one expects, turns out to be one of these somewhat rubbery steaks cut into finger-sized lengths. It is served with lemon wedges, tartar sauce (most un-Italian) and, of course, tomato sauce, and is quite uninspiring.

The appetizer list also offers zucchini fingers, breaded, fried and served with tomato sauce, and cubes of mozzarella done in exactly the same manner. The only non-fried choice under this heading is the shrimp cocktail, an offering with which this restaurant hardly breaks new gastronomic ground.

This same culinary cautiousness continues with the basic pasta selections, a half-dozen pasta shapes offered on a mix-or-match basis with an equal number of sauces. Here, one enters the realm of the meatball and of Italian sausage, both added to the basic red sauce; a note of optimism arises with the well-done pesto (the pungent Genoese emulsion of pounded basil, olive oil, pine nuts and garlic.)

A second grouping of pasta, titled “specialita, “ rises to brief brilliance with a vegetarian offering that tops pesto- moistened fettuccine with a nicely sauteed melange of zucchini, peas, mushrooms, broccoli and tomatoes (carnivores may alter this dish by adding optional chicken pieces or shrimp.) But this list declines rapidly enough with an unsubtle, heavy fettuccine Alfredo, and runs along to such mainstays of the basic American-Italian kitchen as lasagna and ravioli.

Bread crumbs do not go to waste in this kitchen. They are used to coat the veal parmigiana, a surprisingly large slab of veal (it nearly covered the plate) as well as chicken, eggplant and, as mentioned, squid steak. After breading, each is browned, then topped with cheese and spread with a great quantity of the ubiquitous tomato sauce, which also is ladled rather too exuberantly atop the side dish of pasta. (It is well to note at this point that the sauce is respectable, as long as one likes a great deal of garlic. Garlic enters most dishes at Bella Via, and the kitchen is not at all shy about using it in quantity.)

This addiction to garlic proves successful in the scampi fra diavola, a simple but tasty preparation in which plump prawns, doused with tomato sauce, repose atop a hillock of linguine. As an alternative to the red sauce route, shrimp, scallops and clams may be had in a sauce of white wine, garlic, oil, butter and parsley, all served over linguine.

Good garlic bread arrives throughout the meal, and dinners also include the choice of a quite pleasing minestrone, or a simple house salad that on one occasion was fresh and crisp, but on another was wilted and brown. If the only lettuce in the house has passed its prime, the restaurant has no choice but to pull salad from the menu for the evening.

The dessert list features just the simplest sweets, such as cannoli, lemon sherbet and cheesecake, but the selection of espressos and cappuccinos (available in decaffeinated as well as regular models) solves the question of how to end the meal. The cafe mocha, made with steamed milk and a touch of chocolate, is particularly satisfying.

A group of those amiable youngsters who are simultaneously the blessing and the curse of the California restaurant industry staff Bella Via. They are friendly, polite and eager to please, and it is impossible to dislike them--but their combined knowledge of proper service, if distilled into writing, would not fill the first paragraph of a restaurant training manual.

Servers ask if they may refill water glasses (naturally, if the glass is empty, they should do so without asking), and then fail to remove more than half the dirty plates at the end of a given course. They also seem quite ignorant of the preparation of the dishes, which, given the simplicity of the menu, is ridiculous. This is the fault of the management; servers should be given both tastes and explana-tions of everything they bring to table.

BELLA VIA

2591 S. Highway 101, Cardiff

942-1108

Dinner served seven nights.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including tax, tip and one glass each of house wine, about $25 to $45.