RESTAURANTS : A DECO MIXED BAG OF ITALIAN FARE

Across from a sprawling Ford dealership on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills sits Trovare, a Northern Italian restaurant that looks for all the world like a mosque gone deco. It’s got an understated, almost mysterious, stark white exterior; inside, a domed skylight, deco glasswork, deco lighting, deco chairs, deco bar. Add to this an open tiled kitchen and a curiously out-of-sync mural of a California landscape in bright yellow and you have enough decor for 10 restaurants.

The handsome, black-haired Italian proprietor cruises. Alone among the casually dressed diners in these costly surroundings, he wears a dark gray silk suit, the kind of suit you’d expect to see in a red-sauce Southern Italian restaurant. But this place seems like someone’s idea of a first-class Italian place 1980s’-style. Besides the up-to-date decorative cliches, there are all the latest buzz foods: arugula, pasta this and that, veal with fresh herbs or sauteed radicchio.

Some of the food--much of it--the nights I visited was just fine, but some dishes were so far off the mark that, like the weirdly sunny mural, it undermined my confidence in the guiding intelligence behind the place.

The carpaccio, for instance. The meat had been frozen and sliced by machine. Like all defrosted meat, it tasted like meat-flavored water. The only thing that redeemed the dish was the Parmesan--fresh, sharp flakes of it--among the greens and mustardy sauce plopped on top of the bright red circles of meat. Perhaps the meat had been tasty once, too.

And then there was the linguine with clam sauce. It was served in a deep bowl, drowning in bland liquid. There were lots of clams-- lots of clams--but they were surprisingly tasteless. It was as if the clientele on this side of the hills wanted from food what they wanted from real estate: more for their money. But more was not necessarily better.

I had never thought, for instance, that there was any such thing as enough dried tomatoes--until I tried Trovare’s Orecchiette Barese-- little petals of pasta mixed with fine-chopped broccoli and sun-dried tomatoes, tons of them, and tons of garlic, too, all bound together by fine olive oil. It seemed like Southern Italian lustiness applied to Northern Italian care, and for the first greedy bites it was great. Then something happened. I’d gotten too much of a good thing. Too salty. Too sharp. Too many sun-dried tomatoes.

Green salads were fresh, if uninspired (fresh greens, good olive oil, but what else is new?). The Insalata Pugliese, however (tomato, red onion, garlic and basil coated in some of its nice olive oil and sharpened up with some of its terrific parmesan), made a great salad, and one serving was plenty split two ways. The minestrone soup was good, too--thick and heartening and, of course, the parmesan was a welcome addition to it, too.

The scampi were OK, but the special fish of the day was really special--whitefish in a tomato/garlic caper sauce. The fish was white and tender and moist, the sauce tasty, but not too tasty for the fish. It was served with two delicious slices of turnip and two of potato.

The veal dishes were less successful. The broiled veal with sauteed radicchio had sounded intriguing, but the veal and radicchio didn’t do much for each other. It was as if some other ingredient was needed to bring the dish together. Another veal dish--veal loin with fresh sage--tasted more of rosemary than the sage aroma that had been wafting out of the kitchen, and it was served with a strange, tangy red sauce that didn’t do it any favors.

Desserts were a mixed bag, too. Tiramisu was just whipped cream glop, but a tortoni bon-bon-like thing was a treat--frozen to rock hardness, but worth the effort of trying to stab off a chunk.

Trovare seemed to be trying, it really did, to bring an exciting restaurant to Ventura Boulevard. From the money that appears to have gone into it and the money it costs to eat there, it should be the first-rate place it’s trying to be. With more care, maybe, it could be.

Trovare, 21618 Ventura Blvd., Woodland Hills, Calif. 91364. 818/340-4451. Open for lunch Monday-Friday, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; dinner nightly. Visa, MasterCard, American Express accepted. Full bar. Valet parking. Dinner for two, food only, $40-$80.