MORE THAN THE TYPICAL TRATTORIA

Luciana’s Ristorante is about the first thing you see entering Dana Point, insofar as you can see anything on the speedway that is Del Prado Avenue. From the outside it looks like many another Italian trattoria. From the inside, too, for that matter: dark-beamed ceiling, crooner at the piano, a couple of walls full of photos and newspaper notices.

But hold on--the photos don’t seem to include any of Dino, or Sly, or Tommy Lasorda. In fact, the only faces I recognized were a couple of major foodies, Diana Kennedy and the late James Beard. The menu suggests another food writer--Waverly Root--in its stress on Italian food as the essential cookery of the Renaissance. Astonishingly, there are sometimes entrees on special that really could have been served 500 years ago, like sliced pork loin arranged on a bed of raisins, pine nuts and currants in a cinnamon-flavored brandy sauce.

This foodie- trattoria is the sit-down, fancy-evening place of the energetic owner of the What’s Cooking restaurants in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa: Lucy Luhan, who also manages to own a bed-and-breakfast place in Italy.

More than the usual American Italian restaurant, Luciana’s specializes in vegetables, another Renaissance motif. There’s a long list of vegetable side dishes, such as verdure (when I had them, string beans and Swiss chard) in olive oil and garlic sauce--and a little unannounced red pepper. You must understand, Lucy is of pepper-loving Abruzzi stock. One of the soups is simply a warming puree of relatively mild yellow peppers.

Entrees may be accompanied by unusual vegetable combinations like long beans with poached turnip slices. There are also out-of-the-ordinary vegetables in the antipasto selection. In addition to excellent clams and salami, you might get a white bean salad and a peculiar thin sheet that tastes sort of like pickled artichoke leaf and turns out to be salted, pressed eggplant. Vegetarians will be glad to note that there is a platter of grilled vegetables (say, deliciously browned potato, tomato, endive and eggplant) suitable for an entree, and it is as good as the best of the meat dishes.

There are a couple of knockout pastas here (all can be ordered as half portions if you want to follow the Italian custom of having a primo piatto before the meat course). The linguine with clams, in a full-blooded winey clam sauce fully stoked with garlic, is one of the best versions I’ve ever had. The agnolotti come in a cream sauce with bits of green onion floating around, and their rich filling could be cream cheese. Pasta primavera, usually one of the most mild-mannered of Italian dishes, is another of the places where you get a little surprise dose of red pepper.

The meat entrees, or secondi piatti, take up a smaller proportion of this menu that we’re used to seeing. Some are remarkably good, like quail in a Barolo sauce: tiny, tender birds in a rich red wine sauce. Some are not what you might expect. Grigliata mista, four different kinds of roast meat, sounds like a big eater’s special, but it may turn out to be only half a chicken, a quail, a little chunk of steak and a terrific anise sausage. The liver Venetian style is a little coarse because the meat is cut thicker than usual, though I must say it went fast in its oniony sauce with a touch of vinegar. The chef’s specialty is veal in a sweet wine sauce of oddly continental effect.

It’s in the nightly specials that you find the real exotic stuff, things like the pork loin in that wild Renaissance sauce (it was very good, though I sort of wished the pork had been browned a little). Fish cooked in the style of the Sicilian fishing port of Trapani comes in a glaze of reduced onions flavored with balsamic vinegar like an otherworldly sauce Lyonnaise. One night there was a chicken with sesame oil and rice vinegar (“Oriental influenced,” the waiter conceded) that didn’t taste as out of place as you’d think. (Oddly, among the pastas the more exotic a dish sounds, the more likely it is to be disappointing. The porcini mushroom sauce is rather thin stuff, and the sauce on the rigatoni with pheasant, which seems to be mostly cream and Marsala, strikes me as positively insipid.)

Luciana’s tries hard to steer diners to a simple Italian meal-closer of fruit and sliced Parmesan (this is the real Parmesan, by the way, from Parma). Inevitably, though, the American sweet tooth must be served. Of the desserts, I find the chocolate mousse cake stodgy and ruined with too much kirschwasser, but the Italian ices are excellent (was that a maple flavor in the spumoni?), and Luciana’s has one of the best cheesecakes I’ve had lately, with a light, positively fluffy texture.

Prices: appetizers $2.50-$8.95, pastas $8.95-$12.95, meat entrees $9.95-$17.95. Vegetable side dishes $2.50-$3.95, entree-sized grilled vegetable platter $8.95. Desserts $3 to $3.50.

LUCIANO’S RISTORANTE 24312 Del Prado Ave., Dana Point

(714) 661-6500

Open for dinner Tuesday through Sunday. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted.