RESTAURANT REVIEW : Baci Offers No Surprises, Only Solid Dependability

Why is everybody going to Baci? We know about people flocking to a place because of some striking feature--decor, food, celebrities, whatever. Baci, though, seems to be just a pleasant, reasonable little place to eat. What is this, an undiscovered trend?

I mean, Baci’s not the only restaurant around with charming Italian waiters or valet parking at a private lot in back (which gives it a faintly exclusive air, I suppose), and probably not even the only restaurant with a warm color scheme of peach and celadon with a little pink light glowing up from the glass brick panels in the bar. While the menu is solid and reliable, it isn’t profoundly distinctive.

Maybe the nice-looking people who are so obviously enjoying themselves here don’t want something striking. Maybe they like the fact that Baci is just bright and relaxing with the sense of something sturdy underneath. Or maybe it’s the food after all, though most of it is familiar: items like fried mozzarella (crisply breaded in a sweet tomato sauce) or a mozzarella/ricotta-stuffed lasagna that I fear would be characterized as scrumptious in a less sober column than this one because the tomato sauce has been enriched with heavy cream. About the limit of the exotic is bruschetta , a small loaf of toasted bread topped with chopped onions and tomatoes and a generous scattering of capers.

True, everything is confidently done. The calamari comes in really excellent light breading without a spot of grease on it. (There are a quartered lemon and some marinara sauce on the side, but it would be a shame to bury these impeccable squid rings in tomato sauce.) The long list of pizzas mostly sounds pretty ordinary for a place that presumes you’ll eat your pizza sitting down, though Pizza Baci does have some radicchio on it, offering a welcome bit of bitterness to offset the anchovies. The pizza dough is of the fluffy, bready description, though rolled so thin you may not recognize it as such unless you order one of the calzoni , such as calzone alla checca , stuffed with cheese and sun-dried tomatoes (or so it says here; when I ordered it, they seemed to be fresh). Given a little thickness to work with, the pizza dough is so fluffy you’d think this was a sort of Mediterranean piroshki .

The pasta list is where to hunt for the more unusual items. Not earth-shaking unusual, but things like the seafood ravioli, the large sort of ravioli about the size of a Christmas-present envelope, enveloped in a French-style curry cream sauce. Fettuccine Capriccio comes with salmon and, rather out of the ordinary for an Italian restaurant, a bit of cilantro.

Apart from pizzas and pastas, there is a long list of salads and a short list of specialties, some of which contain pasta anyhow. The homemade sausage comes with linguine with a sauce of ground sun-dried tomatoes--it has the texture and a little bit of the flavor (though of course none of the hotness) of ground chiles. The sausage, though fresh, has a cured-meat taste faintly reminiscent of salami.

The dessert choices are limited, mostly consisting of a sweet, creamy sort of cheesecake and a daily selection of rather French tarts. They’re good ones with the sort of crust that makes them rather like a butter cookie with fruit on top, particularly the pear tart, where even the pastry cream layer was fragrant of pear.

Baci, 8265 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 651-4776. Open daily 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking in lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two (food only), $26.50-$35.