RESTAURANT REVIEW : Farfalla Dispenses With Frills in Favor of Glorious Fare

Trattoria Farfalla isn’t much more than a wood-burning pizza oven with a couple of tables. There’s an espresso machine and a cash register, but the kitchen clock is just the chef’s Swatch watch, clipped to a counter. It seems to have planned on being basically a high-class take-out place, not a real restaurant that had to do things like take reservations, which it can’t.

It’s definitely not prepared for all the people who want to eat there on a rainy Thursday night. Of course, we could order take-out. If we lived around Los Feliz, we could even get food delivered ($15 order minimum, 10% delivery charge). But like a lot of others tonight, we choose to sit in this plain, industrial room. Why?

I suppose it’s because we’re used to ordering pizza to go. Farfalla makes good ones with medium-thick, bready dough and familiar, up-scale pizza toppings, like the incredibly cheesy pizza ai 4 formaggi (made with Fontina, mozzarella, Gruyere and Parmesan). But we’re not used to eating pasta to go, and the pastas are particularly good.

Even something as simple as angel hair with tomato, garlic and basil, a dish that often seems to be ordered only by hairshirt gourmets eager to show the purity of their taste, is delicious, slightly tart and with a comforting texture. The best, though, is the gnocchi with smoked chicken and dried tomatoes. These are wonderfully light gnocchi with only a coy resistance to the teeth, and the cream and marsala sauce is so rich and meaty you could eat anything with it.

The meat entrees tend, understandably, to be roasted in the pizza oven, like veal with meat juices flavored with garlic and rosemary, or chicken with garlic, rosemary and fresh sage as well. All these entrees come with spinach tossed with roughly chopped garlic. Along with the muscular aromas of garlic and herbs, in fact, the predominating flavors at Farfalla are sweet olive oil (there’s a bottle on every table) and balsamic vinegar.

There are some rather homey dishes, such as sweet Italian sausage with polenta with some fresh tomato sauce on it, and pasta e fagioli, a bean-thick minestrone without the cabbage. Among the appetizers there’s a nice antipasto called melanzane, peperoni e formaggio di capra , which turns out to be more than it claims: not only fried, marinated eggplant slices with grilled sweet peppers, goat cheese, but also olives, artichokes and capers.

The dessert selection may depend on how late you get served, but we find an apple tart (with big chunks of apple, rather like tarte tatin ) with whipped cream as well as an unusual caramel-flavored cheesecake with lemon frosting and tirami su with particularly good mascarpone cheese.

The tirami su has espresso and cocoa in it, as usual, but no liqueur, probably because Farfalla doesn’t have a liquor (or liqueur) license yet. We’ll have to wait.

Trattoria Farfalla, 1978 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 661-7365. Open for lunch and dinner daily. No alcoholic beverages. Street parking. No credit cards; personal or traveler’s checks accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $28 to $46.