RESTAURANT REVIEW : Giorgio’s Place Serves Nearly Flawless Italian in Long Beach

La Grotte, they’d tell me, La Grotte. Must go to La Grotte, that gastro-landmark of Long Beach.

I never got to La Grotte at its old location, though, and now that the landmark has moved, I still haven’t been there. I have tried. I found the address and everything, but I got sidetracked without knowing it.

The problem is that when you enter La Grotte’s new location on the plaza level of the Arco Center, La Grotte itself is hidden behind a second door. Unless you know that, you might sit down in the high-ceilinged, salmon-colored room with lots of windows that turns out to be another restaurant with the same owner, Giorgio’s Place.

However, Giorgio’s Place has a spiffy Italian menu full of up-to-date items: carpaccio sprinkled with celery leaf, spinach and goat cheese salad, fried brains with squash blossoms and so on. I had a particularly nice appetizer of strips of grilled chicken breast marinated in olive oil and balsamic vinegar accompanied by grilled--indeed, still hot--slices of eggplant and a little thatch of radicchio . In short, I never got to La Grotte.

Giorgio’s is a sensible place and makes a sensible practice of serving its pasta dishes as entrees at lunch. This does lead to an odd situation, though. At dinner the pasta dishes are called primi piatti and the meat dishes secondi piatti. At lunch, this puts the “first plates” at the end of the menu.

The pasta dishes make perfect sense as light entrees, in any case. Stracciette are delicate, practically paper-thin squares of pasta in a light tomato sauce flavored with ham, and the tagiolini al pesto tend to come with unannounced chunks of asparagus. There’s a faultless risotto with the crunchy/creamy texture that often eludes our Italian restaurants.

I’d pass on the penne with broccoli, though. They could use something, probably the garlic and anchovies the menu promises but scarcely delivers.

Among the entrees, a couple have unusual sauces based on pureed vegetables: salmon in a buttery celery puree, and chicken breast in a pleasing sauce of pureed asparagus, the strips of chicken laid out with asparagus spears in a pattern that looks like a surreal crab. For that matter, one of the appetizers, a sort of cheese-and-sweet pepper pate , is surrounded by a thick and surprisingly tasty sauce made from pureed fresh fava beans.

Fish dominate the rest of the menu, and are generally very good. I liked the two-tone construction of sole layered on salmon in a grainy lobster sauce. But it must be said that the whitefish with its loud accompaniment of eggplant and olives, nice though it is, could have been made with any fish, or no fish at all. And that pork chop with garlic sauce was actually pretty flavorless.

No problem with the desserts, though. The Bavarian cream, under an Italian name, was the lightest I’ve had in a restaurant for a long time. The tirami su , the apple tart in a mild chocolate-swirled cream sauce, and the cream puffs have to take a back seat to it.

As for the real La Grotte, I did get a peek inside it once. It looked romantically dim and crowded. I’ll go there, someday . . . maybe.

Giorgio’s Place, Arco Center, 300 Oceangate, Long Beach, (213) 432-6175. Open for lunch Monday through Friday, for dinner daily. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $45 to $74.