RESTAURANT REVIEW : Bright, Inventive Entries on Bellini’s Menu

Things aren’t always as stark as they seem. Bellini’s looks like just a little neighborhood trattoria-- and not in the most elegant Pico Boulevard neighborhood, either--and it is a bit bleak inside. Gray walls. Butcher paper on the tables. Pen-and-ink drawings of old men’s faces.

But the menu is full of bright spots. The food tends to be light and inventive, most of it in effect vegetarian, including a couple of cheeseless pizzas. There is a decided personal tone to it, including a mild mania for fennel.

The fennel thing begins before the meal, in fact, with the plate of fresh bread studded with fennel seed. Then there is an eggplant and goat cheese calzone with fennel in it, and even a dish of spaghetti mixed with fennel seed and fennel bulb sauteed in butter, which has a subtle aromatic flavor and a strangely pacifying quality.

The antipasto is mostly just prosciutto and salami, but it includes two radishes partly hollowed out and stuffed with spiced ricotta, and some rather quaint olives, ordinary black California jumbos with a shred of orange zest in each. The cozze alla Rudy are just mussels in lemony broth, but incredibly plump and fresh-tasting.

Among the pastas, farfalle Delfi are probably the most unusual, bow-tie pastas with browned baby artichoke hearts and chopped walnuts. Because of the wine or the walnuts, the pasta has an eerie purplish-brown color, but the combination of mildly bitter flavors is fascinating.

I don’t mean to say everything is great. In fact, there are some basic flaws here, above all with the rice. The special of veal involtini steamed (steamed!) in spinach--”an upscale hot dog,” as someone described it--came in a delicious sauce that wasn’t much more than pureed porcini mushrooms and black pepper. But alongside this was rice (wonderfully flavored with lemon and basil) of a positively mushy consistency. The saffron risotto, likewise, was full of jolly saffron, but overdone and porridgy.

I hasten to add that the saffron pastas, of which there are more than one, are very good, such as the saffron linguine with fresh tomato coulis. Unfortunately, since they’re pastas the saffron adds more color than flavor.

The pizzas, at least the ones I’ve had, are rather sharply flavored, One of the three made without cheese consisted simply of fresh tomatoes topped with reconstituted porcini. It would be hard to imagine making a main course of this, though it would be OK split with a couple of people as an appetizer. Ditto the rather sharp calzone melanzane.

There are only about three desserts, the best of them a ricotta cheesecake with white and dark chocolate on a crust that tastes a little like crumbled oatmeal cookies. The tiramisu is an unusual model that will disappoint chocoholics, though it’s actually pretty good: mostly a fantastically deep layer of mascarpone (this tiramisu is served in a bowl, not on a plate) with chocolate shavings on top and some ladyfingers way down at the bottom, soaked with anisette.

Altogether, though, not bad for a plain little trattoria on Pico.

Bellini’s Trattoria, 12021 W. Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles; (213) 477-4057. Open for lunch Monday through Friday, for dinner Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Street parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, $34 to $54.