RESTAURANT REVIEW : Mystery of Chicco: It’s Got to Be Atmosphere

Maybe it’s just me, but I get the feeling Chicco might be a movie-biz hangout. There are all those Porsches parked down the street, and all those diners who kiss the air next to each other’s cheeks instead of shaking hands. I’ve also overheard what sounded like tantalizing bits of colorful showbiz jargon: “two projects in turnaround,” “violation of federal banking statutes.”

The question is what the show people see in the place. Certainly it has a nice, if small, view of Beverly Gardens Park, but it’s not in what you call a fancy location, a motor hotel just barely inside Beverly Hills.

But maybe that adds to Chicco’s charm as a cozy little hideaway. Despite its official address on Doheny, you actually have to walk up inconspicuous Civic Center Drive to find the door, and when you do there is no sign on it. The only way you know you’ve found a restaurant at all is that the kitchen door is usually open and somebody is out there peeling vegetables.

Maybe the show folk perversely like the fact that Chicco doesn’t look like your garden variety trendy restaurant. The walls are covered with lath, greenhouse style, and for art there are only some English equestrian prints and quite a few landscape paintings of remarkable clumsiness. The ceiling needs work right over one of the tables.

I suppose the show people might like the food and wine, but that’s a little too simple. It has a pretty ordinary Italian menu (pasta with pesto, two kinds of ravioli, spaghetti with meat sauce, grilled fish), and the wine list is a very curious mixture of decent, commonplace and weird. It doesn’t hesitate to list unfamiliar Italian wines by name, but the top of its line is an unspecified “French Bordeaux” at $55.

For an appetizer you could get excellent cold salmon topped with lemon sauce, or caciucco, a mixed seafood soup in thick, spicy tomato broth. On the other hand, you might order a clam-and-mussel soup which sounds almost the same as caciucco but tastes like nothing but clams and mussels in tomato juice. There is a good antipasto buffet at lunch, complete with veal in tuna sauce (a little heavy on the capers) and various meatballs and varieties of cooked zucchini, though things were a little dried out by the time I got to it.

This kitchen knows its risotto, and the mushroom risotto has good texture and a nice spicy tomato sauce, although not much of the flavor comes from mushrooms. Beef Robespierre is pretty good, too: beefsteak slices fried with thyme. Somehow, though, the veal with mushrooms has a distracting taste of oil.

The pastas I’ve had varied from overflavored to bland. The fusilli puttanesca, with its heavy dose of calamata olives, was astonishingly bitter.

Why do the biz folks come here? Maybe for the salmon appetizer, or the caciucco, or the risotto or the beef Robespierre, or the huge, plainly grilled shrimp; maybe they like the hideaway feeling, or the haughty and abrupt maitre d’. Actually, the more I think of it, they must come for the decor.

Chicco, 469 N. Doheny Drive, Beverly Hills. (213) 273-3844. Open for lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Street parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $26 to $64.