RESTAURANT REVIEW : Enzo’s: Talk of the Town

The waiter is as nervous as a cat, hopping from foot to foot and croaking “We’ll just take it slow and easy” as he mangles the cork and drops the corkscrew on the floor. And now the busboy is spilling soup on us, so the maitre d’ will come over and spend seven minutes apologizing and replacing the whole tablecloth.

What could make a restaurant screw up so bad? Only one thing I know: Stage fright. Somebody must have blown my identity as a reviewer. Restaurants suffer from the tragic delusion that they’ll be able to do better if they know when they’re being reviewed.

Since I’ve eaten here unobtrusively before, I happen to know that Enzo’s Talk of the Town doesn’t usually have such catastrophes. It’s a valuable place too, a plush-booth, nightclubby sort of restaurant serving a Westside Italian menu replete with carpaccio and arugula way out here practically in Arcadia.

Not that the knowledge does me any good at this particular moment, though, as we grit our teeth and wait for the maitre d’ to exhaust his desperate charm. But, for instance, the seafood is very good. The mussels in tomato sauce are among the best I’ve ever had anywhere, plump and sweet, extremely fresh. Here’s a cioppino soup crammed with lobster, clams, swordfish and more of those good mussels in tomato and basil sauce. Here’s a neatly grilled swordfish on a bed of spinach and onions in olive oil.

The pastas are decent too. The penne all’ arrabbiata (more like macaroni than penne, but who cares?) has a distinctly peppery fresh tomato sauce. The tortellini en brodo is a little unusual, the pasta being filled with cheese and the chicken broth also thick with Parmesan: “Like an Alfredo inside out,” as somebody said.

And so on. The fried mozzarella, lightly floured and stuffed with either anchovies or prosciutto, is impressively rich and buttery. The osso buco comes with a risotto loaded with saffron (no grated lemon peel or garlic on the veal shank, though, just parsley).

The chicken cacciatore is off the wall, though very tasty. There are no mushrooms and no tomato sauce on this particular cacciatore, just a garlicky wine sauce. If you miss any of the rosemary leaves floating around in it, you might think you’re eating a Chinese dish.

The vegetables, though, are awful, uniformly mushy and overcooked. Now here’s something the waiter should have worried about instead of that corkscrew.

Some things seem to have been adapted to American tastes. The paper-thin sliced beef in the carpaccio is not raw, but warmed up in a pan until it’s a gray-pink color, and then covered not only with shaved Parmesan but some vinaigrette dressing. It’s a wacky sort of beef salad rather than a carpaccio .

The desserts are Americanized for sure. The tirami su is not cake dosed with cocoa, coffee and liqueur but cake with a layer of bitter chocolate pudding in the middle. The zuppa inglese has also got chocolate pudding in it, between a layer of liqueur-soaked cake and a stiff whipped cream topping.

But one is not exactly on Restaurant Row, and I should think people out this way will be grateful for Enzo’s. You can have a good time here. And of course if you don’t want to have a good time, you can bring a note pad, or maybe a tape recorder, and make surreptitious notes from time to time. You might get them to spill some soup on you.

Enzo’s Talk of the Town, 3730 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. (818) 793-6926. Open for lunch Monday through Friday; dinner Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $47-$79.