Elegant La Dolce Vita Truly Provides a Taste of Sweet Life, Italian Style

Name a restaurant Joe’s and no one will raise an eyebrow so long as some Joe or other was involved with the place at the time it opened.

However, to christen an establishment La Dolce Vita is to invite comment, unless la vita in question is, in actual fact, decidedly dolce . The “sweet life” is something we frequently are promised when we dine out, but much of the time our money purchases only an illusive facsimile.

There are those who would argue that in Fairbanks Ranch, with its gates, guards and mansions, the good life has roared in at the wheel of a Bugatti and seems assured of a fairly long stay. But, although many of the trappings of la dolce vita have been in place in this exclusive community since it started rising from the bare brown hills at the beginning of the decade, a good restaurant usually has not been among them.

Fairbanks Ranch Plaza, the commercial center outside the development’s gates, includes an elegantly proportioned restaurant space that has housed eateries of varying quality, among them La Difference--which succumbed to the neighborhood’s indifference--and Les Blanchard. This space recently was taken over by Anna and Romeo Schiavi, one-time owners of the popular Portofino in Encinitas.

The Schiavis’ upwardly crusty and very Italian La Dolce Vita may very well succeed where its French predecessors failed, not merely because Italian eateries are enjoying such enormous cachet, but because the menu is prepared with so much care and style. While French cooking aims at subtlety and nuance, Italian cuisine emphasizes bold flavors--but at its most elegant, these flavors never are rustic or rough. This sort of allegro ma non troppo note typifies the cooking at La Dolce Vita.

Even though formality seems to be receding from San Diego restaurants as inexorably as the cliffs along some of our beaches, La Dolce Vita has installed a quietly elegant decor and service to match.

Perhaps the prettiest thing about the decor, however, is the antipasto table stationed at the entrance to the dining room. Portofino was the first in town to install one of these, and, although the practice has spread, good antipasto tables still are rare enough to provoke a sense of pleased anticipation on sight. This one boasts platter after platter of cold appetizers, many based on vegetables, and the servers arrange colorful plates that include tastes of most of them.

A serving recently included such standbys as melon fingers wrapped with prosciutto and sliced mozzarella layered with tomatoes and basil leaves, but also featured wedges of freshly cooked and lightly marinated artichoke, a fine salad of shrimp, mussels and incredibly tiny squid, and servings of roasted peppers and grilled zucchini. The tastiest bite may have been the grilled eggplant, which was marinated in oil and musky balsamic vinegar, an ingredient that gave it a surprising but pleasing sweetness. The most unusual offering, however, was the whole head of roasted garlic, its top slashed away to reveal a honeycomb of tiny chambers, each containing a single, pungent clove that could be pried out and savored like a poor man’s truffle.

Chef Santi Bordi, who is from a town near Milan, writes his menu daily, and because the antipasto plate can be prodigious, he generally offers several other starters. These recently included calamari livornese (braised rather than fried, and topped with a heavily herbed tomato sauce), an interesting house version of the ever-stylish carpaccio that dresses the sliced raw beef with lemon sauce and mushrooms, a trio of typical soups and the inescapable Caesar salad.

The pasta list on this same menu offered eight choices, which at first seemed rather an abbreviated selection given the length to which pasta lists can run these days. It was a fairly exotic list, though, and included rigatoni con lumache (macaroni with snails, a dish that requires a certain commitment of anyone who orders it); farfalle rustiche (“rustic butterflies,” or lepidopteran-shaped pasta in an outspoken sauce of broccoli, sausage, garlic, herbs and tomatoes), and fettuccine topped with salmon that has been flamed with vodka and finished in a lightly tomatoed cream sauce.

This was all elegant-sounding stuff, but the pasta that received the nod was the linguine alla arragosta (linguine with lobster), both because it used fresh local lobster and because it extended the usual spicy tomato sauce treatment called fra diavolo with a sprinkling of caviar. The lobster obviously had been cooked right in the sauce, and its essence combined with the caviar to give the sauce a deeply briny flavor. The lobster itself had a wonderful, juicy succulence, which should be something taken for granted everywhere, but, as regal and expensive as this creature may be, a lot of cooks render it as tough as rubber.

At first glance, the entree list looked fairly standard, but Chef Bordi seems to have his own way of doing things and seems to like adding little bits of this and that to achieve an unusual effect. The tomato sauce that finished a filet of salmon, for example, included such savory flavorings as anchovy, caper, olives and shrimp, and a rabbit stewed in white wine was dressed with pungent black olives. Other interesting but untried choices included bacon-wrapped quail with applesauce, chicken breast in a an amaretto-flavored cream sauce spiked with apples and almonds, and sea bass on a bed of herbed spinach, the whole doused in a tarragon cream.

Milan is the home of the famous dish of braised veal shanks called osso buco , and Bordi sent out a remarkable rendition in which the meat was tender but not overcooked, and the tomato sauce spiced to exactly the right degree.

LA DOLCE VITA

16236 San Dieguito Road

759-9011

Lunch and dinner daily.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including a moderate bottle of wine, tax and tip, $60 to $110.