Spumante: Italian Restaurant With a Split Personality

At times, Spumante seems like two restaurants: One has wonderful Italian food; the other serves mediocre versions of California-Southwest-Mexican cooking.

You could, for instance, come to Spumante and start with cozze e vongole (at a reasonable $6.50), a wonderful herbed tomato broth with with mussels, clams and other seafood heaped in. If you then continued with penne al modo mio --a virtually perfect pasta dish with fully flavored cherry tomatoes, garlic, basil, excellent olive oil and feisty goat cheese--or the rib-eye steak--with an invigorating Madeira and rosemary sauce--you would come away thinking that Spumante was surely one of the best Italian restaurants in the Valley.

If, however, you started with Mozzarella Southwestern, you’d get a strange, under-flavored version of insalata caprese (minus the basil) with mozzarella, sliced tomato and purple onion plus--I don’t know why--feta cheese on the side. Choose the chicken tacos, and you would end up with a bland dish only slightly redeemed by a first-rate chopped tomato, garlic and basil salad. The weirdest thing you could order is a chicken breast with a black pepper and cassis sauce. Avoid it.

The atmosphere at Spumante is of the casually elegant school. The indoor dining area feels like a garden room. Windows on one side face the street, while, on the opposite side, wood-framed glass doors give onto an attractive dining patio. It’s a friendly, open space--a comfortable place to eat a good meal.

Of course, getting great food in a restaurant that tries to do too much takes careful choosing.

You’d do well with melanzane al Greco : slices of eggplant rolled around feta cheese, briefly grilled and served with a sun-dried tomato sauce. It’s a happy combination of flavors that stands up to the appropriately resilient texture of the eggplant.

Ravioli stuffed with chicken liver and spinach, served with a rich dark sauce studded with whole wild mushroom caps, is a welcome change of pace, though the flavors could have been clearer.

Pizzoccheri spumante , an absurdly complicated-sounding concoction of whole-wheat fettuccine with cheese, cubed potatoes, white cabbage, butter, sage and garlic, turns out to be remarkably appealing. I expected it to be heavy and muddy-tasting; it was neither. Indeed, its interplay of textures, starting with the slightly coarse pasta and continuing through the soft potato cubes and crunchy sauteed cabbage, reminded me of pastas I haven’t eaten since I was in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy.

Spumante also has what is possibly the best tirami su I’ve tasted since this Venetian invention became the dessert of the late ‘80s. It has all the requisite richness of flavor and texture without being too sweet or soft. Unfortunately, it seems evident that most of the other desserts come from a supplier used by quite a few other restaurants. One of them, the chocolate sponge cake, is certainly acceptable. But judging by the tirami su , which, I was told, is made in-house, Spumante should stick to desserts of its own making.

There’s a modest wine list of California and Italian bottlings, almost all priced less than $30. Service is good here too. The pacing of meals always seems graceful. This is especially appreciated in a restaurant where the prices are not excessive.

Spumante, 12650 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. (818) 980-0734. Open for lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, dinner 5:30 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, until 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Parking lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $35 to $55.