Home Cooking, Italian Style, at Vittorio!

It is no accident, I think, that there’s an exclamation point fixed to the end of this Italian restaurant’s name. Vittorio! is a place where garlic!, olive oil! and Southern Italian home cooking! reign. Both the taste of the food and the tone of the place have the spirit of a Sunday-night supper on New York’s Mulberry Street. (OK, so this Palisades veteran has spiffed-up its looks; so have countless restaurants in Little Italy.)

There is nothing quiet or restrained about this cuisine. It is as buxom as a va-va-va-voom Cinecitta queen. If you like your antipasto crazy with olive oil, your squid salad covered with a hailstorm of garlic and your cannoli the spitting image of one you’d pick up at a San Gennaro Feast, then add Vittorio! to your take-out list.

There’s one thing I should warn you about: Vittorio! is very generous with their snail-shaped, garlic- and oil-soaked pizza dough rolls--and they are hard to resist. I have watched normally sane human beings act like pigs at truffle time when the rolls, the antipasto (fat red and yellow peppers, marinated broccoli, good feta and good olives for $7) and the insanely delicious calamari salad (as pink and as tender and as garlic-oily as it comes, $5.50) are brought forth.

The stuffed mushrooms (seven for $5.50) are especially nice--hot, meaty and heaped with bread, garlic and parsley. Though essentially the same stuffing is piled into large artichokes (dig deep enough and you’ll find mozzarella shards), with less surface to brown the filling tastes wet and soggy, like some lost Thanksgiving ($5.50).

Mussels marinara ($9.50) are another delightful appetizer: sweet tasting mussels blanketed with a thin, light, garlic-strewn, clearly homemade tomato sauce. At the same price, calamari fritti is equally plentiful but so greased-up it tastes like carnival food.

There are nearly 20 pasta selections (when you call, ask for the specials of the day). No goat cheese, no sun-dried tomatoes, you know the turf: linguine with two kinds of clam sauce, spaghetti and meatballs, linguine and garlic shrimp. . . . Something listed simply as “baked pasta” ($8.50) turns out to be a meaty, mozzarella-laden manicotti, as New York Italian-homey as I’ve had in L.A.

The linguine with white clam sauce ($11.50) is straightforward and delicious, filled with lots of oil, lots of garlic and lots of pale pink fresh clam chunks. Six large tender shrimp mixed with oil, garlic, parsley and a heap of linguine ($12.50) are a pleasant enough way to eat protein and complex carbs but lacked oomph.

Veal and peppers ($11.50 and served with pasta) are lovingly prepared lean, lemony slices of veal mixed with two handfuls of velvety and yellow peppers. Crisp, fresh and certainly tasty enough again, New York-style pizza with its fat, chewy dough comes in every standard guise. I tried the primavera with ripe tomatoes, fresh basil and garlic, and the meatball pizza with its meatballs sliced like meat loaf and a simple, well-balanced sauce, yet they’re nothing to write home to Mama (or KCRW’s Billy Vera) about.

Those somewhat greasy homemade cannoli ($2.50), packed with vanilla and dotted with chocolate bits, deserve an exclamation mark. But what particularly punctuates my memory is Vittorio!’s calamari salad. I want a lifetime subscription to that squid.

Vittorio!, 16646 Marquez Ave . , Pacific Palisades. (213) 459-3755, 459-9316. Open Tuesday through Sunday, 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. Neighborhood delivery available. No checks or credit cards accepted.