A Gaslamp Site Graduates From Tattoos to Top Italian Cuisine

Truck on downtown to 5th and F, and you’ll find it hard to believe that San Diego was the setting of the classic tough-guy read, “I Cover the Waterfront.”

Not so long ago, the northeast corner of this Gaslamp Quarter intersection was home to a couple of bars where the atmosphere could be cut with a G-string and every other forearm bore a bold tattoo. The places in question were named China Doll and Singapore, and during their heyday, anyone who doubted San Diego’s role as a roistering seafaring town needed to look no farther than their beery vestibules.

Now Fio’s occupies the site, and the only tattoo you’re likely to find at this uptown Italian house will read “I Brake for Endangered Species.” Gentrification, a term that signifies much in other major cities but is just entering the vocabulary here, quite suddenly has made the corner of 5th and F safe for tasseled loafers and Armani suits.

For its logo, Fio’s has taken a sentimental red rose, but the cooking and mood distance themselves pointedly from sentiment. There is a sharp edge to dishes like radicchio alla griglia , pizza puttanesca and pizzoccheri alla valtellina , and a hard, no-nonsense tone to the servers’ all-black costumes, which somewhat disconcertingly remind one of the black shirts worn by Mussolini’s Fascisti .

Make no mistake: Fio’s is an important opening, and one that has significantly altered the style of a neighborhood now emerging as a major entertainment zone. The decor--contemporary, sleek and attractive in a rather self-conscious way--arouses the strong suspicion that Fio’s owners want the place to be, as is said in the trade, “very New York.”

There are handsome pillars, an exhibition kitchen and an exhibition wood-fired oven, and local artist Debra Sievers has painted seven life-sized murals of the historic Palio horse races held in Sienna, Italy. Their reference to San Diego, the restaurant or the cooking (which offers little that could be identified as Siennese) is indistinct, but their effect is more than sufficiently dramatic.

The menu could best be described as realistic. It spends little enough time with formal entrees, but devotes much space to pastas and dressy pizzas (the hot items of the moment) and also finds room for several sandwiches. This menu seems a typical exercise for chef Nancy Anne Smith, who a year ago opened Del Mar’s outrageously successful Il Fornaio and unquestionably favors robust, rustic, no-nonsense Italian cooking.

None of the sandwiches were sampled, but the list is illuminative of Smith’s style. There is a sandwich of cream cheese, arugula and anchovies (it sounds oh-so-trendy, but does anyone like anchovies that much?); a grilled chicken breast and sun-dried tomato combo; a classic pairing of Italian sausage and roasted peppers, and a grilled, thin steak with mushrooms and mozzarella that sounds suspiciously like the famous Philadelphia “cheese steak.”

The brief (for this menu) appetizer list offers some excellent choices, most notably a beautifully arranged antipasto platter that features marinated seafood and vegetables, wonderful curls of genuine, imported, lusciously sweet Italian prosciutto (only recently available, after a decades-long ban on some imported pork products was lifted), other cold cuts and cheeses. There is a daily carpaccio , and while this usually is a serving of thinly sliced raw meat, the term sometimes extends to raw fish, which suggests that Fio’s has invented Italian sushi. The baby squid used for the deep-fried calamari plate are a little larger than usual, but tender and deliciously sweet.

Another handsome offering, the radicchio alla griglia , hits all the au courant notes by wrapping red Treviso lettuce in prosciutto and dressing the grilled bundles with splashes of pungent balsamic vinegar.

Pizzas emerge burnished and molten from the wood-fired oven, a fixture which is to today’s upscale Italian eatery what a BMW was to last year’s yuppie. These ovens produce superb results with Smith’s light, supple crusts, as evidenced by a football-sized calzone that arrived stuffed with a smooth cargo of ricotta and mozarella cheeses blended with mushrooms, bell peppers and onions. Pizza choices range from the tame quattro formaggi (four cheeses with tomato) to the stridently seasoned puttanesca (anchovies, capers, olives and more) to the rather elegantly conceived quattro stagione (“four seasons”), which decorates the crust with tomato, cheese, eggplant, artichoke hearts and prosciutto.

The pasta list quite nicely repeats a pizza theme with the fettuccine quattro formaggi , a dish that adds peas and cream to the blend of four cheeses. Cheese-stuffed tortellini arrive moistened with sage and browned butter, a really classic presentation, and there is also a classic and well-executed spaghetti carbonara that adds caramelized onions to the prosciutto, cheese and cream dressing. The capellini with fresh tomatoes, one of the most typical Italian pasta presentations, is done with a light hand and is rather tasty. On the less familiar side, the list also offers salmon-stuffed ravioli in a saffron cream sauce; lasagna layered with stewed duck and becciamella (white sauce); gnocchi in rabbit sauce, and, for those who want farmhouse cooking, pizzoccheri alla valtellina , or buckwheat pasta tossed with cabbage, belly bacon and Fontina cheese.

Smith prefers grilled entrees and offers such things as veal chop stuffed with wild mushrooms, a marinated rib-eye steak with roasted garlic and a skewer of seafood flavored with rosemary. Her fanciest presentation may be the anatra arrosto , or rotisserie-roasted duck that has first soaked in a marinade of honey and balsamic vinegar. The subtly sweet-sour flavor is unexpected and delicious, and the remarkably crisp skin a fine foil to the tender meat. The kitchen also sends out a nicely done fegato alla veneziana , or thin strips of liver briefly sauteed, in the savory Venetian manner, with onions and fresh sage.

The dessert tray flatters the eye quite effectively, and rather more successfully than it does the tongue. A flour-less chocolate cake was heavy and ill-favored, and a cheesecake rather flavorless under its cloak of lemon sauce. The carefully finished tirami su , on the other hand, delicately combined a light chocolate flavor with whipped cream and mascarpone cheese.

If the menu takes a realistic note, so does the wine list, which recognizes both that Californians are faced with such an enormous choice of local wines that they are always in the market to taste a new one, and that there are those who want an Italian wine with an Italian meal.

FIO’S

801 5th Ave.

234-3467

Lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday; closed Sunday.

Valet parking.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including a glass of wine each, tax and tip, $35 to $70.