RESTAURANT REVIEW : Mi Piace: The Place to Go for Just Deserts

Up near the ceiling of this big white room are two huge mirrors and a couple of tiny, insubstantial-looking lamps, a la Rockenwagner. It looks sleek and modern, and Pasadenans are clearly enthusiastic about Mi Piace, though some apparently think its name is “My Place” rather than Italian for “It pleases me.” People willingly wait at the little triangular tables near the pastry counter for 45 minutes or more for a table--and they’re the ones who have reservations.

The focaccia bread is certainly pleasing, slightly chewy and sprinkled with rosemary. Mostly, though, the cuisine is a peculiar mix. A meal consists of Italian dishes, long on tomato sauces and with a slight mania for eggplant, followed by Chef Takis’ clever, dainty, slightly fussy pastries. The pastry menu explains this as International Cuisine.

The pastries are really the best part. They’re gorgeous to look at, less like traditional French or Austrian pastries than colorful, overblown pop jewelry, or maybe silly ‘40s-style hats. For instance, cheesecake, encased in a “crust” made of thin slices of sponge cake glued together with jam, is topped with rose-tinted slices of poached pear.

One pastry, called oranginna , is a layer of chocolate cake, a layer of orange mousse and a layer of chocolate mousse topped with mandarin orange slices in apricot glaze, the whole thing wrapped around in a thin leaf of chocolate. Another is two layers of meringue enclosing a nougat filling, topped with chestnut puree extruded into spaghetti. “Cappuccino the dessert” is a sculpture in pastry of a cup of cappuccino complete with chocolate layer, strongly flavored coffee layer and a topping of gelatinized whipped cream.

These can a lot of fun. It’s mind-blowing to see that blowzy Italian treat tirami su turned into a prim little cake that mostly happens to be filling. They tend to be rather sugary, though, especially that chestnut spaghetti, and it’s hard to imagine eating them two days in a row.

Unfortunately, the pre-pastry part of the meal is wildly erratic. There’s a wonderful artichoke with delicious sourdough bread crumbs stuffed between the leaves, an artichoke you’d eat for these bread crumbs alone. The rosemary chicken pizza doesn’t have much chicken, but the pickled sweet red peppers and the good mozzarella make it pretty exciting anyway. The barbecue chicken pizza is really for people who are not hungering for chicken; mostly you taste sweet barbecue sauce.

A lot of things are bizarre. A loose, sloppy frittata of eggs fried with tomatoes and cheese, more like huevos rancheros than frittata. A steak sandwich you can’t pick up (the tomatoes, onions and peppers fall all over the place) or cut (the bun has been toasted to the consistency of plastic). Veal Marsala in a sauce clearly thickened with cornstarch.

And while the restaurant uses many tomato sauces, they tend to have a rackety, acid flavor. In chicken scarrapela , the sauce is saved by the flavor of the sweet peppers that accompany the chicken, along with excellent anise sausage. In chicken cacciatore , the tomato sauce is enlivened by butter, apparently (the chicken itself is all but underdone). The worst is the one that is spooned onto the pasta that accompanies meat entrees; it has an acidity reminiscent of tomatoes straight from a can.

Pasadena thinks it loves Mi Piace, but it might only have fallen for a pretty room. And those pastries. Well, maybe the artichoke too.

Mi Piace, 25 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. (818) 795-3131. Open for lunch and dinner seven days. Beer and wine. Street parking. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $22 - $42.