RESTAURANT REVIEW : California Cucina Revives the Ordinary

No matter how fresh the food products, it still takes care and skill, if not talent, to make them into appealing dishes.

So, when a restaurant such as California Cucina, located in a new shopping strip in Toluca Lake, offers freshness and vitality of flavor, I pay attention.

Although it’s not consistently excellent, California Cucina’s successes are notable. For one thing, it made me reconsider dishes that are so consistently poorly made that I had stopped taking them seriously.

One of the greatest offenders in this category is ratatouille--I’ve come to call it the gray vegetable. Many other restaurants serve it as an almost always cold, overcooked vegetable stew whose original flavors have been leached out and replaced with mysterious seasonings.

But the hot ratatouille at California Cucina serves as a base for grilled Italian sausage. You get whole, flavorsome tomato concasse with smaller quantities of full-textured diced eggplant and sliced zucchini shot through with sprigs of fresh rosemary. It is as alive, vital and colorful as if it were being served in Provence.

Angel hair pasta with a similar sauce (basil is the predominant herb here) is equally impressive, although the scallops served when I ate there were somewhat overdone.

Another surprise, or even shock--the fried mozzarella. Testing the restaurant’s culinary limits, I ordered the dish, which is probably the most butchered of all Italian-inspired dishes. But here, the cheese was thinly sliced so that it was warmed through and through, the fried coating was delicate, and the vibrant tomato concasse and basil were underneath, where they belong. Now this dish has re-entered my active mental menu.

I also enjoyed the cream-sauce dishes. Linguine with a walnut-Gorgonzola cream sauce was very rich, but the flavors were well-balanced. So was a rib-eye steak in a green peppercorn sauce. Salads also were appealing, though there wasn’t much “Caesar” to the Caesar.

California Cucina serves a number of dishes that are far superior to what you’d expect to get in a shopping strip or most anywhere, for that matter. Not only is the cooking a surprise, so are the portions and the prices: the former generous, the latter reasonable. However, the service, though speedy, could use some polish.

Recommended dishes: fried mozzarella with tomato basil sauce, $5.25; angel hair pasta with tomato, garlic and basil, $6; linguine with walnut-Gorgonzola cream sauce, $6.50; Italian sausage with ratatouille, $6.50.

California Cucina, 10658 Riverside Drive, Toluca Lake. (818) 509-1714. Open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 4 to 10 p.m. Sunday. No alcohol; no corkage charge. Parking available. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $24 to $42.