RESTAURANTS : High-Ticket Restaurant on the Hill : Fino is one of the most ambitious spots in the South Bay

Technically, we’re in Torrance. However, this is not Torrance proper--Torrance horizontal--but the sloping, foothill part of Torrance that really seems to belong to Rolling Hills.

Certainly the sign for this particular shopping mall is no help unless you’re coming from the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you’re driving up from the flatlands, you’ll have overshot the entrance by the time you see it. You have to remember to turn at the sign for a street called Via Valmont, only in the opposite direction, if you want to find Fino Restaurant.

All very promising. Diners instinctively know where the ambitious restaurants bloom, just as a fisherman knows the kind of pool where the big bass hang out: namely, near hills, or anyplace else where just thinking about the real estate values can give you a nosebleed. In other words, where a restaurant owner can count on the lurking presence of deep pockets and demanding palates. (Or at least palates that can afford to be demanding; whether they actually are is another matter.)

The only odd thing about Fino is that its owners are fishing in the Palos Verdes area, rather than in the more familiar waters of the Westside. That, and the fact that instead of being near hills, Fino is right on a hillside. You’re aware of the slope of the ground everywhere in this quasi-rustic, boutique-filled mall. The restaurant itself takes a form sternly dictated by the hill, a somewhat foreshortened dining room with a balcony overlooking it.

This gives the dining room an odd feeling, somehow sprawling and cozy at the same time. Maybe this is why people come. Or maybe they come because of the jovial mural showing a party in some unspecified Mediterranean country, where the guests are treading an admirable line between dignity and boisterousness. Anyway, they really do come--Fino is clearly the preferred high-ticket restaurant in this area, as the dressed-up clientele shows.

A year and a half ago, when Robert Bell and Michael Franks opened Fino, they made more of this Mediterranean motif and aimed at a sort of fusion of all Mediterranean cuisines from Spain to Lebanon, combined in our inimitable Californian way. Today, however, the book of fancy toothpicks that the waiter leaves with your bill (in lieu of a book of matches) identifies its cuisine rather more circumspectly as Italian, French and Spanish.

Fino is still one of the most ambitious restaurants in the South Bay, but it’s harder to give a thumbnail characterization of the food it serves now. The wilder entrees are gone, the farfalle pasta with lamb and yogurt and the frog legs in vinegar and hazelnut sauce. Nor can you start dinner any longer with a plate of olives followed by an appetizer of toast covered with olive paste and then move on to duck in olive sauce.

But when you sit down they still give you a little plate of baked garlic cloves in virgin olive oil--you mash them with a fork and dip good chewy focaccia bread in it. And the best of the appetizers is still around, a whole head of escarole grilled semi-crisp and sprinkled with grated cheese and fried pancetta.

The antipasto plate is now called tapas, but apart from a few Spanish notes such as a fresh sardine, a wedge of Spanish-style potato omelet and some Manchego cheese, this is basically still antipasto . . . plus tabbouleh. On Monday nights there’s a particular specialty of these quasi- tapas, and more salads and rice dishes are added to the usual selection.

Fino still serves excellent calamari in a luscious and relatively unusual style, not crisp but moist and somehow crunchy. The pesto sauce on the side has enough garlic in it to cure the plague. There are also excellent sauteed shiitake mushrooms, so richly flavored in their strong red wine reduction they really taste like meat.

The salads retain a stronger note of the old experimentalism. Are they made with exotic baby greens? Of course. They might also contain chunks of fried lobster meat, pickled artichoke hearts and green olives, or perhaps a couple of crescent-shaped shaped dumplings made from filo and filled with assertive goat cheese.

The pastas still play with pan-Mediterranean fusion too. Pasta casareccia is twin-strand macaroni with a Franco-Italian topping of celery, carrot, raw tomato and hot anise sausage. The ear-shaped pasta orecchiette comes in a sharp tomato sauce with Spanish chorizo (don’t confuse this dry pork sausage with the spicy Mexican chorizo). Fino’s duck pasta is linguine with duck, shiitake mushrooms and prosciuttino in cream sauce, solid and on the peasanty side.

The entrees don’t take quite as many chances as the preceding courses, though. One of the best is simply a grilled chicken breast topped with pine nuts, sun-dried tomatoes and great big capers, accompanied by plain-cooked but savory beans, peeled tomato chunks marinated in vinegar and snow peas. Lamb shank--cooked very soft and sprinkled with roasted garlic cloves--was one of the stars of the old menu, but the current incarnation, mixed with roasted new potatoes, is less dramatic than the old one where the mass of meat was separated from a pile of garlic potatoes by a hedgerow of sauteed carrot, celery and onion.

Maybe this new caution is for the best. One night there was an excessively daring special entree of lamb medallions with mint and anise sausage, where the lamb had also been marinated in vinegar and everything was served in a Dijon mustard sauce. You probably wouldn’t refuse to eat this, but I doubt that anybody is demanding that it join the permanent menu.

But the only daring thing about the mixed grill, for instance, is that among the chunks of steak, chicken and lamb are some pieces of pork sausage with sun-dried tomato in it (made by the Westside’s favorite sausage-maker, Jody Maroni). I suppose the scaloppine roulade is a combination of several cuisines, but I don’t feel like separating the strands (French? Italian? German?). The veal is wrapped around shiitake mushrooms and then sauteed in a thick, meaty wine sauce, a satisfying dose of protein but a little unfocused.

One of the desserts is a really solid success, the raspberry ganache tart. It looks like a raspberry cheesecake with brown cheesecake and turns out to be another variation on the chocolate-raspberry- creme anglaise combination, but a good one. The lemon meringue pie is not quite the classic sort because the meringue is rather dense, but its only fault, as I had it, was that the crust was stiff and cold.

The pecan cheesecake is just as it sounds, though a little more tart than you might expect, and the tiramisu a little mushier than you expect (good bitter chocolate in it, though). The chocolate oblivion tart is the usual fudgy thing, only in strawberry sauce (less tart than raspberry sauce, which may not be such a good thing). The creme brulee I had was a big disappointment, grainy and with a sugar crust that was not just caramelized but burnt black.

The old Fino’s menu was more intellectually stimulating, I guess, but the current version probably knows its clientele better. Fino is still one of the most important restaurants in the South Bay, and nobody knows these waters like Robert Bell and Michael Frank.

Fino

24530 Hawthorne Blvd., Torrance; (213) 373-1952.

Open for lunch 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Friday; dinner 6-9:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 6-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday. Full bar. Parking lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $36-$63.

Suggested dishes: grilled escarole, $5.95; sauteed shiitake, $7.95; calamari, $7.50; fried lobster salad, $11.95; pasta casareccia, $8.95; grilled chicken breast, $13.95; raspberry ganache tart, $4.50.

INTERVIEW: A conversation with Fino’s owners. Page 84.