RESTAURANT REVIEW : Big Portions of Good Food Make Zaretti Authentic

Caffe Zaretti has to be the only authentic Italian restaurant in the county with autographed pictures of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Pete Rose in the men’s room. But then it doesn’t look much like an authentic Italian restaurant.

It’s next to a Target store in a semi-desolate Northridge shopping center, and you’ll spot the place immediately (just look across the vast parking lot for a lonely row of sidewalk-style tables). Inside, it’s a dark, clubby place with red vinyl booths and a fair amount of wood, like one of those slightly run-down steak houses that are always being sentimentalized. There’s almost no privacy--you’re bound to make friends with the people in the opposite booth.

Oh, there are a few Chianti bottles scattered about and an Italian flag on a rear wall, even a Perino beer sign. But basically, the atmosphere is provided by the food.

And good food it is. Owner Gian-Carlo Zaretti is from Rome, and so is much of what he cooks. At one time, Zaretti was one of the big wheels in the Los Angeles restaurant scene. He owned a Beverly Hills restaurant called L’Etoile. Today, he is a neighborhood restaurateur, but the man still treats his customers like Beverly Hills royalty.

The benchmark of the neighborhood Italian restaurant is the large portion, and that’s what you’ll get at Zaretti. Enormous plates of pasta come with soup or salad and puffy house focaccia bread. Trencherman-sized entrees get soup and salad, the bread plus a side of pasta. Abbondanza!

The salad, incidentally, is terrific, thanks to a textbook-perfect creamy Italian dressing. The house soup, pasta e fagioli, is the one disappointment here, doubly so since the soup, like Zaretti, is native to Rome. It’s a thick soup largely devoid of flavor, with only a few strands of pasta afloat in it. It reminds me of navy bean soup from a frat house.

You’ll really get misty-eyed for college days when you see these pizzas--large, outrageously heavy models with thick crust and gooey toppings. But the calzone breaks the mold comfortably, an upscale version with whole-milk mozzarella, good prosciutto and imported salami. Just about everything else on the menu, though, is much more sophisticated than college town Italian.

Take an appetizer like scampetti della casa, an amazingly delicious recipe using fresh thyme, tarragon, cognac and white wine, blended together in a tomato-based sauce. Or how about one of the best calamari fritti in town--crisp, fragrant and tender, served with a chunky tomato sauce made with sweet basil? I never saw food like that on a college campus.

Pastas are really surpassing here. Every pasta on the menu is made on the premises and cooked to a chewy turn. There are six 350 calories and under in a section labeled “healthy pastas”: for instance, angel hair with fresh tomato (220 calories), fettuccine verde puttanesca (350) and linguine alle vongole (350).

Then there are the more substantial ones with calorie counts we won’t reveal. Fusilli ai porcini is corkscrew pasta in a cream sauce with aromatic mushrooms and lots of Parmesan. You can feast on a meaty lasagne, a classic fettuccine Alfredo, or pasta in a light, ultra-green pesto sauce.

There’s fettuccine Caruso, named for the famous tenor, with mushrooms and chicken liver, and there’s rigatoni rustici with chopped salami, ricotta and herbs. You can even dig into pescatora, a seafood pasta with clams, mussels, calamari, scallops and shrimp. That’s probably the best pasta in the house.

Entrees are huge and satisfying. My favorite among them is chicken in lemon caper sauce (pollo piccata) , perhaps because it’s the lightest. Veal dishes come in many styles: parmigiana, pizzaiola, with porcini mushrooms, margherita (with prosciutto and fontina cheese) and alla paesana (scaloppine with artichoke hearts and sweet peppers).

The house specialty is osso buco Milanese. But caveat emptor, as they say in Rome. It’s a good, tender veal shank, full of marrow and savor, but the menu advertises a “light tomato sauce,” and what you get would power a 12-cylinder Ferrari.

Don’t leave without having one dessert. One particular dessert. Zaretti makes a reasonable tirami su (who doesn’t?) and, I’m told, a mean chocolate souffle (Friday and Saturday nights only). But it’s neither of those.

I’m talking about his cannoli. It’s the best cannoli I’ve ever had. The crust must be 50% cheese, and it is stuffed with a dry ricotta filling laced with bits of chocolate. It doesn’t look particularly Italian, but then in this place, that’s not much of a surprise.

Suggested dishes: calamari fritti, $3.95; scampetti della casa, $4.50; linguine alla pescatora, $10.95; pollo piccata, $10.95; cannoli, $2.25.

Caffe Zaretti, 8856 Corbin Ave., Northridge; (818) 701-5066. Lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday; dinner 5:30 to 10 p.m. daily. Beer and wine only. Parking lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $25 to $40.