A Regular Joe

“You on your way to see a play?” a waitress asks, her words echoing in the empty, hangar-size dining room. “ ‘Cause you sure as hell aren’t on your way to see the Dodgers--that crowd left 10 minutes ago.”

OK, there’s really not much new to say about Little Joe’s, which, after all, has been around for the better part of a century and which charges pretty much ordinary prices for pretty much ordinary Italian-American food. It serves more meals each day than all the hip Italian restaurants on La Brea put together. It’s a Los Angeles tradition.

If you grew up in the Southland, you’ve probably known the taste of Little Joe’s ravioli since you were small: soft meat-puffs in sour red marinara sauce. If you grew up almost anywhere else, you’ve tasted something like Little Joe’s ravioli, and the spaghetti and the manicotti, and the spumoni for dessert.

You also probably know what the place looks like--high ceilings and guys in shirt sleeves, leather booths, a zillion different dining rooms with sawdust on the floor and rosy acres of Italian scenes painted on the walls--right down to the presentation plate from Sam Yorty, the giant-screen TV and the place in the mural where the Vatican melts right into the Forum of the Caesars. Two minutes north of the Civic Center, a safe haven among the spicy-sweet smells of Chinatown, Little Joe’s sells familiarity and convenience the way Spago sells pizza. (It’s got to be selling something, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t the food.)

If you’re like everybody else, you’ll start with a hot-appetizer plate, a round metal job not unlike an Italian-American pu-pu platter that might include deep-fried logs of pully cheese, deep-fried rings of squid, something with an uncanny resemblance to deep-fried cocktail weenies, and sodden deep-fried ravioli, which are served with a ramekin of the house’s special sour red sauce. Oddly enough, the deep-fried stuff goes pretty well with a Negroni or an Americano. Other appetizers include weirdly sweet eggplant caponata, and a special salad that features strips of turkey and salami. (Watch out--what Little Joe’s calls Italian dressing is the orange goop your junior high school cafeteria called Creamy French.)

The deal here is the spaghetti dinner, where for not very much money you can get a bowl of decent minestrone, a salad, a giant plate of extremely overcooked spaghetti with meat sauce, and a bowl of spumoni for dessert, all served at dazzling speed. Well . . . it’s better than a Dodger Dog.

Add a couple of bucks, and you can have ravioli stuffed with dryish ricotta and sauced with a commercial-tasting pesto, or linguine with a strong-tasting seafood mixture, or limp manicotti. Double that money, and in addition to the spaghetti you can get cottony shrimp “scampi,” or soggy chicken “cacciatore”--a Southern Italian red plate. Moderns can request decent polenta in place of the spaghetti on the side.

There are Northern Italian white plates too. One featured veal piccata, in which the slices of cutlet were so thickly encased in an egg pancake that the dish seemed more a Korean specialty than anything served in Italy, with fried zucchini and a gluey heap of tortellini.

This is not a pizza parlor, you understand: what goes under the name of pizza here is laden with a good half-pound of ricotta and a crisp cap of mozzarella-not bad, exactly, but not pizza.

Little Joe’s has a better wine list than you might expect from a noodle joint. California wines especially, with delicious things like William Wheeler Reserve Cabernet, Ferarri-Carano Chardonnay and the Cain 5 claret blend at fairly reasonable prices. The big-deal wines don’t go particularly well with the food--you’re probably better off with another Negroni, or possibly a cheap Chianti, but it’s nice to know that they’re around.

The best things in the house seem to be the steaks and chops--good meat, accurately grilled. Side ‘em with some polenta and a dab or two of sour red. And afterwards, visit the old Jim Beam decanters and salt ‘n’ pepper shakers in the display case by the kitchen.

Little Joe’s, 900 N. Broadway , Chinatown, (213) 489-4900. Open Monday-Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $16-$32.