Trattoria Is Simply a Standout

“Ventura Boulevard must have as many Italian restaurants as the Via Veneto,” sniped a curmudgeonly friend as I dragged him miles across town to try Tarzana’s La Finestra.

I know what he meant. At first, this spare little trattoria does seem a bit lost in the great Boulevard Italian shuffle. There’s little inside or out to indicate the winning attitude, the cheerful service and the solid, peasant-style cooking that you are going to experience here. But this is the kind of place that tends to make friends and keep them.

White dominates inside, due to bare stucco walls embellished with nothing more than modest pictures of Italian tourist traps. Oh, there are lots of mirrors and plants and even a shoulder-height banquette with flowered upholstery to sit on, but this is a simple restaurant with a simple spirit. And when it comes to what you eat, that’s exactly the appeal.

Chef Mario Tidu is a native of Sardinia, an Italian island province in the Mediterranean where the peasant is king. For years he was chef at Adriano’s on Beverly Glen, and, to judge from the chatty conversations I heard while dining, more than a few of his former patrons have followed him to his new venture. His choice of dishes is hardly out of the ordinary (I actually wish he would cook more hearty Sardinian things, based on fava beans, potatoes and fresh-pressed olive oil), but in sticking to the tried and true Tidu manages to win you over anyway, with a kind of dogged consistency.

Once you are seated, Tidu’s friendly partner, Fabrizio Amati (also an alumnus of Adriano’s), comes to greet you. Then a waitress will bring crunchy bruschetta toast topped with checca, a mixture of chopped tomato, basil and garlic. Much of what you want to eat here is printed on a stationary specials blackboard, so if you cannot see it from your table you’d better get up and take a long look.

We went right after the blackboard’s pizza alla Sarda, expecting something really exotic. Nope. It’s just a cracker-thin pizza topped with sun-dried tomatoes, mozzarella and goat cheese. All right, so it is delicious, and as Amati later explained to me, there are lots of goats on Sardinia.

Two more specials deserve your undivided attention. One is risotto agli asparagi , where arborio rice is simmered with delicate chicken stock and chopped asparagus; the perfect piatto primo for two. (In fact, all Tidu’s risottos are wonderful, the flavors discrete and the grains cooked to a subtle, seductive texture.) Another is chicken mamma mia, a recipe the chef cribbed from his mother back home. It has that peasant touch you dream about. It’s a big plate of stewed chicken, topped with olives and artichokes. Mangia, my child, mangia.

The small menu is basically the usual core of dishes you find in practically every Italian restaurant nowadays: antipasti, soups, pizzas and pastas. There is nothing to distinguish the antipasti, although I will say the insalata di mare, made with baby shrimps, scallops, calamari and olives, is tangy and refreshing. I find the oily minestrone a disappointment--La Finestra actually serves a beanless version. The chef’s mother, I suspect, taught him differently on this one.

You can’t go wrong with pizzas here, all with those cracker-thin crusts. Among the many good pastas, there are a few standouts. Farfalle “La Finestra” is a bow-tie pasta with a heavy tomato sauce, ground veal and fresh peas. Linguine al tonno e olive, my personal favorite, is made with oil-packed Italian tuna, black olives, tomato and basil. And there are excellent, homemade ravioli, stuffed with ricotta cheese and spinach and served in a rosy sauce made with tomato and cream. The chef calls them ravioli Aurora.

In keeping with the spirit of simplicity here, there are precisely four desserts. La Finestra buys ready-made tartufo al cioccolato (a pint-sized ice cream bombe enrobed in chocolate), so for our purposes we are down to three. I recommend sogno di Venezia, a wineglass filled with homemade lemon sorbet and amaretto liqueur served with a pair of tiny almond cookies. The frothy tiramisu could be termed adequate, the too-frothy zabaglione just a touch inadequate. But by and large, like almost everything here, the quality is high.

Oh, and by the way, my friend said he might be back . . . if he were ever in the neighborhood.

Suggested dishes: pizza alla Sarda, $8.50; risotto agli asparagi , $10.50; ravioli di ricotta Aurora, $8.50; chicken mamma mia , $12.50.

La Finestra, 19647 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana, (818) 342-2824. Lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday; dinner 5:30-10:30 nightly. Beer and wine only. Parking in rear lot. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, $30-$50.