Cafe Bellissimo a Slice of Sicily

“I don’t believe it,” said one of my authentic Nyawk friends as he surveyed the scene at Woodland Hills’ Cafe Bellissimo. “This is exactly like an Italian restaurant from my youth in the Bronx.”

Really. What else needs to be said about a restaurant where your waitress excuses herself to sing the theme from “The Godfather,” where an autographed head shot of Ol’ Blue Eyes himself is prominently displayed above the door, where an accordionist breaks into rounds of “O Sole Mio” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” to get the crowd going and where there really is an authentic mama, slaving away behind a hot stove in a splattered cloth apron?

Cafe Bellissimo is the real article all right, an eccentric restaurant that, like Bobby Darin, aspires to be a legend in its own time. Mama Sara Bellissimo and her sons, Emilio and Tony, have done their best to bring a slice of Sicily to the West Valley.

The Bellissimos will stop at nothing to create a mood. Sometimes one of the boys will dress up in a black shirt and fedora, like the young Robert De Niro in “Godfather II.” The menu is full of joke allusions to the Mob, like the seven-course Godfather dinner for parties of 10 or more, or the chicken Cosa Nostra I ate one evening.

The dining room is a hoot, a mock palazzo constructed out of more than 15,000 pieces of tile. Much of the festive spirit is provided by soft pinks and greens, giving the restaurant a sun-bleached, almost arid look. Most of the tables are clustered along a wall ornamented by a painted vista of Longi, the Bellissimo family’s Sicilian hometown. Furthermore, these tables are about as close as the law allows. If you can’t make friends here, you just can’t make friends.

Now, don’t come expecting to find the sleek, self-consciously hip Italian dishes of northern Italy or West Hollywood. This is Southern Italian peasant fare, with no apologies. The pastas can be mightily overcooked, and more than a few dishes are gratuitously heavy. But mangia, mangia.

You’ll get started with wonderful pizza bread, cut into squares and lightly brushed with butter and garlic. The best things to eat here, not coincidentally, are two things that Mama Sara literally prepares by herself. One is an appetizer called arancini di Messina. The other is cannoli, a rich canoe-shaped cream cheese pastry.

Arancini are rice balls, and subject to myriad interpretations, but Mama Sara’s are the best I’ve tasted: big, golden golf balls, glued together with mozzarella cheese, peas and a rich meat sauce. Try finding anything like this on Melrose.

As for the cannoli, she makes the dough and stuffs it with kneaded, sweetened ricotta cheese. The chocolate chips she uses as a garnish seem almost austere by comparison.

Beyond those treats, little is remarkable about this menu. Good appetizers like scampi are sauteed with plenty of butter and garlic, a combination no one can argue with. Campagnola is one of the more interesting appetizers, a platter of cooked eggplant, roasted peppers, pungent black olives that look like little jewels, and some rather rubbery and noncommittal mozzarella.

The beanless minestrone is too intense with tomato for my taste. I’d prefer the hearty tortellini in brodo. It’s about 70% stuffed pasta, 30% broth. Sometimes, for bean lovers, the kitchen makes pasta e fagioli. It comes chock-full of cannellini and kidney beans, but it’s infuriatingly bland.

Among the many pastas I tasted here, I’m afraid not one was prepared al dente. The carbonara has a creamy, tasty sauce, but the requisite eggs (added for richness) are virtually undetectable. Penne arrabbiata, those little tube-shaped wonders in spicy red sauce, are another disappointment. They are full of heat but have almost no aroma.

This kitchen is much more in its element serving meat and seafoods, just as it would be doing back in Sicily. There are excellent charbroiled lamb chops--Longi style, meaning marinated in wine, oregano and spices--and the usual parade of veal dishes. Good calamari comes in chunks, with a heavily garlicked white wine sauce, and the ruddy clams marinara will evoke the Bronx all over again.

And the accordionist will be happy to play “New York, New York.”

Suggested dishes: arancini di Messina, $3.95; campagnola, $5.95; lamb chops Longi style, $14.95; cannoli, $3.50.

Cafe Bellissimo, 22458 Ventura Blvd., Woodland Hills. (818) 883-2233. Dinner 5:30-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 5:30-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday. Beer and wine only. Valet parking. All major cards. Dinner for two, $30-$50.