For San Diego Restaurants, 1991 Was Year of the Italian : Food: More of the ethnic eateries appeared, replete with more diverse menus.

It wasn’t widely noticed amid all the midnight revelry last New Year’s Eve, but the little baby New Year who came gliding into town at the dawn of 1991 held a bottle of Chianti in one hand and a slice of pizza alla putanesca in the other.

Four hundred and ninety-nine years after Columbus thought he had reached India, scores of his countrymen jetted to San Diego and intensified the peaceful culinary conquest of this city. Nearly one-third of the restaurants reviewed in this column last year have been Italian, which unquestionably made 1991 the year of the Italian eatery. The trend furthermore appears to be holding, so that the feat may be repeated in 1992.

The fettuccine curtain being woven along many of the county’s restaurant rows was not yet tight enough last year to keep out several top-notch, non-Italian interlopers, notably the exquisite Azzura Point dining room at the new Loews Coronado and the Gaslamp Quarter’s Cafe Bravo, which specializes in the cuisine of the Algarve province of Portugal. And perhaps feeling too many elbows poking his ribs, La Jolla’s Will Howard not only changed the course of his pricey and recherche Issimo from alta italiana to haute francaise , but pulled off the switch from Italian to French with finesse.

But the year undeniably belonged to the Italians, who, besides increasing the supply of Italian eateries, began significantly diversifying. While neckties blotched with pesto and marinara sauces bedeviled dry cleaners in other years, in 1991 they were faced with dribbles of such formerly unknown sauces as the sweet-sour uvetta that naps the red snapper at Trastevere and the bitter salsa agrumi served over prawns at Cin Cin da Salvatore. The diversification went beyond individual dishes to styles: Trastevere, for example, specializes in the cooking developed by Rome’s ancient Jewish community, while Cin Cin da Salvatore and the elegant if not finely-tuned Tutto Mare primarily offer seafood. The spread of styles has even caused the introduction of at least one new term, the “red Italian restaurant,” which has nothing to do with politics but rather specifies the genre of family-style spaghetti houses that formerly dominated the local Italian restaurant landscape and stills plays a very large role.

In descending order, the list of those new Italian houses that deserve or at least could bear a second look probably would start with Madeo, the offspring of a Beverly Hills establishment that built a pair of gracious dining rooms off the lobby of downtown’s new Emerald Shapery Center. The menu runs on and on, but the style generally is light and elegant and includes such highlights as the calamari affogati , or tiny squid smothered in a sage-flavored tomato broth; a lovely salad of arugula and shaved, air-cured bresaola beef; an extremely handsome grilled swordfish with a checca garnish of chopped fresh tomato and basil, and a surprisingly elaborate dessert cart.

Trastevere, which gave a chic, ultra-contemporary face lift to the small La Jolla Boulevard space that formerly housed the L’Escargot, seems a little too cramped, noisy and New York-ish (the Lattanzi family operates four Big Apple restaurants) for some diners’ tastes. There is no question, however, that the food is different and often wonderful. The list of Jewish-style dishes (often based on kosher preparations, although the kitchen is not strictly kosher) is brief but intriguing, and a must-taste offering is the plate of baby artichokes fried in olive oil with plenty of garlic. Also from the Jewish menu, the rosemary and garlic-flavored abbacchio alla Romana may be the best baby lamb chops in town. For starters, try the spiedino , triangles of a fluffy cheese mixture doused in a super-savory brown sauce.

Down in the Gaslamp Quarter, the very new Sfuzzi looks like a restaurant chain’s design for the ultimate Yuppie watering hole (and Sfuzzi is part of a nationwide chain), but serves a light, thoughtful, expertly cooked menu. Chef David Woodward’s tastes run to such things as Tuscan white bean soup (as a prediction, look for dried bean and lentil soups and garnishes to become widespread this year), a terrific starter of grilled Portabella mushrooms and asparagus, a fine plate of veal scallops with brown sauce and crisped risotto cakes, and a knock-out combination of beef filet, peppery Chianti sauce and garlic mashed potatoes.

Downtown restaurateur Salvatore Gangale’s new La Jolla venture, Cin Cin da Salvatore, suffers from a difficult location at the corner of Girard Avenue and Pearl Street, but does very well with the cooking and offers several dishes that cannot at present be found elsewhere. Among the more unusual is the house pizza, topped with mayonnaise, fish, herbs and mustard; less daring are such things as the beautifully arranged seafood salad, the linguine with saffron and clams and the shrimp glazed with a bitter-tart orange and lemon sauce.

Piatti, in the remodeled La Jolla Shores premises once held by Gustaf Anders, opened to heavy business and continues to draw crowds to its casual, noisy atmosphere, a cleverly contemporary decor and a moderately priced menu of light starters, pizzas and pastas. Not everything is prepared all that well, but the carpaccio mezzo e mezzo , or shaved raw beef with spicy mustard sauce and other garnishes, is quite tasty, as are the grilled fennel in caramelized onion sauce and the well-composed vegetarian lasagna with pesto.

Tutto Mare, also grand and glitzy, occupies a curving space on the ground floor of a new Golden Triangle office tower and impresses with the number of cooks who toil behind the counter of the open kitchen--although, on occasion, too many of those cooks meddle in the same pot of broth. The menu reads well, but as of October a number of preparations still needed fine-tuning. This seafoodery misses the boat entirely with salads, and seems to do best with pastas, especially those in briny, shellfish-studded sauces. At least the pastry cooks are sure of themselves; the cart sparkles with such attractive choices as the superb hazelnut tart.

The Pernicano family returned to its Hillcrest roots with the new Pernicano’s in the Uptown District, to some degree a “red” restaurant, but one with expanded horizons that run to designer pizzas, breaded squid steak in a wine-lemon-garlic sauce and a good selection of pastas. Never forget that the Pernicano family is famous for traditional pizza, and the “Handlebar,” named for the famous mustache sported by patriarch George Pernicano, pretty much has the last word on your basic cheese pizza with pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms and onions.

Also in Hillcrest, the new Dei Binari brought a clever decor to spacious quarters near the corner of University and Fifth avenues, but but the menu is uneven and seems to do best with appetizers and pizzas. Good choices include the cold vegetable melange called caponata , the crisp mozzarella in carrozza (fried, crumbed cheese, done the way it should be) and marinated flank steak flavored with rosemary and garlic.

Among the new Italian places, the general rule last year seemed to be the less trendy the neighborhood, the more familiar the menu. In Old Town and Mission Valley, comfortable houses that serve good versions of many of the dishes we’ve been eating for years are Parreno’s and Villani’s, and in La Mesa, the very mom-and-pop-style Lader’s, which offers an unusual and delicious stuffed pasta called “the Italian handkerchief.”

The award for best meal of the year belongs to a non-Italian establishment, however, Azzura Point at the new Loews Coronado Bay Resort. Nationally noted chef Jeff Tunks has introduced what he styles “an Asian-influenced new American cuisine,” which we locally would understand as “Pacific Rim cooking.” The important thing is that he wows with such dishes as the mille feuille of fried won ton dough layered with ahi sashimi, daikon sprouts and creme fraiche ; expertly cooked sea scallops garnished with pistachio-stuffed Portabella mushrooms; exceptional crab cakes with three fine sauces and a grilled veal chop with Gorgonzola-rosemary butter and a fried cake of wild mushroom risotto. This luxury restaurant offers numerous extras and professional service in a deceptively casual environment.

Antonio Urbano’s Cafe Bravo helped the year to belong nearly as much to the burgeoning Gaslamp Quarter as it did to the Italians. Oriented toward seafood, this attractive little place on the corner of Fourth Avenue and E Street offers such specialties as grilled giant shrimp of surprisingly deep flavor; the very Portuguese saute of baby clams and cubed pork called carne de porco a Alentejana ; a grand, flavorfully-sauced platter of assorted seafood, and veal scallops in a suave Port sauce.

Few enough other trends surfaced last year, but one encouraging sign was the arrival of places that show an interest in Mexican-style Mexican cooking, as well as in the cuisine of Latin America in general. Two places practicing the former would be La Vela in Chula Vista and Cancun in the Gaslamp Quarter; Berta’s Latin American Restaurant in Old Town offers everything from Brazilian tallarines vatapa to the excellent, Chilean pastel del choclo .

Price consciousness struck to some degree in 1991 (it hit consumers well ahead of restaurateurs), but there were responses. La Jolla’s George’s at the Cove and Top O’ the Cove both added new bars with menus that allow guests to sample the offerings of talented chefs for far lower cost than in the main dining rooms, and the new Avalon, also in La Jolla, advertised its intention--and followed through, no less--to serve light, inexpensive, innovative fare.