RESTAURANT REVIEW : Recipe for Success Is Not Perfect

Recipe for an Italian ristorante:

Take one large, vacant Good Earth restaurant; remodel lightly. Mold with services of renowned restaurant consultant and insert one seasoned Italian chef. Garnish with wine bottles, hip posters and chic modern lighting.

Voila ! (Or rather, presto !) Serves about 150 on a good night.

A Woodland Hills restaurant named Salute has followed this recipe to the letter, using Silvio De Mori of the Westside’s Pane Caldo Bistro, Silvio and Tuttobene restaurants as consultant and hiring Simon Tapia, late of the prestigious Rex in downtown Los Angeles, as chef. But not without a few predictable glitches.

First off, getting into the building from the garage requires stamina and courage. Come in the evening, after the First Fidelity Thrift & Loan building (where the restaurant is housed) is closed and you have to ride an elevator, get buzzed in through a series of glass doors and make several maze-like turns just to find the door.

Once at the entrance, you are greeted by a suave continental gentleman named Tino, who leads you to your table past a sort of mini-mart stocked with such Italian staples as olive oil, balsamic vinegar, polenta and biscotti. No problem here. Tino, and these products, are definitely the real article.

But looking around this spacious room, you don’t sense the pieces quite fitting together. The life-sized papier-mache animals strewn about the restaurant--such as this tiger complete with paws draped over one of the smaller tables--are obviously there by intent, but it’s anybody’s guess what that intent is.

This is a spare, almost austere room, all blond wood and earth tones, better-suited to its macrobiotic predecessor than to upscale Italian. The Italian motif feels imposed on the room against its will, from the forced whimsy of a man in a suit of armor standing guard over the main seating area down to the Italian pop music that drones incessantly through remote speakers. Even while eating Salute’s good rustic Italian dishes, you never quite shake the feeling that you are dining in some kind of hip, overstated lobby.

The recipe for almost every new Italian restaurant apparently calls for the primi (such as appetizers, soups and, in this particular case, pizzas) to outshine the main courses. Salute is true to form.

The pizzas are terrific: cracker-thin crusts, lots of good toppings and just the right degree of doneness. Pizza salsiccia comes loaded up with slices of juicy, fragrant duck sausage. Gorgonzola is your basic tomato and mozzarella pizza, with a twist--light, if ultra-pungent, hints of Gorgonzola cheese, kissed with the perfect amount of sweet basil.

The restaurant’s classic minestrone di verdure looks and tastes so healthfully loaded with vegetables that it could be a holdover from the Good Earth. Pasta e fagiole , an occasional special, is surely more caloric and less nutritious than the minestrone. This triple-sized portion of soup (intended as a main course) is served the way you might get it in Rome, in a ceramic crock brimming with stewed white beans, a tubular pasta and minced garlic.

But zuppa di vongole positively steals the show in the soup department. It’s a zesty bowlful of rich clam broth mixed with pureed tomatoes, garlic and green herbs, then simmered with fresh whole and chopped clams for mind-blowing richness.

The salads and pastas have their moments, but basically they’re erratic. The traditional Caesar pulls no punches with the anchovies, but a surfeit of dressing and grated cheese spoils the effect. Primavera salad is nothing more than a glass bowl of French-style crudites--julienned squash, zucchini, carrot and cabbage. It’s a work of art with vivid colors; pity it has so little taste.

The simple cappellini alla checca can often be a good barometer for pasta in any given restaurant. Here, the angel-hair pasta comes with a good tomato, basil and garlic topping, but the pasta itself is matted and gummy. Penne with calamari, from the specials board, has the opposite problem. It’s tasty but so undercooked that the calamari reminded one of my guests of Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy.

After the pastas, there just isn’t much point to the main dishes. I quite like osso buco con polenta --the veal shank is tender and saucy, with a smooth, creamy pool of polenta underneath--but the monster proportions are bound to scare many people off.

Pass on the oily, bready and flavorless veal Milanese, but you might compromise on pollo al mattone , available in whole or half portion. Rosemary and garlic impart a good flavor to this bird, but the Pinot Grigio mushroom sauce on top is sheer overkill. Maybe you can get the chef to, you know, play around with the recipe.

Suggested dishes: pizza salsiccia, $7.95; pizza Gorgonzola, $7.50; zuppa di vongole, $9.95; osso buco con polenta, $14.95.

Salute, 21300 Victory Blvd., Woodland Hills, (818) 702-9638. Lunch 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday s through Friday s, dinner 5 to 10 p.m. Sunday s through Thursday s , 5 to 11 p.m. Friday s and Saturday s . Beer and wine only. Validated parking in adjacent structure. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $30 to $50.