AMORE A L’OPERA : Beautiful Room, Wonderful Food: Passion Flourishes in Long Beach

Long Beach is in love, and it looks like the real thing. L’Opera Ristorante may have opened almost two years ago, but faces still light up when you mention its name.

That name may not ring many bells outside the South Bay, and Westsiders may be pardoned for confusing it with the defunct Opera Restaurant, but L’Opera deserves to be more widely known. It compares with the West Side’s best Italian restaurants, and its pastas actually put most of the West Side’s to shame.

The dining room is semi-palatial, with green booths and high, old-fashioned ceilings, the effect lightened by plate-glass windows (giving a clear view of the new light-rail line on 1st Street, if you care). Both the dining room and the smallish, generally crowded bar front on a display kitchen notable for massive quantities of copper and aluminum. On the dining-room side, a gigantic M-shaped structure (is it to bring the room up to earthquake code or just for fun?) carries a sort of etched-glass architrave, a fugitive reference to Roman antiquity.

As soon as you sit down, you get a basket of hot focaccia and porcelain cruets of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. People who finish the basket are probably planning to skip a course. Not that many people are up to having appetizer and pasta and meat entree and dessert anyway.

The list of appetizers carries the cute title “Per Stuzzicare l’Appetito” (“to prod the appetite”), and one of the cutest of them is stuzzichini (“little prodders”). They consist of very thin cuts of lamb chop, fried buckwheat-brown in crunchy breading, and are meant to be eaten hot with a squeeze of lemon. They’d make great street food.

Spiedino di mare sounds as plain as street food, but its best part is concealed. As the name implies, it’s a skewer of clams, scallops and shrimp, a sort of seafood satay sitting in broth flavored with lemon juice and white wine. Buried at the bottom is a paper-thin slice of eggplant fascinatingly impregnated with the flavors.

Apart from scamorza con porcini , a tiny portion of extremely smoky melted mozzarella, and prosciutto d’oca , a prosciutto made from goose (a bit dry and of a somewhat disturbing corned-beef shade of red), the rest of the appetizer list is more familiar. At least, at first glance. You can get calamari fritti , though with small fish called whitebait mixed with the fried squid. You can get carpaccio, but it consists of raw tuna and swordfish cut paper-thin.

Even the antipasto plate--with its particularly good sliced sausages and pickled vegetables--is worth considering. The soups are a gamble, though. A waitress asked me how we liked our artichoke soup, and then confessed that she never knows how the soups are going to turn out--good, bland or salty. This was a bland one.

You can get risotto here--on the solid, rather than the moist, end of the risotto spectrum--but why would you when you can order pastas? L’Opera’s have such satiny textures and striking flavorings, I can’t imagine wading through a plate of even very good rice instead.

One of the best pastas, somewhat surprisingly, is lasagna vegetariana. This is not a perfunctory bow to vegetarians but a low-rise block of delicate pasta, sprinkled with tomato sauce and parsley to approximate the colors of the Italian flag, with a luscious filling of ground mushrooms, something like a French duxelles. For meat eaters, the equivalent in lusciousness would be the cannelloni, which are like ethereal enchiladas with a mild veal-and-cheese filling, again wrapped in the Italian flag.

The very richest pasta is gnocchi filanti , a big bowl of pasta pillows in sticky cheese sauce. Gnocchi are probably not the most serious thing in the world, but when they have this light, melting texture, neither chewy nor mushy, they can seem important. Fettuccine alla norcina , consisting of very delicate pasta in a tomato-cream sauce mixed with bell pepper and chunks of sausage, comes close in the richness department.

Sometimes as a pasta of the day, L’Opera serves salmon ravioli in thyme sauce--or to be more exact, a faintly sweet butter sauce flavored with thyme. Ravioli porcini comes in a brown butter sauce, but the effect is so profoundly mushroomy--it’s kind of like eating on the forest floor--you almost don’t notice how rich it is.

Not all the sauces are so rich. One of the best pastas is mezzelune d’aragosta , little half-circular dumplings filled with lobster in a fresh tomato sauce. Rotolino consists of strips of pasta rolled up with ham, topped with chopped tomatoes. If you really feel like tomatoes, that’s what you get with your penne all’arrabbiata, along with a faint dose of red pepper.

If you feel like coin-shaped pasta filled with lamb and rosemary, on the other hand, you can get orecchiette al sugo di castrato. I’ve never seen panzerotti stuffed with duck in a mascarpone- and-walnut sauce anywhere but L’Opera.

After the imagination and skill lavished on the pastas, the meat courses look a little pallid. Actually, most of them score pretty high (though not the medaglioni a waiter pushed on us one night; bell peppers in cream sauce--what a thing to put on a steak). The osso buco , which, unfortunately, is available only a couple of times a year, has a wonderful texture and a hint of saffron in the veal. Alas, L’Opera doesn’t believe in sprinkling osso buco with the minced lemon-peel-parsley-and-garlic mixture called gremolata.

Filetto pepe puts a very dark red sauce of balsamic vinegar and a refreshingly bitter topping of cooked radicchio on beefsteak. With a squeeze of lemon, it’s an intriguing sensation, though this is the kind of dish to order when you can trade bites with another diner. It gets a little wearing on its own.

The rest of the meat entrees could have come from many a West Side Italian menu. There’s a roast chicken, a sort of chicken paillard called sfogliatella and sometimes a rich, subtle special called musdea ripieno , consisting of mahi-mahi rolled around artichokes and mozzarella. Meat entrees, especially the grilled items, tend to come with carrot slices, broccoli and very good roasted chunks of red potato.

Dessert may not be an option by the end of the meal, but there are good ones. Some are cute, like vulcano --a hemispherical chocolate cake with raspberries and chocolate sauce representing a volcanic eruption--and sacchetto , a molded chocolate “shopping bag” lying on its side, spilling berries and custardy sauce. Distinctly Italian sweets include crunchy fried ravioletti and crispellini . The latter are little crepes wrapped around mascarpone and pecans under a berry sauce; the former are filled with apple and sprinkled with shaved bitter chocolate.

Apple ravioli with bitter chocolate! It’s amore , I tell you.

L’Opera Ristorante, 101 Pine Ave . , Long Beach; (310) 491-0066. Open for dinner nightly; Monday through Friday for lunch. Full bar. Complimentary valet parking. All major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $38-$71.