RESTAURANT REVIEW : European Sensibility in Malibu

It’s Sunday night and we’re relaxing with coffee after a good dinner at Tra di Noi restaurant in Malibu. The room, all wood, smells like a mountain cabin. The lighting is subtle, like gaslight. Large, garish California landscape paintings aside, there’s a European atmosphere and sensibility at Tra di Noi.

The night has grown cool; waiters are pulling the windows shut, folding the umbrellas on the patio. The dinner crowd is dwindling. Somebody puts polka music on the sound system. It’s boisterous and cheering and irresistible to one of the waiters who breaks into a spontaneous dance through the dining room. For a moment, in this rustic and romantic room, a satisfying meal behind us, the comic music and dancing waiter before us, we laugh out loud from sheer pleasure.

It’s one of those moments in a restaurant I’ll never forget.

The moment passes, of course, as it should. After a while, a waitress asks a few tables, “This music is a little annoying, don’t you think?” Hmmm. Maybe. Well, yes, now that you mention it. So the tape is changed, the room suffused with an Italian tenor singing the kind of song that can get a whole room of grown men to start bawling in unison. Before we start bawling too, we get up and walk out into the night. The air smells like the salty sea and the spicy sage-filled hills--would we have noticed this if our senses weren’t so dilated at dinner?

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While Tra di Noi is in no way a formal or fancy restaurant, it’s not an inexpensive restaurant, either.

Tra di Noi’s Italian menu is more interesting than some. Assorted pastas can be matched with assorted toppings and sauces and there’s a small but interesting selection of main courses.

The country-style antipasto plate has the usual (tomato and mozzarella, grilled eggplant, bruschetta with tomatoes, bruschetta with Gorgonzola, a wedge of frittata) and the unusual (some unidentifiable but tasty vegetable cakes and patties). The tricolore salad here is actually a perfectly OK mix of field lettuces covered with wide, thin flaps of Parmesan cheese. Somewhat closer to the traditional tricolore is the San Remo, an absolutely luscious salad of endive, arugula and Gorgonzola cheese.

The risotto changes at the chef’s discretion; we tried one made with porcini mushrooms that was saucy and tasty and a tad underdone so that the rice was still chalky rather than merely firm.

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We matched the gnocchi with the Milano sauce and wound up with dreamy little pillows of the potato dumplings in a pleasurably gluey mix of spinach and Gorgonzola.

I followed the Milano gnocchi with the Il Maiale, a butterflied pork chop with Gorgonzola sauce. Luckily, the sauce was very light and good, and only underscored the great grilled flavor of the pork.

The salty Valdostana, a veal scaloppine topped with good prosciutto and melted Fontina cheese, was lively and irresistible.

Not everything we tried was fabulous. The grilled sausage was not particularly tasty, and came looped around a soggy heap of stewed peppers and potatoes.

When we ordered the baked dorado special, we were first introduced to the whole cooked fish, an attractive shimmery red-orange creature, and then the waiter set about dismantling it with a fork and spoon. Unfortunately, the fish was somewhat overcooked so the fileting process became a bit of a wrestling match and the eating of the meat was less gratifying than it otherwise might have been. Still, my friend who ordered it had this to say: “It tastes like fish I ate in Portofino . . . it tastes like Italy.”

The service at Tra di Noi is erratic, possibly lazy, with stretches of competency alternating with neglect. At some points there seemed to be a lot of staff members around, but only one swamped waiter felt remotely responsible for meeting our needs. Bills were delivered before we were offered dessert, no refills were offered for post-prandial coffees. It’s too bad, because such faltering, especially at the end of a meal, was the only thing weighing us down as we walked outside through the arbor of jasmine, smelled the ocean and the spice of the cooling hills.

* Tra di Noi, 3835 Cross Creek Road, Malibu, (310) 456-0169. Lunch Monday through Saturday, dinner 7 days. Beer and wine. American Express only. Dinner for two, food only, $36 to $78.