RESTAURANT REVIEW : Inconsistent Fabio No Symphonie

For hungry Southern Californians, these are the Italian years.

Even Torrance’s Asian-French restaurant Symphonie has gone Italian. The owners are the same, but the chef and the managerial staff have changed, and there’s a new name: Ristorante Fabio.

We pull open heavy glass doors in a glass brick alcove, step into a glittering bar. An older man with a ponytail leads us to a table. Gone is Symphonie’s severe black-and-white color scheme. Today, there’s gorgeous blond wood paneling, banquettes upholstered in a buttery faux blond leather. The halogen light is flattering, the chairs are elegant black lacquer with curved, slatted backs.

Buffering us from Hawthorne Boulevard’s many lanes of traffic is a narrow garden with bamboo, rocks, trickling water and a high wall over which you can see only starry sky.

Kenny G wails on the sound system. At a corner table, a group of well-dressed younger men talk first about workout techniques, then move on to the challenges of their marriages. At another table, two young women are out to dinner with their parents. Otherwise, the clientele is largely twosomes dining quietly.

Our waitress is an attractive, dramatic woman with a flair for selling the daily specials. But our drinks and bread take too long to arrive. The older couple, who came in a while after us, already have their salad while we’re still waiting to order our food.

We’re starving too. The bread basket is a disappointment; heavy, undercooked, it is served with a small bowl of marinara sauce, no butter, no oil.

We guess the basics of the menu before we even open it: pizza, pasta, insalata . Antipasti , secondi , dolci . Fabio’s food, like its space, aspires to be more lavish than the average Italian cucina, almost borderline Continental. It’s also fairly inconsistent.

This is immediately obvious with the antipasti misti , a sampling of the day’s side dishes, displayed on a sideboard in the dining room. Our plate has good, fresh black mussels in red sauce, a patty of goat cheese, some ordinary marinated mushrooms, a soggy wedge of fritatta, and a cold potato-and-cream assemblage that one friend says tastes like her mother’s failed attempt at scalloped potatoes.

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Other appetizers share a similar unevenness. Marinated salmon with asparagus has a lovely, circular presentation with fresh asparagus, but the salmon itself has an off-putting muskiness. Arancini , fried rice balls with cheese, which can be fabulous when made from last night’s risotto, here have a bland, prepackaged character. A Mediterranean salad, with feta cheese, Greek olives, lettuce and onions, is OK, but the $6 arugula salad is mostly leaf lettuce augmented by an occasional arugula leaf. Luckily, the carpaccio is sliced as thin as skin and topped with arugula, good oil and Parmesan for a true, sensual pleasure.

One night, the waitress sells us black lasagna with black mussels. What arrives is black tagliatelle with black mussels, an acceptable dish if not exactly what we’d envisioned. The house risotto, made to order, does have dreamy, plump, slithery chunks of porcini mushrooms, but the rice is dry rather than chewy, soupy rather than creamy and too salty.

We are not surprised to find a similar inconsistency in our entrees. We are sold a rack of lamb that is, as promised, heavenly: tender, juicy, beautifully cooked. The swordfish, however, is the skinniest, toughest piece of fish I’ve ever encountered, and the chopped tomato and bland black olive topping would be unsatisfactory even on the best swordfish steak. A grilled half chicken served on delicious slices of grilled fresh tomato is also tough. Accompanying potatoes, apparently boiled in a tomato base, are pretty awful.

The service, while congenial, is problematic. I always feel uncomfortable when I’m waiting to order coffee and dessert and the waitress is busy breaking down the tables, blowing out the oil lamps, in preparation for tomorrow. The message is: Leave, don’t linger.

These may well be our Italian years, and it may have been prudent for the owners of Symphonie to redecorate, rename and restaff. I only wish that as much care and attention was lavished on the food as on the room.

* Ristorante Fabio, 23863 Hawthorne Blvd., Torrance, (310) 373-8187. Lunch Monday through Friday, dinner Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Parking in rear. Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $26-$65.