BREAD AND BETTER : From Air-Dried Duck to BLTs, 5-Year-Old Campanile Shows No Signs of Midlife Crisis

It’s Sunday morning at the Hollywood Farmers Market, and if you want the sweetest strawberries or the tastiest tomatoes, there’s no time to dawdle. Competition for the best produce is fierce. By noon, the crowd is six deep at my favorite tomato stand, and the heavy, vine-ripened fruits are just about gone. As I stop by to pick up my booty, a voice behind me calls, “Do you have the bag for Campanile?” They do. A big one.

The next day, when I lunch at Campanile, the California-Mediterranean restaurant on La Brea Avenue, I have one of those juicy tomatoes. It is sliced thick, layered with applewood-smoked bacon and crunchy iceberg lettuce and sandwiched between a yeasty, marvelously textured “country white” bread smeared with homemade mayonnaise. The rustic loaf comes from La Brea Bakery next door. Every element in this sandwich is first rate, and it all adds up to a terrific BLT.

Since they opened Campanile in 1989, chef-owners Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton have searched out the very best raw materials. Prosciutto and melon here means wedges of glorious Chino Ranch melon dripping with juice and hand-cut slices of rustic prosciutto. The antipasto plate one day includes a heavenly down-to-earth salad of mixed beans, ranging from cream and pale green to mottled burgundy. I am lucky enough another night to snatch the last of the brassy golden zucchinis, their blossoms stuffed with fresh ricotta and julienned prosciutto and basil. In winter, Peel serves air-dried duck in a dark blood-orange sauce, playing the sharp, sweet-scented citrus against the rich duck flesh.

While most 5-year-old restaurants are heading for a midlife crisis, Campanile is actually getting better--more enticing menus, more confident cooking--which is saying a lot for a kitchen that turns out breakfast daily and dinner six days a week and somehow fits in lunch Monday through Friday. This is also one restaurant where a meal still builds from start to finish instead of fizzling at the main courses or the desserts. This captivating, highly personal food is very close in spirit to great home cooking: nourishing, comforting, completely delicious. Take soup. Who pays much attention to soup anymore? It’s one of my favorite things here. I recently savored every spoonful of marvelous roasted parsnip soup.

The small menu, which changes daily for dinner and weekly for lunch, closely follows the seasons. If live soft-shell crabs or fresh sardines, say, are available, Peel will devise just the dish to show off these finds to best advantage. One night he wraps firm-textured wild bass in fig leaves before grilling the fish and then topping it with olives and a squeeze of lemon. Order a dish of vegetables for the table, and out comes a platter piled with whole onions roasted in their skins, new potatoes crinkled from the oven, grilled eggplant and zucchini and garlicky Blue Lake beans. He knows enough to let the vegetables speak for themselves. When Silverton found some Persian mulberries, in season for only six weeks each year, she chose to serve the sweet berries plain, topped only with a little cream.

The two were quite young when they first started cooking together; they were brash enough to take on Maxwell’s Plum in Manhattan in the mid-’80s. Now they’ve got three kids of their own and a restaurant that has grown up alongside them. Campanile is very European in the sense that it is a hands-on family affair. A former student of agricultural economics who cooked at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Spago, Peel, with sous-chef Tina Wilson, is in the kitchen while his wife concentrates on breads (assisted by plant manager George Erasmus) and pastries (with pastry chef Jon Davis). Silverton’s thyme-scented rolls, big loaves studded with wine-dark olives, or Provencal fougasse formed into lacy ladders are the first pleasures of dining in their restaurant.

Campanile is set in a 1920s building topped with Moorish arches and a graceful eponymous bell tower. It is especially lovely at breakfast or lunch, when light streams in the high-ceilinged atrium with its Spanish tile fountain and potted olive trees. In the main dining room, diners are wedged elbow to elbow between the open kitchen and a wall decorated in abstract bas-relief. The back room, where tables are more widely spaced, feels a bit forlorn at night in the gloomy lighting. The service is friendly, knowledgeable and exemplary. Water glasses are filled and wine replenished without your ever having to ask.

When European friends are in town, I never hesitate to take them to Campanile. Much of the restaurant’s menu is familiar to foreign visitors, but it’s different enough from Italian or French food to thrill them. They love the soups. And they eat a ridiculous amount of bread. The rustic boneless prime rib is a variation on bistecca fiorentina , charred, sliced thick, smeared with tapenade ; the juicy, flavorful beans are flageolets or cannellini. Flattened grilled chicken, the pollo al mattone of the Tuscan countryside, comes with a bracing parsley salad spiked with garlic.

Although La Brea Bakery is one of the premier bread bakeries in the country, Nancy Silverton is first and foremost an extraordinary pastry chef. Never too sweet, her desserts are definitely worth a detour. Consider her sedate-sounding sourdough chocolate cake quivering in a pool of coffee sauce while a ball of “iced” cream melts into the soft, warm round. Or her tender, yeasty brioche tart piled with sauteed nectarines, peaches and apricots. She recently baked a lemon meringue tart and served it with a prickly vanilla-scented Champagne vinegar sauce. Who would think you could pair vinegar with lemon and pull it off? But she does it.

The restaurant has a wonderful, fairly priced wine list, filled with hard-to-find wines from small, quality producers, not only from France, Italy, California and Germany but also from wine buyer (and co-owner) Manfred Krankl’s native Austria. The 13-page list is put together with passion and intelligence. Among my picks: the ’92 Scheurebe spatlese, $33, from Germany’s Muller-Catoir, a stunning match with an appetizer of cold cedar-smoked sturgeon with poached egg and frisee. For reds, he has Domenico Clerico’s ’90 Arte, $48, a Nebbiolo-Barbera blend; a rare ’90 Syrah from the Chianti producer Fontodi, $57; the inky ’90 Cornas from Auguste Clape in the Rhone, $45, and an ’89 Moraga, a distinguished Bordeaux blend from grapes grown right here in Bel-Air, $68.

At Campanile, Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton have put a lot of thought into even the smallest details. Lemonade is fresh-squeezed, for example; hot chocolate comes with a homemade marshmallow floating on top. Small wonder that eating at this warmhearted restaurant induces such a feeling of well-being.

Campanile, 624 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles; (213) 938-1447. Closed Saturday at lunch and Sunday at lunch and dinner. Dinner for two, food only, $57-$88. Valet and street parking. Smoking allowed in the atrium. Corkage, $12.