RESTAURANT REVIEW : Bounty of Flavors : Il Salotto offers a lavish lunch buffet for $4.95. Dinner promises even more.

Il Salotto--the name is the Italian for “living room”--is a sweet little Ventura Boulevard cafe specializing in home-style Italian cooking. Owner Pietro Zaretti comes from a restaurant family. His brother Gianni has the estimable Caffe Zaretti in Northridge; Pietro’s wife, Rossana, is responsible for many of Il Salotto’s top-notch recipes.

One thing that makes Il Salotto stand out from other Italian eating places on the boulevard is an incredible $4.95 lunch buffet. This buffet is a deal, all right: two pastas, homemade soup, pizza, a variety of appetizers, salads, terrific polpetti (veal meatballs) and dessert. Zaretti admits that he is taking a loss on this buffet, as anyone with a sense of the restaurant business might reasonably conclude. “Lunch has been slow,” he confides.

I can easily imagine being a regular at lunch here. Two of us filled small plates with antipastos such as little slices of zucchini topped with baked bread crumbs, mozzarella Caprese with a dollop of pesto, delicate polpetti in a superbly light marinara, two slices of the thin-crusted pizza Margherita and a couple of grilled onions . . . and later we went back for pasta and sauteed calamari.

Soon after, a waiter brought out a steaming basket of hot, puffy focaccia bread, while my friend insisted that I try a bowl of the deliciously filling pasta e fagioli soup. It’s a specialty of Zaretti’s native Rome.

Yes, this is a buffet, complete with steam table. But unlike many a buffet, it consists of food made in small quantities and is continually replenished.

Dinners are on an even higher plane, although the menu rarely strays from the simple. Zuppa di pesce is about the fanciest dish Il Salotto puts out. It’s the priciest, too, if $13.50 for an iron kettle chock full of assorted fresh seafood can be called pricey.

Zaretti pulls no punches with this one. It contains large, soft chunks of swordfish and sea bass, mussels, clams, shrimp, calamari rings, whole scallops, a piquant marinara and a hot, crusty bread lining the inside of the kettle. I couldn’t resist it, and found myself scooping out the bread crust to get at the remnant flavors of the seafood.

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Fans of gnocchi will be pleased to know that these little potato-flour dumplings are yielding and tender. You get a huge plateful served a piacere , meaning with your choice of sauces. I’ve had them with creamy Gorgonzola here and also with a rustic, heavy meat sauce, which I preferred. Order the pasta spirals called fusilli and they come with lots of porcini mushrooms and cream--maybe even too much.

Only cannelloni alla Fiorentina really fails to live up to expectations. This cannelloni is a long pasta tube stuffed with spinach, ricotta cheese and fresh mushrooms. Maybe I’d like it better if it weren’t covered with a commercial grade of provolone before baking.

Veal dishes are only $11.95, made with good medallions of white veal and the usual toppings. Personally, I’d spend the extra money and have the house specialty, osso buco . This marrow-filled veal shank is firm, tender and meaty.

It’s tough to choose between soup or salad, an option you have with all entree and pasta selections. One evening the soup was a hearty lentil with a delicate homemade taste. Both the house vinaigrette, made with red wine vinegar, and the Caesar dressing, subtly tangy with anchovy, were good enough to make you temporarily forget Mama.

A few desserts come from the hand of Signora Zaretti, though not, naturally, the commercially made ice creams: spumone or the chocolate confection called tartufo . The one called casalinga , made of ladyfingers and an amaretto-flavored custard, is a cousin to tiramisu.

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Where and When

Location: Il Salotto, 19563 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana.

Suggested dishes: Lunch buffet, $4.95; gnocchi a piacere , $8.95; zuppa di pesce , $13.50; osso buco alla Milanese , $13.50.

Hours: Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday to Friday; dinner 5 to 10 p.m. nightly.

Price: Dinner for two, $21 to $32. Beer and wine only. Parking lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa.

Call: (818) 996-8008.