Mi Piace: Italian for Uninitiated

Mi Piace was the first Italian restaurant with a pretty room to open in a prime Old Town Pasadena location, and it’s had lines at its door ever since. Now, there’s a new Mi Piace in Burbank’s Media City Center. And the crowds are already gathering.

The new restaurant is sunk below street level at a busy corner near Ikea and Barnes and Noble. The room is vast and airy, and a veritable museum of the trendy post-modernist flourish. A large architectonic boat shape of blond wood and steel cable floats over the booth area. Harpoon-like shafts strung with fish-shaped glass hang from the ceiling. MI PIACE is spelled out in rusty steel over the kitchen. Senseless, jutting beams--an homage to Barbara Lazaroff?--fan over the dessert case.

The last time I ate at Mi Piace, I sat next to a woman who kept asking her date questions. “What’s spaghetti again? Well, then, what’s linguine? And fettuccine?” This woman would seem to be the perfect Mi Piace customer, since anyone who is knowledgeable about Italian food is apt to be disappointed by the cooking here. If you’ve never had dense, crusty bread grilled and brushed with good olive oil and topped with juicy ripe tomatoes, you probably won’t mind Mi Piace’s version of bruschetta: four small discs of soft bread, one topped with chopped shrimp, one with too much tapenade, one with soggy tomatoes, one with limp, presumably roasted, sweet peppers.

There’s nothing subtle, let alone sophisticated, about the cooking here. The warm bread is salty, oily, irresistible. Even the lemonade is so strong, we mistook it for Spic ‘n’ Span.

Grilled portabello mushrooms are pretty good--once you find them: They’re served hidden under a tuft of over-dressed greens--possibly to obscure the fact that they’re small and extremely flat. (In another salad, slices of roasted eggplant are also buried under greenery. Go figure.) Fried calamari are pale and tender; I only wish the cilantro/lime/jalapen~o sauce wasn’t so sweet.

Salads are over-dressed, especially the Caesar. Best are those made with vegetables--a green salad with steamed broccoli and string beans, for example, or a chopped salad with green beans, carrots, onion and tomato.

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Pastas are a mainstay here: Portions are daunting and the price is right, so who but a persnickety restaurant reviewer cares if, in too many instances, the pasta itself lacks character, the tomato sauce is insipid, the cream sauce bland, the grated cheese of indifferent quality? Penne all’arrabbiata tastes like canned tomatoes with red pepper flakes. The same dull red sauce deadens the rustic seafood stew.

There are exceptions: Pumpkin ravioli, once you fish them out of a lake of melted butter, are fluffy and delicious. And there’s the unusual and bracing linguine with sea scallops and compellingly bitter rapini.

Mi Piace serves best those people who don’t know the difference between a shiitake and a domestic mushroom. If you do know the difference, you’ll be peeved when your veal marsala is smothered by the latter rather than the shiitake mushrooms promised on the menu.

Pizza is made with broad strokes. Sauce and cheese swamp the “Classico,” a thin-crusted pizza with fresh basil and oregano. The barbecued chicken pizza is brushed with candy-sweet barbecue sauce, then loaded with grilled zucchini, goat cheese, fresh basil, red onion, two kinds of cheese.

A waitress discouraged me from ordering the eggless creme dessert. “Too bland,” she said, and recommended the Mi Piace Special, an overbuilt pastry with layers of chocolate and berry mousses and dry cake striped with red food coloring. The Luxor is more dry cake in a pyramidal (natch) shape filled with hazelnut mousse. The Italian cheesecake, a paisley-shaped creation with more painted, dry cake, contains a mascarpone filling that smacks of liquor and the refrigerator. When I finally did order the eggless creme custard, I found a decent snowy-white panna cotta drizzled with fruit syrups.

The service can be young and charming, the crowd’s a great cross-section of Burbank’s shopping and movie-going public. The lines, I’m afraid, are inevitable.

* Mi Piace, 801 N. San Fernando Road, Media City Center, Burbank, (818) 843-1111. Open for lunch and dinner seven days. Full bar. Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $25-$52.