Divina Cucina Cooks With Family in Mind

A lot of upscale Italian restaurants are geared toward hip singles and professionals-on-the-run, which is why these places tend to avoid family residential neighborhoods. Children just don’t care about extra-virgin olive oil; as we know, what they want is pepperoni pizza and the chance to splatter red sauce on each other.

Divina Cucina, family-oriented Montrose’s first really hip Italian restaurant, offers the best of both worlds.

It’s a sophisticated wood-and-glass building with walls of Tuscan beige and a rustic tile floor, and it has a wood-burning brick pizza oven you can smell halfway to downtown Glendale.

The crowd inside--and outside on the elegant enclosed patio that fronts Verdugo Road--spans the generations, but the food is clearly contemporary Italian.

And if you’ve come with the family, there’s major bang for the buck. Kids can order whole pizzas and pasta dishes from a special menu, nothing over $4.50. There are also a dozen family-style pasta or chicken meals that feed four to six for around $5 a person.

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The best things here come from that glorious brick oven. Everybody starts off with complimentary bruschetta--toasted peasant bread piled high with tomato, basil and garlic. Then loaves of the yeasty house bread come hot from the oven for dipping in olive oil.

The thin-crust pizzas have pleasant toppings. Divina’s pizza quattro formaggio doesn’t ooze melted cheese like another versions, but it does feature an intelligent blend of mozzarella, Gorgonzola, Romano and goat cheeses.

The pizza Margherita shows an exemplary balance of basil, mozzarella, tomato sauce and crust. The only mediocrity is the barbecue chicken pizza. Not only is the sauce cloyingly sweet, it turns the dough soggy.

The rest of the menu is fairly solid. There is a workmanlike version of fried calamari and a decent beef carpaccio with a nice mustard-caper sauce (and a little too much shaved Parmesan cheese).

Most pastas come from the blue DeCecco boxes you might see piled up in the rear of the restaurant, but a few are homemade. However, homemade doesn’t necessarily mean better. The ravioli--small ones, but a generous serving--have a nice al dente consistency; however, the filling is bland and mealy in the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee style. Oh well, the kids will probably like it.

One evening I tried a special called spaghetti alla salsiccia. The pasta was perfectly al dente, and the sauce of fennel sausage, sweet peppers, sun-dried tomatoes and olive oil was applied with proper restraint. I’ve also had surprisingly good risotto Milanese here, cooked with saffron, porcini mushrooms, Parmesan cheese and cream.

You can’t go wrong ordering the old standbys. Spaghetti Bolognese has a nice veal-based ragu sauce, spaghetti alla carbonara is light and full of bacon and linguine vongole is loaded with fresh clams.

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Gnocchi a piacere means, basically, gnocchi any style. We ordered it al pesto; a mistake. With the slightly glutinous gnocchi served here, the creamy pesto sauce got monotonous in a hurry.

Among the main course dishes, salmone alla griglia is a good piece of fish, but the steamed vegetables that come with it are remarkably flavorless. Filetto con porcini is thinly sliced beef tenderloin in a rich mushroom sauce; just OK. Pollo della casa is blanketed in a lemon caper sauce--in effect, a grilled chicken piccata.

Desserts run to tiramisu, homemade flan (paired with the Mexican caramel confection dulce de leche), a store-bought chocolate cake from the refrigerator and a creamy cheesecake.

DETAILS

* WHAT: Divina Cucina.

* WHERE: 3730 N. Verdugo Road, Montrose.

* WHEN: Lunch 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. daily; dinner 5-10:30 p.m. daily.

* HOW MUCH: Dinner for two, $24-$39. Suggested dishes: pizza Margherita, $8.75; pizza quattro formaggio, $8.95; risotto Milanese, $7.95; spaghetti Bolognese, $7.95.

* FYI: Beer and wine only. Parking lot. All major cards.

* CALL: (818) 248-3077.