Tuscany Puts Elegance at Top of Menu

Out in bucolic Westlake, Tuscany has long been the big-deal dining spot. It’s a beautiful, relaxing place, filled with plants and flowers, a trompe-l’oeil countryside painted on a rear wall.

Smack in the restaurant’s middle is a charming, semi-private room separated from the main dining area by French doors. It’s painted the shade of roof tiles in an Italian village and decorated like a small art gallery of Impressionist watercolors--an ideal room for a romantic meal.

Tuscany is a rather formal restaurant. You are greeted at the door by a congenial host, and led grandly to the table. The staff is large, and you’re never neglected for long.

You are plied constantly with piked bruschetta and hot, yeasty rolls--brushed with butter, garlic and herbs--just taken from the oven. The solicitous waiters are well versed in the nightly specials, which complement the creatively appealing menu.

There’s a leather-bound wine list featuring a page of top-drawer Italian wines (rare in these parts), including an ’81 Le Pergole Torte ($85) and one of Italy’s benchmark wines, a ’90 Sori Tilden from Angelo Gaja ($165). Older wines are opened and decanted on a cart beside your table, another rarity.

It all sounds too wonderful to be true, and to a degree it is. Competition keeps a restaurant sharp, and Tuscany has no real competition in its own bailiwick. There’s no shortage of good things to eat here, but more than a few dishes are unnecessarily flawed.

Yes, the bruschetta is complimentary, but that doesn’t excuse it for being soggy. The famous chopped vegetable salad boasts a gorgeous mound of Gorgonzola cheese, walnuts, lettuces and vegetables in a subtle Dijon mustard dressing. So why hasn’t someone in the kitchen bothered to dry the lettuce leaves?

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There’s a fritto misto of calamari and whitebait that sounded irresistible to a smelt lover from the Northeast like me, but there turned out to be no whitebait in it. Big deal. You can get plain fried calamari at practically every Italian joint in California.

Later in the meal, I tried to order agnolotti stuffed with veal and sage, a dish I’ve been craving for months, and got a guarded response from the waiter. “Stuffed pastas are wonderful,” he said, “but we don’t make them every day.” I caught his drift, and contented myself with the regular menu’s pappardelle noodles with chicken and vegetable ragout, which turned out to be delicious.

No one’s saying these people can’t cook. The appetizer called Venetian-style crab cake with exotic greens is as fine a crab cake as I’ve had this side of the Chesapeake Bay. You get two crisp, buttery disks of sweet, flaky meat plus a roasted garlic and whole grain mustard sauce.

The garlic-studded grilled portobello mushrooms with assorted baby greens are fine, even if they are topped with too much goat cheese.

The country-style soup pasta e fagioli here consists of a clear broth flavored with a hint of prosciutto, lots of whole white beans, chopped garlic, Swiss chard and a handful of tiny tube-shaped pasta. The chef isn’t afraid to spice up the lively tomato sauce on his penne alla puttanesca with lots of pungent black olives, capers, garlic and crushed red pepper.

The linguine with fresh clams is satisfying because the pasta is beautifully al dente and the clams are the essence of ocean sweetness.

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Entrees tend to be as opulent as the restaurant itself, a few spilling over the Italian frontier into Continental territory. The stuffed roasted quails come wrapped in pancetta, blanketed with a Port sauce and set on a bed of grilled polenta.

Garlic-roasted Angus filet mignon has a distinctly French sauce of Dijon mustard and green peppercorns. I recommend having a tender, oversized veal chop charcoal broiled, sprinkled with garlic and herbs. One evening, there was a sensible but hardly austere special of broiled white-fleshed salmon--a nice size chunk--on a bed of cannellini beans.

Desserts are homemade and indulgent. My favorite, the chocolate dream, looks like a child’s puzzle: a square layered with three distinct shades of chocolate mousse--white, milk and dark. Chocolate creme bru^lee is well executed and properly rich with eggs. A tiny lemon meringue tart is paired with a cylinder made from gianduja, a regal chocolate and hazelnut cream.

DETAILS

* WHAT: Tuscany.

* WHERE: 968-4 Westlake Blvd., Westlake.

* WHEN: Open for lunch 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Friday; for dinner 5:30-10 p.m. daily.

* HOW MUCH: Dinner for two, $37-$68. Suggested dishes: Venetian-style crab cake, $9.50; pasta e fagioli, $5.50; pappardelle with chicken and vegetable ragout, $12.50; veal chop, $24.

* FYI: Full bar. Parking lot. All major credit cards welcome.

* CALL: (805) 495-2768.

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