Il Fornaio Goes to the Beach : Don’t expect anything new in terms of menu, but there’s workmanlike pasta and fine crusty bread.

Il Fornaio at the Beach joins Ivy at the Shore on Santa Monica’s Ocean Avenue. This newest in the San Francisco-based chain of Italian restaurants has Il Fornaio’s signature look of a glitzy urban trattoria. But this one, strategically situated at the corner of Colorado Avenue and Ocean Boulevard, features lots of distressed pine, and roomy booths upholstered in nautical blue and white stripes. After all, it’s the spiaggia, or beach. Tall French doors open onto a patio on two sides, from which you can just see the lights of the Ferris wheel off the pier. There’s the large open kitchen featured at all the Il Fornaio, and, down a few steps, a separate bakery with its own galaxy of tables.

The crusty regional Italian loaves are good; so are the grissini, or breadsticks, though you may have to shoo away two or even three attempts from various waiters intent on pouring a pool of olive oil--and vinegar--onto little plates.

Nothing new here in terms of the formulaic menu. The usual pizzas bubble away in the wood-burning pizza oven. Chickens twirl over a wood-fired rotisserie. And a line of cooks turn out workmanlike pastas in big American-sized portions.

Antipasto della casa at $7.95, with fried calamari, gooey eggplant rolls filled with goat cheese, oily grilled zucchini, fat wedges of bruschetta, caprese salad and a selection of cold cuts and roasted vegetables, would make a big dent in anybody’s appetite. Pastas, like the signature ravioli di verdura (ravioli filled with vegetables), tend to be oversauced. That rotisserie-roasted chicken is not bad. Nor is the hefty veal chop. But the bistecca alla fiorentina, a 22-ounce Porterhouse marinated in olive oil and rosemary, is too tender and bland to interest real steak aficionados.

Desserts from the bakery are so numerous, the waiter arrives with a groaning cart of sweets. And it takes him 10 minutes to explain them all. I bet almost nobody can resist trying at least one. That’s the trouble with this place. Everything looks--and sounds--better than it tastes, so the disappointment is just that much sharper.

BE THERE

Il Fornaio Della Spiaggia, 1551 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica; (310) 451-7800. Open every day from 7 a.m. to midnight. Valet parking. Antipasti, $4.95 to $7.95; pizzas, $7.95 to $10.50; pasta, $8.95 to $13.95; meat and poultry, $11.95 to $21.50.