Serving It Your Way

Way out in the unfashionable eastern tip of Beverly Hills--in Beverly Hills 90214, if you want to know the awful truth--below the cutoff point of Restaurant Row, across La Cienega Boulevard from the vast oval Larry Flynt Publications building and down a couple of doors from a pay parking lot that conveniently stops charging around dinner time, there’s an inconspicuous little Italian restaurant.

How little and inconspicuous is Caffe Carrera? The best way to spot it is not to look for the address at all but to head south from Wilshire Boulevard and keep an eye open for a couple of umbrella tables on the sidewalk. If nobody else is using them, friends and family of the restaurant staff will probably be socializing out there in the evening, especially on hot days, when the pizza oven can make the interior a bit warm.

From the outside, Caffe Carrera looks like a pizza place, and it is largely a pizza place, though the dark red wallpaper signals higher ambitions. The waiter will recite a list of daily specials--fish, ravioli of the day, gnocchi of the day and so on--and then urge, in the best Italian fashion, that you can just ask them to make anything you like from the ingredients on hand. One night I had penne with little gamy bits of lamb in a fresh tomato sauce. It might not be first on my list of things to do with lamb, but it was enjoyable.

Whatever you order, you’ll start out with excellent fresh dome-shaped bread, crusty and with a good elastic crumb. You get a cruet of olive oil, of course, but in place of the ubiquitous balsamic vinegar, they hand you a cup of crushed garlic mixed with a little oil and basil. This is a Sicilian kitchen and it’s not squeamish about garlic.

The short antipasto list is mostly familiar choices. The eggplant parmigiana is a light, appetizer version, not very heavy on the cheese. The antipasto plate is a simple one, but the mozzarella is sweet and fresh and there’s a good, salty prosciutto. The most unusual appetizer is the Sicilian focaccia, which is like a tomato and eggplant pizza rolled up into a compact package.

There are more than a dozen pastas. I’ve had farfalle Bari, tossed with radicchio and sun-dried tomatoes for an intriguing bittersweet flavor. The arrabbiata sauce is smooth and tangy. As it happens, I had it with the gnocchi (they encourage substitutions here), which were light and soft with a little al dente chewiness at the end.

A pasta that isn’t on that list--it’s over in a short section of Sicilian specialties--is pasticcio, a medium-thick tube pasta baked with bechamel sauce and bits of meat. If you’re familiar with the Greek pastitsio, it will be a surprise. Pastitsio tends to be solid and chewy--I’ve had pastitsios I could bounce off a wall. Caffe Carrera’s pasticcio is loose in a white sauce, and the predominating flavor is not cheese but sweet cream.

There are more than a dozen pizzas as well. I tried Avv. Morello--really just because of the odd name, which turns out to refer to a lawyer back in the family’s hometown in Sicily. It’s topped with chicken breast, tomatoes, spinach and a sharp wake-up call of funky Gorgonzola cheese.

At dinner, there are meat entrees besides pizza and pasta. You can always get grilled salmon as well as a fish of the day. The fish comes with a lemon sauce, and the mahi mahi I tasted was certainly fresh and perfectly cooked. The most expensive entrees are based on large shrimp in either fresh tomato sauce or a nicely garlicky lemon-butter sauce.

Vitella Livorno turns out to be a cousin of saltimbocca--three bits of veal pounded paper-thin and topped with prosciutto, fresh sage and mozzarella--except that saltimbocca is rolled up for sauteeing while in this dish the little protein sandwiches lie flat. The result doesn’t look as neat, but it’s still flavorful, though kind of a small portion. The chicken entrees include rollatini, which is a bit like the rolled Sicilian focaccia, only it’s chicken breast with a tomatoey filling, rather than bread.

Tiramisu owns this town when it comes to dessert, and Caffe Carrera makes a sweet, multilayered version filled with custard rather than mascarpone. But the dessert I’d go for is the homely old-fashioned ricotta cheesecake, which is light, pleasantly grainy and not overly sweet.

That’s Sicilian. It may not be Beverly Hills or even Restaurant Row, but it’s Sicilian.

BE THERE

Caffe Carrera Trattoria, 235 S. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills. (310) 652-5992. Lunch, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday; dinner, 5-10 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Closed Sunday. Beer and wine. Street parking. American Express and Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $30-$58.

What to Get: antipasto plate, Sicilian focaccia, gnocchi arrabbiata, pasticcio, pizza Avv. Morello, vitella Livorno, Sicilian cheesecake.