Truly, bravely Tuscan

For the last few weeks, I keep going back in my mind to the simple, pure taste of a pasta dish I had at Rocca, a new Italian restaurant in Santa Monica. Handmade fettuccine, thick enough to have some chewiness, had been tossed in butter, with a little flat-leaf parsley and tiny ocher chanterelles. The description doesn’t sound that remarkable, but the devil, as they say, is in the details, here the robust texture of the fettuccine and the crisp, dusky mushrooms set off by a touch of grassy parsley and garlic.

Another cook wouldn’t have been able to resist embellishing the dish -- with pine nuts or sun-dried tomatoes, or God knows what else. But Rocca’s chef, Don Dickman, knows where he’s going with this and most other dishes on the menu: straightforward Italian food, as authentic as he can make it.

The dining room is just as restrained. Buttery Naples-yellow walls and comfortable booths covered in subtle stripes keep the focus where it should be -- on the food. The only decorations, really, aside from a harvest table covered with bottles of wine and rustic dried pasta and other ingredients, are the prints of old black-and-white photos of Naples, Venice and Rome gleaned from Italian archives. Upstairs is an even cozier mezzanine dining room.

We’d started that night with an order of chicken liver crostini, the typical Tuscan pate of chicken livers, olive oil, capers and anchovies spread on thin toasts. Rocca’s have a deep, earthy flavor that’s anything but bland. The touch of sweetness in the liver might, I suspect, be a splash of vin santo. They are a terrific way to begin a meal, especially with a glass of Felsina Chianti or Avignonesi Vino Nobile di Montepulciano from the intelligent wine list.

The menu, printed on plain brown paper, offers a wealth of choices in the antipasti category. I love the bowl of cockles and cannellini beans swirled with pesto. The pretty green sauce, with a kick of garlic and the fragrance of sweet basil, links the sweet, tender shellfish with the meaty beans. You can’t go wrong with the affettati misti, a plate of assorted cured meats, to share. Or a baby spinach salad in a briny “olivado” dressing with a couple of delicate squash blossoms stuffed with cheese.

Sometimes there are tiny mussels from Maine in their blue-black shells, in a tomato- and saffron-tinged brodetto, or broth. Light and easy. Or you could have asparagus Milanese style, topped with an egg fried in bread crumbs, slivers of speck (a smoky mountain ham) and some good Parmigiano. It’s like a divine country breakfast on a plate.

But the hit that night was something hardly ever seen on a menu in these parts. When I went ahead and ordered trippa alla fiorentina for the table, one of my guests blanched, saying he could still remember the smell of it every Saturday morning when his mother used to cook it. But he was game and bravely took a bite. “It tastes more like tomato than tripe,” he commented, eyes opening wide. “It’s not at all funky. I kind of like it.” So do I. The ribbons of snowy tripe were sweet, delicious and tender, and with all of our forks participating, the casserole quickly disappeared.

How is it that an American is cooking gutsier dishes, more in touch with the spirit of Italian cuisine, than some Italian-born chefs? Maybe he’s more optimistic that he’ll find an audience for something beyond the cliches. After all, Dickman is a highly capable chef. He was sous-chef at Michael Roberts’ Trumps in the mid-’80s, which was one of the more daring and influential restaurants of the era. After Trumps, though, he disappeared into the corporate world and ended up overseeing the Daily Grills, among others. A few years ago he resurfaced as chef at a golf course on the Palos Verdes Peninsula now owned by Donald Trump, and, for about a minute and a half, he presided over the menu at Sky Room at the top of the Breakers in Long Beach.

In his career, this seasoned chef has cooked French, California, avant-garde and fusion. But with Rocca, he’s given up all that to follow his love of rustic Italian cuisine. For the most part, his instincts are dead-on.

He can cook as if he’s channeling a Tuscan grandmother with the touch of 10 generations’ pasta making in her hands. He understands the soulfulness of rough-hewn dishes such as panzanella, the salad of torn chunks of day-old bread, tomatoes and cucumbers. He makes his with colorful heirloom tomatoes, sweet onion and crunchy cucumbers drizzled with green-gold olive oil, with a few basil leaves for decoration. He doesn’t try to fancy it up, which is why it has some character.

A couple of the antipasti, though, ring less true. The bagna cauda seems too refined for the lusty Piedmontese “warm bath” that’s traditionally made with handfuls of garlic cooked with anchovies in olive oil and butter. All the better for dunking raw autumn vegetables. His is thin and pallid and, oddly, includes chopped walnuts. A scallion sticks out of a small bottle of balsamic vinegar like a quill pen in a bottle of ink. What’s this for? And the vegetables -- red peppers, button mushrooms, green beans -- are mostly cooked, not raw. I don’t think his fonduta quite works either. It’s presented as rafts of toast already lavishly spread with black truffle paste dosed with truffle oil. The idea, I guess, is to top it with melted young pecorino. The cheese is much better off on its own.

He’s quite good on pasta, though. His ravioli stuffed with braised pork cheeks are wonderful, tender little packets with zigzag edges and a single bite of rich pork inside, sauced only in a little broth and Parmigiano. Tagliarini neri is a soulful combination of black noodles tossed with firm, meaty curls of shrimp, fresh mint and dried hot pepper. And for a touch of southern Italy, there’s spaghetti made with farro, the ancient Roman grain, and simply sauced in fennel, olive oil and crunchy bread crumbs. But the real killer is his potato gnocchi, with the tender consistency of burrata cloaked in a luscious oxtail ragu.

Portions at Rocca are kept deliberately small, with prices to match (none of the secondi are more than $20), to encourage ordering three or more courses. That way you can easily mix and match too. You could have two pastas, if you wanted, or two antipasti and one pasta, which is the way I tend to want to eat here, partly because the main courses are less compelling. That said, among the best are the cabbage leaves stuffed with a venison forcemeat and served with soft white polenta, the grilled wild boar sausages with beans and green apple mostarda, and roasted rabbit loin stuffed with spinach and chanterelles. A single lamb chop of modest proportions, though, is $17.

Tailored to the menu, the wine list features 15 wines by the glass and half-bottle carafe, including a lovely rosato, or rose, from Castello di Ama and Icardi’s Barbera d’Asti. The regular list proposes some wonderful and sometimes hard-to-find Italian wines, such as Chianti Classico from Casa Emma and Fontodi, or Produttori del Barbaresco’s single-vineyard Barbaresco Ovello.

You might want to drink dessert: either a bubbly Moscato d’Asti with a perfume of peaches, or the Umbrian producer Lungarotti’s vin santo. The actual desserts tend to be hit or miss. I’ve had a delicious panna cotta turned out of a fluted mold, suffused with the taste of Meyer lemon and surrounded by plump berries. One time, peach and blueberry crostata has an excellent billowy crust; the next time it’s doughy and undercooked. Chocolate pudding cake can be dry. Affogato is really a summer dessert, something to cool you down on a sweltering afternoon, but in L.A. it could stretch to pretty much every season. Here, it’s served like a root beer float, in a tall, narrow glass so you have to dig beneath inches of softly whipped cream to ferret out a bite of hazelnut ice cream “drowned” in espresso.

Waiting one night for my car, I watch a couple tango across a video screen in the window of a ballroom dance school, while real couples sashay across the floor. Is it too late to join up? Maybe that’s the place to work off some of the pasta I’ve just eaten at Rocca.

*

Rocca

Rating: ** 1/2

Location: 1432 4th St., Santa Monica; (310) 395-6765.

Ambience: A comfortable neighborhood place halfway between trattoria and ristorante.

Service: More enthusiastic than polished.

Price: Antipasti, $4 to $10; primi, $7 to $12; secondi, $11 to $18; desserts, $5 to $7.

Best dishes: Chicken liver crostini, cockles and cannellini beans with pesto, Maine mussels in saffron brodetto, trippa alla fiorentina, ricotta gnocchi with oxtail ragu, fettuccine with chanterelles, pork cheek ravioli, half chicken al mattone, grilled wild boar sausages, venison-stuffed cabbage, Meyer lemon panna cotta.

Wine list: Smart Italian selections, with savvy California bottles to round out the list. Corkage $10.

Best table: One of the cozy booths along the wall.

Details: Open daily for dinner, 5:30 to 10 p.m.; until 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Beer and wine only. Valet parking across the street in front of Border Grill, $5.

Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.