An Italian revival in the Valley

It’s a Saturday night and Panzanella, the new Italian ristorante that has replaced Posto on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, is jumping. The phone rings, distracting the already harried hostess. As soon as one table rises to leave, waiters are unfurling tablecloths for the next. Runners are on their heels with baskets of bread or bottles of fizzy Pellegrino.

Everybody who has a thing for Italian food but hates the drive to the Westside must be here, happily dipping bread into pools of olive oil, swirling glasses of vino rosso and calling out to friends two tables over. It’s a crazy, exhilarating scene. Posto was, for years, the best Italian in the San Fernando Valley, but the thrill was gone. Panzanella holds out the possibility of something new and interesting close to home.

It’s yet another restaurant from the Drago brothers, this time Calogero, Giacomino and Tanino -- without their older brother Celestino, who started the whole Drago phenomenon. He was too busy launching Enoteca Drago, his new Beverly Hills wine bar and ristorante, and he seems to know you can’t be everywhere at once -- a lesson his brothers may have yet to learn. Together, the three also own Celestino in Pasadena, Tanino in Westwood and Il Buco and Piccolo Paradiso in Beverly Hills.

When Piero Selvaggio decided to sell the long-running Posto, this trio of hopeful restaurateurs pretty much moved right in, bringing only their outsize personalities and a young hotel chef from the Veneto to the party. The decor looks almost exactly the same. Diva lights in white origami-like shades perch on low-voltage tracks overhead. Painted posies decorate the walls, which are also covered in mirrors, the better to spy your neighbor across the way.

Calogero Drago is center front, making the rounds of the tables, suggesting dishes or wines. He treats everyone like a member of the family, telling stories, sharing preoccupations with the temperature of the wine or the service. Sometimes his more svelte brother Giacomino, who also does double duty as chef at Piccolo Paradiso and Il Pastaio, will stop by and do a little cooking. But mostly now, the toque is worn by Marco Pizzolato, a young chef from the Veneto region of Italy.

One Drago restaurant is very like another. Portions are large, and plates are garnished to the max -- with rosemary, garlic, truffle oil, anything at hand. So it’s no surprise to find the large menu larded with dishes from Drago or Il Pastaio. The choices are uneven, though, so for a first-time visitor, finding your way through the menu isn’t easy. Rule of thumb: Stick with the classics and the very simplest dishes.

That would be, first of all, ribollita, the robust, bread-thickened Tuscan soup made with black cabbage, cannellini beans and a heap of vegetables. In Panzanella’s version, everything is chopped very fine so you don’t get distinct nuggets of flavor, but it all blends together to a wonderfully soothing soup with the texture of oatmeal. Garnish it with a thread of fruity Sicilian olive oil and a grinding of black pepper.

Carpaccio is another signature dish, and it comes as either the classic of thinly sliced raw beef with a scattering of capers and some Parmigiano shaved over, or in a more unusual version of swordfish marinated in lemon and olive oil and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Unless it’s made with superb beef, and this isn’t, the classic beef carpaccio can be a bore. The more delicate swordfish version has the virtue of novelty. Fried calamari is crunchy and golden; it just doesn’t have all that much flavor. That’s why you need the little crock of spicy tomato-based arrabbiata (“angry”) sauce.

Appetizers can hit or miss. San Daniele prosciutto is not only cut too thick, it doesn’t seem like the best quality of this special raw-cured ham from Friuli. One of the glories of Italian salumeria, cured meats, it should be slightly sweeter than it is salty and so supple and tender it practically melts on the tongue. Bresaola, the air-dried beef from the same region, makes a fine appetizer with a swatch of arugula and, of course, more Parmigiano. But roll-ups of eggplant and goat cheese are gooey and dull. And if you want a salad, go with either the tricolore (radicchio, endive and arugula) or a slab of creamy, locally made burrata cheese with organic cherry tomatoes.

When panzanella, the Tuscan bread salad that gives the restaurant its name, is good, it’s really really good, one of my favorite salads in the world. But in order to succeed, every element has to be top-notch -- the olive oil, the tomatoes, the red onion, the sweetly perfumed basil. This version falls short. Panzanella con farro, made with spelt, the grain that fed the Roman legions, is oddly soupy, and tucked under a radicchio leaf, like a big dollop of hidden porridge. It’s a rustic dish that looks as silly dressed up like this as a 90-year-old farmer’s wife would in a belly-baring miniskirt.

Though Italian cuisine is much much more than pasta, the quality of the spaghetti or fettuccine is still the best way to judge a restaurant. The Drago family is from an area near Messina in Sicily. There, and throughout the south of Italy, dried pasta made from hard wheat rules. The translation of their father’s favorite pasta dish, spaghetti with baby plum tomatoes and basil, is one of the best dishes at Panzanella because of its simplicity and first-rate ingredients. Another good choice is garganelli, pasta made by rolling up a square of dough from corner to corner to form a tube, offered here in a hearty dish with crumbled Italian sausages and broccoli.

Now that’s a meatball

PANZANELLA’S fresh noodles aren’t nearly as interesting. Fresh pasta with the usual porcini or Bolognese sauce seems more tokens of northern Italian cooking than anything anyone in the kitchen is passionate about. But the risotto can be good, especially the one with a golf-ball-size meatball sitting in a puddle of basic butter and cheese risotto. That meatball is delicious -- fluffy and laced with herbs. Let’s have more of this kind of cooking and less of the fancy turns.

Chefs gotta decorate, I guess. And Pizzolato, like anybody who has ever worked in a hotel kitchen, knows all the tricks. One night the skinny Italian waiter keeps mentioning “pearl vegetables” when he’s reciting the specials. We all thought we misunderstood, but when that marinated shrimp salad with pearl vegetables and white tomato cream arrived, I got it. The pearl vegetables turn out to be zucchini, carrots, etc., carved to resemble pearls. What can possibly be the point other than to be fancy? The white tomato cream is equally silly, like shaving cream with some shrimp on top. I wish the chef would concentrate more on making the food taste great than fiddling with the way it looks.

Main courses for the most part are uninspired. Here’s another veal chop with zero flavor. If you closed your eyes you couldn’t tell what you were eating. Lamb chops seem more steamed than grilled. But the osso buco is decent enough, the veal braised to complete tenderness and cloaked in a well-made sauce.

And what’s not to like about cotoletto di pollo, a chicken breast pounded, dipped in beaten egg and bread crumbs and sauteed gold? Squeeze a little lemon over and it’s delicious.

If there’s one thing the Drago brothers know, it is what Angelenos like. Learning from their older brother, Celestino, who arrived here in 1979 at the age of 22, they’ve zeroed in on a certain comfort zone when it comes to Italian food. As a result, their restaurants are all very much alike, middlebrow Italian with dishes that everyone recognizes. Why fix what isn’t broken? But then why go to one over the other? None are really compelling enough to drive all the way across town for, but like the folks in Pasadena, Westwood and Beverly Hills, people in Sherman Oaks are grateful to have one in the neighborhood.

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Panzanella

Rating: *

Location: 14928 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks; (818) 784-4400

Ambience: Suburban Italian restaurant with kitschy decor and an enthusiastic crowd, mostly from the neighborhood.

Service: Attentive and very Italian.

Price: Antipasti, $9.25 to $11; soups and salads, $5 to $10.50; pasta and risotto, $9.50 to $15.50; main dishes, $16.50 to $26.

Best dishes: Ribollita soup, fried calamari, bresaola with arugula, swordfish carpaccio, tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms, spaghetti Natale, risotto with meatballs, cotoletto di pollo, osso buco, sorbetti.

Wine list: A work in progress in terms of Italian wines. Corkage, $12.

Best table: A corner banquette.

Special features: Private dining rooms.

Details: Open Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Monday through Wednesday, 5:30 to 10 p.m.; Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 5:30 to 11 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking, $3.50.

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.