Just in from Italy

There’s nothing generic about Pecorino, a new restaurant on Brentwood’s restaurant row. Not the setting. Not the menu. Not the olive oil.

It may be a small detail, but it’s a telling one. Instead of an anonymous extra virgin, here they bring out the good stuff, a half-bottle of the limpid green-gold oil from the family farm of one of the owners. The bread is cut from a good country loaf with a thick chewy crust, perfect for making bruschetta. Here that’s a thick slice of toasted bread splashed with a little of that olive oil and topped with stewed cherry tomatoes and sheep’s milk ricotta forte (sharp ricotta). The flavors are wonderful together.

In a city filled with cookie-cutter Italian restaurants, Pecorino has plenty of personality. With its exposed brick walls and open kitchen, the space, which was once Zax and before that Woodside, feels more San Francisco than Los Angeles, more fall and winter than straight out summer.

It’s fitting that that inspiration for the name comes from an ingredient. Pecorino -- the pungent Italian sheep’s milk cheese -- conveys the idea of earthy, rustic Italian cuisine.

At the 2-month-old ristorante, pecorino dances through the menu, showing up grated in several pasta dishes, showered on top of bruschetta, and subtly woven into a lamb dish from Abruzzo. Opt to finish off that bottle of inky Montepulciano d’Abruzzo with a cheese course, and the kitchen will send out an array of four or five cheeses from different parts of Italy, all made with sheep’s milk, and so all technically pecorino.

Pecorino the restaurant is really a second-generation L.A. Italian. Two of the owners -- Mario Sabatini and Giorgio Pierangeli (who also owns Oliva in Sherman Oaks) -- started out as waiters at the perennially popular Toscana across the street, and also worked as managers there at various times. The third partner is the chef, Raffaele Sabatini, who happens to be Mario’s fraternal twin. The chef and his brother are natives of Abruzzo, a mountainous region east of Rome on the Adriatic sea.

Abruzzo is famous for its cheeses, seafood and lamb. It also turns out cooks who can be found working all over Italy. Raffaele Sabatini, in fact, had been cooking in Rome and arrived in Los Angeles only two weeks before the restaurant was slated to open. This is a good thing, because he hasn’t had much time to learn how to dumb down his cooking to suit what is perceived as Angelenos’ tastes. For the most part, his food still tastes authentically Italian.

The two manager-partners, though, follow the Toscana model to the letter. That means laying on the Italian shtick with a heavy hand. Attired in beautiful suits and ties, they’re busy dispensing effusive double kisses or a more dignified “buona sera,” depending on what’s required for any particular party. The lesson they learned, and learned very well, from Toscana is that it’s impossible to overplay the Italian cliche. The audience loves it. Lesson two: Most people care more about snappy service than the cooking. They want to be fussed over. They want to be pampered. And at the same time they want to be in and out as quickly as possible. Pecorino’s partners are happy to oblige.

The trio go their own way, though, when it comes to the food. Instead of rehashing the same familiar Tuscan dishes seen all over town, they’ve come up with something a little more original. The restaurant’s menu of antipasti, pasta, fish and meats cuts a wide swath through northern and central Italy. The dishes that are most interesting, though, are the ones that have a distinct sense of place. And that place is Abruzzo.

You can get carpaccio or seafood salad anywhere. But not a rustic fava bean and chicory soup or pasta e ceci, the central Italian equivalent of pasta e fagioli, only pasta e ceci is made with garbanzo beans instead of borlotti or cannellini.

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Specials that really are

It’s spring and it’s Los Angeles so salads -- more than you’d ever see in Italy -- are essential to the menu. Count on a lovely one of emerald green beans, tuna put up in olive oil, cherry tomatoes and the fragrant oregano so beloved in that part of Italy. I also like the arugula and mixed bean salad with a little bottarga (dried pressed grey mullet or tuna roe) shaved over. The bottarga tastes intensely of the sea, a delicious match with the earthiness of the beans.

But do we really need another ahi tuna tartare with arugula and alfalfa sprouts? I’m willing to bet alfalfa sprouts never crossed Sabatini’s pantry in Rome or Abruzzo. And a mixed salad of baby greens topped with toasted hazelnuts and served with the delightfully spelled “bush de chevre” (i.e. buche) seems too international a dish for this otherwise Italian menu.

Never mind. Listen up when the waiter recites the specials, because some of these were among the best dishes I tried at Pecorino.

One night it’s an excellent version of carpaccio. The beef has some flavor and it’s crowned with artichokes that have been put up in oil and vinegar. Another appetizer of sliced seared tuna steak comes with a crisp and refreshing green bean salad. And snowy morsels of perfectly cooked cod are served with garbanzo beans in loose sauce fragrant with herbs, almost like a soup. But my favorite may be the house-cured beef, described as something between bresaola and carpaccio. Cured in salt and spices for up to 10 days, the pink slices are suffused with the spices. With a little of Pierangeli’s olive oil poured over, it makes a wonderful appetizer to share.

I love the rather austere pasta dish called cacio e pepe, which is basically spaghetti tossed with sharp pecorino, Parmesan and lots of black pepper. It’s about as basic -- and soul-satisfying -- a pasta as you can find. On a lighter note, there’s a delightful fresh pasta sauced with tender clams and zucchini with a touch of lemon and lemon zest. Orechiette, or “little ears,” so-called because they’re shaped like cupped ears, make another soothing pasta dish tossed with cauliflower florets sauteed in a little olive oil; bottarga is shaved over the top. Artichoke lasagna, though, is incredibly heavy on the cheese.

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To Abruzzo and back

I like the way the chef uses cherry tomatoes to lighten up a dish like his ravioli filled with eggplant and sheep’s milk ricotta. The filling is delicious, but the pasta doesn’t have the heft of handmade pasta. I strongly suspect someone showed the chef the cost-efficient trick of substituting Chinese wonton skins for the real thing. It’s mushy to boot.

Main courses are well-executed but fairly standard. The best meat dish I’ve tried is, no surprise, one from Abruzzo. It’s tender chunks of lamb, probably lamb shoulder, braised with meaty artichokes, eggs and pecorino cheese in a gratin dish. And the lamb really does taste like lamb. Braised beef is like an Italian pot roast, pure comfort food, served with mashed potatoes whipped with olive oil. Straccetti di manzo, on the other hand, is thinly sliced beef sauteed with arugula and sun-dried tomatoes -- good, but not all that interesting. But I do like the thick veal chop stuffed with scamorza cheese and chunks of silky porcini mushrooms. It adds interest to the mild flavor of the veal. When the gratin of potatoes and onions that comes with it is undercooked one night, the waiter brings us a dish of fork-mashed potatoes with olive oil. Now this is brilliant: direct and simple.

Wines from the south of Italy are coming up now, so much so that there’s one restaurant in San Francisco where the entire wine list (and it’s a large one) is drawn from the south. It would be nice to see more wines from Campania or Sicily on Pecorino’s list. But almost every category could have more interesting, cutting-edge choices.

Like Toscana, where the partners learned the restaurant business, Pecorino indulges in typically high markups. And you’d think for these kinds of prices, you’d get more than standard issue stemware. They do have some better glasses, but you have to request them.

As for dessert, skip the heavily orange-scented creme brulee and the amaretto-laced tiramisu, which is quite ordinary, and order the warm pear gratin, which is something like an Italian version of clafoutis suffused with the taste of almonds. A few bites of this delightful dolce followed by a strong jolt of espresso is punctuation enough. You’ve been to south-central Italy and back, in the time it would take you to drive to the airport and check in for your flight. Sometimes life is beautiful.

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Pecorino

Rating: **

Location: 11604 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles; (310) 571-3800

Ambience: Cozy Brentwood Italian with exposed brick walls, iron scrollwork chandeliers, an open kitchen and regional Italian fare from a chef from Abruzzo in south-central Italy.

Service: Exuberant and professional

Price: Antipasti, $7 to $15; first courses, $10 to $16; entrees, $19 to $29; desserts, $7.

Best dishes: Green bean and cherry tomato salad, homemade cured beef, bruschetta with cherry tomatoes and ricotta, spaghetti cacio e pepe, pasta with clams and zucchini, orecchiette with cauliflower and bottarga, lamb “Abruzzese style,” stuffed veal chop, pear gratin.

Wine list: Italian-dominated with typically high markups. Corkage, $14.

Best table: The round table in the front window

Details: Open for lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday; for dinner from 5:30 to 10:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 5:30 to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 5 to 10 p.m. Sunday. Wine and beer. 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.