Presto chango: Italiano!

LOS ANGELES is constantly reinventing itself. Still it’s somehow disconcerting to walk by a restaurant you frequent occasionally and find it’s suddenly morphed into something entirely different. Just like that.

Restaurants come and go, but usually there’s a bit more fanfare -- or at the very least a lot of sawing and hammering -- when a new restaurant takes the place of the previous one. Three months ago EM Bistro quietly vanished, and Solare, an Italian restaurant from chef-owner Paolo Giovani, who used to own Il Sole on Sunset Plaza in West Hollywood, moved in.

What’s he doing there? It feels as if Giovani, who was a fixture on Sunset Boulevard for years, is tentatively dipping a toe in the neighborhood to see if he likes the temperature. He’s hardly changed a thing.

The room, which I always liked, is still white, white, white, and so well lighted, it almost requires sunglasses. But the effect is anything but hard-edged, and it’s kind of refreshing to be able to see your food without having to root around in your purse for a flashlight. Chandeliers of white glass globes look like bundles of white balloons caught on the ceiling. The carpet is white. The white upholstered chairs are insanely comfortable compared with so many restaurant chairs that seem designed to encourage you to flee the table as soon as possible. In fact, this is one of the few restaurants in which most of the time it’s quiet enough to have a conversation without straining to hear every word. The only spots of color are the red shades of the table lamps on the bar and the abstract paintings hung in slapdash fashion along one wall.

We all crave that frisson of excitement when you sit down at a new restaurant and open a menu for the first time. Solare’s menu, though, looks all too familiar. It’s basically a collection of the standards Los Angeles Italian restaurants have been living on for years -- artichoke salad, minestrone, porcini risotto, veal chop -- the same dishes touristy spots in Italy serve only because every out-of-towner is sure to recognize something. Italian cuisine encompasses a vast repertoire, but we have virtually the same dishes served all over town. Why? It’s hard to understand the strategy behind opening just another Italian restaurant.

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Reliable favorites

THAT said, at Solare, almost every dish is better executed than at most of the Italian spots around town. The food is solid and reliable, and the modest menu is supplemented every day by a handful of specials listed on an insert. I appreciate that we don’t have to listen to a recitation of every one, like you do at Giorgio Baldi. Oddly, precisely because the menu is so familiar, my guests and I had trouble deciding what to order. We’d stare at the menu, then put it down and get distracted talking. The waiter had to come back several times before we were ready.

I had to get volunteers for the minestrone, for example, because nobody wanted it. When it came it looked like the same dull vegetable soup you see everywhere, but it tasted like something you’d get in a little country trattoria. Made with a decent broth and a confetti of vegetables and beans, it felt just right as an appetizer on a brisk fall night. The Tuscan bread and tomato soup called papa al pomodoro, invented as a way to use up stale bread, traditionally has a texture more like porridge than soup. It’s surprising how delicious and satisfying this simple dish can be, yet curiously, you don’t see it much around town. At Solare it’s made with organic tomatoes and garnished with a swirl of olive oil.

Solare’s carpaccio manages to rise above the cliche, not by doing anything fancy, but by dressing the thin slices of raw beef in just the right amount of lemon and good olive oil rather than the usual creamy mustard sauce. A shaving of Parmigiano goes on top, along with a flurry of baby arugula. Artichoke salad makes an appearance at every northern Italian restaurant with any pretensions. This one, however, is one of the best I’ve had in L.A. The artichokes are slivered rather than sliced, showered with minced parsley and a little onion and drenched in lemon and extra virgin olive oil (x.v.o. on the menu).

One night, just as we were finishing our steamed clams in white wine and some other appetizers, there was another surge of arrivals headed to Corky’s Jazz Room. It’s located in a sort of lounge off the dining room with the door between open wide, all the better to hear the music from the restaurant. (The jazz lounge is only open Thursday through Saturday. Corky Hale, the muse behind it, was a former owner of EM Bistro.) If you want to eat in the lounge, you can do that too. Mostly, though, people are nursing cocktails and bobbing their heads to the music. As that evening wore on, Giovani sat down with friends at a table just on the restaurant side of the door, sharing a bottle of wine, and later, a glass of Malvasia di Lipari, a sweet wine from the island off Sicily.

But what can the kitchen do with risotto and pasta, that’s what I want to know. The porcini risotto, made with fresh porcini, is a tad rich for my taste, but nevertheless delicious, each grain of rice bathed in broth, butter and cheese. Orecchiette, the little ear-shaped semolina pasta from Apulia, gets a rustic sausage ragu brightened with sweet roasted red peppers. Spaghetti with finely shaved bottarga, dried and salted gray mullet roe from Sardinia, has that wonderful intensely briny taste of the sea, but somebody has a heavy hand with the olive oil.

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Adept with classics

A dish as innocuous as veal scaloppine is always a good test of an Italian kitchen. It’s hard to get it right: The thinly sliced veal can easily be too floury or dried out. Solare passes nicely with tender veal, perfectly cooked, with the classic flavors of lemon and capers. Chicken Milanese, an organic chicken breast pounded on the bone, dipped in egg and bread crumbs, and then fried, makes a nice supper too.

The veal chop, big as a paperback and very thick and juicy, is worth every penny. The New Zealand rack of lamb is eight chops, forming a steeple on the plate. The flavor is fabulous -- it’s lamb that really tastes like lamb, cooked to a deep rose at the center.

Everything comes with the same vegetables, though -- soft, garlicky cubes of potato, a little rapini and huge carrots cut on the diagonal -- which is pure laziness. I-s it so hard to pair each entree with a vegetable that makes sense with that dish? Is this a cafeteria or a serious restaurant?

The wine list could use some vision. It feels like a collection of whatever wines are easily available, with no particular point of view and very little effort at research. Of the 10 California and Italian wines by the glass, none is stunning, or even very interesting. The main list adds a handful of bottles from France, Spain and Australia to the mix. But where are the interesting Italian wines? All sorts of wines go with Italian food, but if you’re eating at a serious Italian restaurant, you should be able to try some of the cutting-edge wines that are coming out of Italy right now. Instead of an interesting, well-priced Pinot Grigio, there’s an overrated, overpriced one from Santa Margherita for $45. Considering the quality, that is some serious gouging. In the reds, there are only two Italian choices at $30 or under, which is a shame if you know what’s out there at that price.

Sometimes the waiter will bring out a long slender plate of miniature cookies -- thumbprint cookies, baci or “kisses” with a layer of dark chocolate at the center, or flower-shaped ones from a cookie press. It’s a lovely gesture, especially considering that these are more compelling than the real desserts, which are disappointing. I assure you no grandmother has been near the dense, floury torta della nonna, or grandmother’s cake.

Still this is just the restaurant that plenty of people are looking for -- somewhere you can get a good risotto and a veal chop, somewhere comfortable and quiet enough to talk. And somewhere that, for once, is not catering to the young and hip. Sometimes a little live jazz drifting in from the boite next door is just what you need.

Farewell EM Bistro, benvenuto a Solare.

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Rating: * 1/2

Location: 8256 Beverly Blvd. (at Sweetzer), Los Angeles; (323) 655-7652

Ambience: All-white Italian restaurant with a small bar.

Service: Pleasant and professional.

Price: Appetizers, $9 to $14; main courses, $16 to $32; dessert, $6.50 to $8.

Best dishes: Baby artichoke salad, papa al pomodoro, porcini risotto, orecchiette with Italian sausage ragu, spaghetti with bottarga, chicken Milanese, veal chop, rack of lamb, veal scaloppine.

Wine list: Stodgy, and it doesn’t show off the best of Italy. Corkage, $15.

Best table: The large round one in the window.

Special features: Live jazz on Thursdays through Saturdays at Corky’s Jazz Room next door. Two drink minimum.

Details: Open 6 to 11 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking $4.50

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.