New Italian, dipped in gold

ON a Monday night, 16 black-clad valets stand at attention in front of Bridge, the new Italian restaurant on La Cienega from the owners of Koi, just across the boulevard. Passing drivers wonder, what’s going on? Must be an A-list party, a Britney appearance, or the hottest thing in town.

If you want to pique the interest of everybody driving up or down La Cienega, the valet chorus line is a brilliant move. And it probably doesn’t even cost all that much. At least not compared with the 3 million bucks the Haque brothers have poured into the former Alto Palato space to make their new Italian stand out from the crowd.

Your waiter will explain that Bridge is the Koi experience translated to the Italian idiom. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but maybe it has something to do with the restaurant as event and stage set. To capture the desired demographic -- young and trendy -- you gotta have glitz.

Designers Mike Lee and Deborah Rumens of Chinese Jesus haven’t changed the configuration of the space much, but they have wrought some magic. It’s as if the entire place has been dipped in gold. Everything shimmers -- the highly stylized wallpaper, the extravagant gold glass chandeliers that dangle like crystal earrings from the high ceilings, the buttery-smooth caramel leather booths.

Mirko Paderno, one of the co-chefs, the other being Santos MacDonal, comes from Dolce, the first L.A. Italian restaurant to meld a boldly theatrical decor with Italian cuisine and enough semi-famous faces to lure a celebrity-hungry crowd. Sommelier Alessandro Sbrendola worked there too. The hustle, the bustle, is very similar. But Bridge has more of a Vegas gloss. And a more welcoming crew at the door.

Paderno can be an able chef, and although Bridge’s menu has plenty of familiar dishes, he also occasionally ventures beyond the cliche. He has beef carpaccio, but also has octopus carpaccio, so precisely arranged on the plate that it looks like a piece of violet and ivory marble from the floor of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. What the bland octopus lacks in flavor it makes up for in looks. The real winner in the thinly sliced appetizer category is the vitello tonnato, the classic cold roast veal covered with a smooth layer of tuna sauce brightened with capers and vinegar.

Caprese, which at most Italian restaurants means sad tomatoes and rubbery mozzarella, is excellent here, made with bronze heirloom tomatoes, truly fresh mozzarella and perky basil leaves. Roasted sweet red and yellow peppers gift-wrap a nugget of dreamy locally made burrata cheese. It’s like mozzarella with a heart of cream, and you can never indulge too often.

Another good bet is the platter of mixed cold cuts -- rosy sweet prosciutto, capacolla, peppery salame, and mortadella studded with pistachio nuts, all of such high quality, it’s a pleasure to sample this and that. And it’s certainly generous enough for two to share.

The feathery light gnocchi put to shame most other versions around town. Order them tossed in a lovely fresh tomato sauce with ribbons of basil. I also recommend the supple asparagus ravioli napped in sage butter. This is the kind of dish, simple and pure, that Italians do best.

Seafood risotto bordered with baby clams and mussels in the shell is better than most. The flavor is subtle, but the rice is still a bit gummy, probably because of the shortcuts the kitchen has to take to serve risotto in a timely fashion. But that’s nothing new.

When I look around at what other diners are ordering for first courses, though, instead of pastas or thin-crusted pizzas or even the salumi, the women, mostly, seem stuck on salads. And Bridge’s aren’t that interesting. Italians don’t really eat a lot of salad and the chefs’ boredom with the genre shows. They’re just going through the motions with mixed baby greens, a raw artichoke salad with lemon, or roasted beet salad with feta and walnuts. Why bother? Why? Because that’s what sells.

After the appetizers and first courses, it’s pretty much downhill. Except for the fiorentina bistecca for two, cooked, like all the meats, in a wood-burning oven. It’s massive and thick -- about 30 ounces -- which is not what I’d call in the Koi style of small plates. It comes with crusty roasted potatoes and good sauteed rapini and makes quite the feast for two. Overall, though, the main courses are routine -- steak, chops, Dover sole, branzino. And for the kind of prices Bridge is charging, execution should be, at the very least, dead on. That isn’t always the case.

Broiled langoustines, a special one night, are very nicely and simply done. My grilled Maine lobster with black olives and cherry tomatoes one night is dismembered and put back together like a puzzle: poetry on the plate. Unfortunately, the claw meat is like leather and the rest of the beast is completely dried out. And it’s $68.

Kobe style beef is so tender and, well, mushy that it’s almost repellent. Perfect, though, if you’ve just come from dental surgery. But the worst of the main dishes is, oddly enough, the lasagna of wide noodles layered with an awful sludge of meat and vegetables that’s supposed to be a Bolognese sauce.

A word of caution: When a special is proposed, you’d better ask the price before committing to it. One night our otherwise wonderful waiter neglects to mention that the special tagliatelle with summer truffles that night costs $58, until one of us asks. He seems so embarrassed that I have to think it’s the policy not to volunteer the price.

I order it anyway because the cost seems so preposterous for summer truffles. Summer truffles cost a tenth of winter white truffles. When my pasta comes, the noodles are really delicious, tossed in butter and covered in a mild blizzard of summer truffles. These have such a delicate flavor I ask if the chef has seen fit to amp up the dish with truffle oil. He checks with the kitchen and says it’s truffle paste, butter and lots of love. Who knew love was so exorbitant?

Though the wine list cuts a wide swath through Italian vineyards with more than 300 selections, plus a long list of Champagnes as recognizable as Chanel or Gucci, prices are very high.

The dessert situation is grim. Our $32 chef’s tasting one night is a quartet of unattractive desserts on one plate, including a slab of sad, incredibly sweet tiramisu and a soggy apple strudel.

Maybe the menu is just too large for the kitchen to handle when the restaurant’s this busy. Some things, usually the simpler, the most Italian things, are very correct, and then others are so badly executed it’s as if they issued from an anonymous restaurant down the street. If the prices weren’t so aggressive, it would be easier to be more forgiving, because it’s such a glamorous looking -- and comfortable -- setting.

And Bridge conjures up such an inviting party atmosphere that Koi fans jaywalk across the street in glittery sandals, SUVs disgorge the curious from the ‘burbs and locals on the hunt for the next new place settle in for a late supper around long tables. This, even before the punishing soundtrack is turned up, is not the spot for a quiet dinner for two.

The waiters, though, are awfully nice and that kind of service can take some of the sting out of the experience. Or at least, I think so until I hear the middle-aged gentleman standing next to me as we wait for the valets squawk to his wife, “Seven dollars to park my car? One more reason I’m never coming back.”

It’s also an effective way to edit the crowd to those who really, really need to be at the in place.

*

Bridge

Rating: * 1/2

Location: 755 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles; (310) 659-3535; www.bridgela.com.

Ambience: Glitzy Italian restaurant with two dining rooms separated by an “outdoor” patio with a floating glass roof, the better to smoke. The crowd is fairly young, devotees of Koi across the street.

Service: Amiable and accommodating, if sometimes uninformed.

Price: Pizza, $12 to $16; soups, $8 to $2; antipasti, $12 to $14; salads, $9 to $16; pasta and risotto, $14 to $19; meats, $24 to $68; fish, $25 to $68; main courses, $18 to $22; dessert, $8 to $32.

Best dishes: Vitello tonnato, peperoni arrostiti, risotto with seafood, asparagus ravioli, gnocchi in tomato sauce with mozzarella, bistecca alla fiorentina for two.

Wine list: A broad selection of Italian wines. Expensive. Corkage, $25 per bottle; limit two bottles per party.

Best table: One of the caramel leather booths along the far wall.

Details: Open for dinner 6 to 11 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays; the bar is open until 2 a.m. Full bar. Valet parking, $7.

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.