Where California Pays Homage to Italy : Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton have a ringing hit in Campanile

Campanile, 624 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 938-1447. Open for dinner Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $62 to $92. Recently I tried, days in advance, to get a Thursday night reservation at Campanile, but the only available table was at 10:30. I took it, of course. People are glad to get seated at all in the new temple of gastronomy run by Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton.

Campanile really does look something like a temple, come to think of it, a sort of squared-off Italian Romanesque temple made of gray, stone-like brick. However, after you enter by a high-walled courtyard--practically a piazza with a Spanish tiled fountain in the middle--on the left you find a reasonably busy bar with geometrical things going on in the vicinity of the ceiling. All that somber gray brick, it turns out, oddly enhances the old joie de vivre .

To the right of the same courtyard, you can peer into Campanile’s substantial bakery, where great tubs of sourdough starter bubble ferociously 24 hours a day. The La Brea Bakery, as it’s known, also sells its bread to the public. There’s often a line, and if you’re smart you won’t even think about dropping by on a Saturday.

Beyond this courtyard is the first dining room of the most temple-like appearance of all. Through its steeply pitched, cathedral-like glass roof you can see the square bell tower that gives the restaurant its name, though I’ve never heard any ringing from this particular campanile . Here you also get to see into the kitchen, an unusually open display kitchen with vast hooded fans over the stoves. Windows from the second floor give onto this room, as if belonging to discreetly inquisitive neighbors.

Behind this is the second dining room, pleasantly solid and blocky with casual, almost weedy plants like horsetail fern in planters. There are also two upstairs dining areas back here--corridors with a view of the ground floor, really, rather than rooms. A remarkable mix of people is eating in these rooms: intense restaurant first-nighters, comfortable senior citizens, and young people who don’t look like the usual foodie crowd but are clearly enjoying themselves. Campanile is a relaxing place, and not nearly as loud as you might fear from all those sound-reflective surfaces.

The cuisine has been described as “rustic Italian,” and it could be called the final tribute of California to Italy. Italian ideas have always been present in California cuisine, of course, and Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton spent years in the kitchen at Spago where the Californian/Italian combination was made explicit.

But this vision is not what Americans have thought of as Italian until recently: no Southern Italian tomato sauces, no Northern cream sauces. Instead, there are wine sauces or meat reductions that might be called French but for some rowdy ingredient like rosemary. Amazingly, given the huge bakery at Campanile’s disposal, there’s no pizza, not even a crazy California one with avocados or mangoes on it.

Instead, Campanile concentrates on the things that have so impressed California chefs about Italian food. A hearty, almost bluff celebration of grilled meat and the snap of really fresh ingredients. A taste for herbs, olives, mushrooms, citrus flavors. An avoidance of French-style contrivance--or at least an avoidance of the appearance of it. For instance: Entrees come out with a common plate of vegetables for all at the table to share. The selection might include sweet white corn roasted in the husk, sweet baby carrots, tiny baked onions and a thin sheet of potatoes Anna (call them potato chips cooked in a solid layer).

Occasionally a dish seems conventionally Italian, like linguine with clams in a wine/garlic/lemon sauce (there’s basil and pancetta too, but basil and pancetta are practically everywhere here). Potato-filled ravioli, I understand, is a familiar cheap dish in Italy, but the texture of Campanile’s version is luxurious--not really a dish for poor people with chanterelle mushrooms and pieces of lobster floating around.

Altogether, though, there’s a Californian taste for invention in all this profusion of vivid natural flavors. For instance, I once had a salad topped with slices of briefly charred tuna with a faint smoky-juniperlike flavor, a California staple that for once was overshadowed by the simple salad.

All the salads are breathtaking, really, the greens of an almost unearthly--or let’s say, unrestaurantly--freshness, as if picked within the hour. They may contain croutons of dark rye-walnut bread, or a slice of crisp toast topped with three little dabs of exquisite cheese: goat, Maytag blue from Iowa, and a French triple cream that tastes like cheese-scented butter. In this case it was a puree of strong black olives as well as the tuna.

The point is, I followed this olive-dosed salad with penne , the pasta irresistibly flavored with the same olive paste, and then an entree of grilled squab, remarkably meaty squab in a wine sauce with shiitake mushrooms. The squab, as it happened, came with penne too, only these had been browned in a frying pan. Everybody should brown some penne once in a while.

But ideas are not everything; high quality cooking is at least as important here. Grilled swordfish--small steaks, really, bigger than shish kebab chunks--are skewered by branches of rosemary. Grilled calf’s liver, not a dish many think of first when they sit down to dinner, comes in a wonderful, slightly sweet winey sauce with sauteed shallots, pancetta and tiny fried cherry tomatoes floating in it. Both dishes are interesting ideas, but what’s outstanding is how perfectly the fish and liver are cooked--moist and in the case of the liver positively creamy in texture.

Crisp flattened chicken sounds like a California idea, though it’s actually a Tuscan tradition. For that matter it might be from far to the east of Italy; the idea of flattening a chicken out and frying it under a weight is common in the Caucasus Mountains. At any rate, it’s a densely textured fried chicken, and it comes with a parsley salad that is nothing but parsley and a little bit of sliced garlic tossed in hot olive oil, not long enough to wilt the parsley but enough to add some interest.

Possibly the best dish is grilled prime rib--a generous portion, by the way. The meat is grilled black on the outside and then sliced and arranged on a bed of white beans and a mysterious sauteed bittersweet herb, with garlic and rosemary in the sauce of reduced beef juices. It contrives to be hearty and elegant at the same time.

The most mannered dish is certainly the fish soup, served in a bowl that bears a suspicious resemblance to a dinner plate. It could be described as a platter of lobster, clams, shrimp and salmon in a saffron-flavored fish sauce, but scarcely a soup, especially not when the beautiful shrimp were clearly grilled at the last moment.

Although this kitchen has the Italian love of clear, vigorous flavors, the plates are not always laid out with Italianate casualness. Occasionally there is some of the French or Japanese fondness for artful display: The grilled prime rib sliced and neatly arranged over its bed of white beans, the calf’s liver with an aesthetic pattern of grill marks, the fish of the day in a sort of hula skirt of toasted leek shreds.

Nancy Silverton was Spago’s pastry chef for several years, and the desserts, like the breads, are distinctive. They’re not just a sweet taste at the end of the meal; they’re often conceived of as entrees--sweet entrees. Sauteed strawberries, for instance, are served in a slightly buttery red wine sauce with strawberry reduction and a dash of cinnamon. These are strawberries treated like some sort of stewed meat, and the macaroons that come with them are even a little like the vegetable on the side.

The kumquat-passion fruit semifreddo, like a whole entree including side dishes, looks like a sort of pie, with a thick, yellow outer crust. But the “crust” is tart passion fruit ice. The filling of the pie (set on a layer of crushed walnuts) is semi-solid ice cream with almond nougatine and bits of candied kumquat. A couple of almond cookies about the size of jellybeans and a thin, apparently candied piece of tangerine skin with a tangerine slice on top garnish the plate. Under the tangerine slice are, amazingly, three threads of saffron.

The most amazing -looking thing is the rice flan, basically a custard with a chewy, slightly browned layer of rice pudding cooked on the top. But there’s sweet-sour lime sauce instead of caramel sauce. There is caramel, however, in the form of big mottled sheets of paper-thin caramel candy. They look like leaves from a tropical plant, or perhaps the ears of a space alien. If you can get this dessert in Italy, I’m a rustic Italian.

There are pretty desserts too, or perhaps striking is the word. The winner is called plum bundles, which consists of twists of filo pastry baked with probably half a plum in each. They come with brilliant dark-red blackberry sauce against a background of snow-white lemon ice cream.

The most uncompromisingly distinctive dessert is the chocolate mousse. This is no sweet, buttery dessert, it’s a powerfully flavored, almost gritty, cylinder of not-quite-sweet chocolate that could wake the dead (there’s certainly some coffee in it). It comes with two unsweetened almonds dipped in cocoa powder, and a chewy chunk of pistachio nougat. Not for people who just think they like chocolate mousse, this is a chocolate mousse for tough guys.

It’s extraordinary food, and an extraordinary restaurant. Every time I’ve walked out of Campanile I’ve felt blessed. I figure it was just a feeling that I was lucky to have eaten there, but of course the temple thing might have something to do with it too.