RESTAURANT REVIEW : Personal Cooking, Italian-Style

What is Fama? A year ago, I thought I knew. It seemed to be a slightly Frenchified idea of a Californianized version of an Italian restaurant.

And evidently a good idea, because this most disorienting of rooms--full of meticulously crafted blond-wood structures leaning at Expressionist angles--was roaring. I mean, people were fighting to get in. (Well, it was roaring, too, with all those sound-reflective surfaces.)

This had not been the original idea, though. Fama was planned as an Italian restaurant, but Sally Fama is Hans Rockenwagner’s wife, and the public fervently expected impressive inventions of the sort they were used to at Rockenwagner restaurant. Fama found itself obliged to serve things like trout on saffron rice, scattered with giant capers and toasted almonds.

Since then, the wheeling cloud of restaurant first-nighters has moved on to newer placesand Fama has sneakily reverted to its original plan: a personal style of Italian cooking.

Many of the appetizers, at any rate, do have an Italian or Italian/Californian aspect. The salad of sweet red and yellow tomatoes, sliced and dashed with vinaigrette, is a tastefully simple celebration of these particularly sweet tomatoes (vine-ripened, it says here very credibly). A “light style” eggplant Parmesan made by grilling eggplant slices and heating them in tomato sauce with some smoked mozzarella epitomizes the clever California-Italian style.

One of the successes of the old menu is still available, the eggplant mousse surrounded by a pool of tomato sauce--rather like fresh cream of tomato soup--with a flotilla of green gnocchi bobbing around. It seems as un-Italian to me as it did last year, but it’s still irresistible. The smoked trout salad, with rather mild fresh horseradish sauce, and salad garnished with goat cheese on toast are as California as you can get.

Fama makes all, but all, of its pasta fresh. This means even spaghettini--and very tasty spaghettini it is, though the fresh texture is a bit of a surprise, something like Oriental pan-fried noodles. It comes mixed with sliced grilled carrots, zucchini, onions, celery and sweet peppers, combining a lot of our favorite things.

The other pastas cover an amazingly wide spectrum. The jalapeno rotellini are a shocking bright green color and taste a bit peppery, but the overall impression of this dish is of the rich cream sauce and the smokiness of the salmon mixed with it. Shocking in their own way are the noodles with homemade Milano sausage. They’re in the old-fashioned hearty-Italian style, where tomato sauces taste like sweet tomato paste.

The list of meat entrees is short, and the star is the exquisite, thin-sliced baby Bodega salmon, which has an unusual delicacy of flavor. They tend to what the West Side would call sober and traditional: lemony grilled ahi served with a sort of tomato hash on the side, filet mignon with a wonderful grilled flavor and an early-’80s green peppercorn cream sauce.

Sober is good. The big innovation here is breast of capon with red lentils--an intriguingly tangy puree of red lentils, actually. But the capon itself is chewy, practically rubbery.

The desserts are a little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n’ roll. The best is the two scoops of intense chocolate mousse in a small sea of pureed hazelnuts in cream. You can get fruit in a lively champagne zabaglione .

On the other hand, there’s apple crisp and a soupy rice pudding much improved by the addition of fresh pecans. The surprise is Mummy’s two-layer cheesecake, simply the old-fashioned sort with a sour-cream frosting layer, but well-balanced and very fresh.

Fama is still loud and sort of disorienting. No matter (unless you really want to carry on conversation). It was good before and it feels more sure of itself this time around.

Fama, 1416 4th St., Santa Monica, (213) 451-8633. Lunch 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday; dinner 6-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 6-11 p.m. Friday; 5:30-11 p.m. Saturday; 5:30-9:30 p.m. Sunday. Beer and wine. Street parking. MasterCard and Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $37-$52.