Food Feature: Out of uniform

Trovato’s is a restaurant with a dual personality. As the moldy oldie standards of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin waft through the air (if you don’t remember “Volare” topping the charts, consider yourself lucky), it seems as though it could be just another schlocky pseudo-Italian restaurant.

And then you overhear owner Leonard Trovato and a few of his employees speaking in animated Italian. That alone is enough to make the place endearing, despite the uneven food and less-than-attentive staff. Although, the latter seems to be due more to a lack of a sufficient, seasoned staff than to indifference.

Either way, Trovato’s isn’t quite the Italian restaurant one expects. There isn’t a red-checked tablecloth in sight, for one thing. Instead, rough-textured terra cotta-colored walls catch the sunlight coming through the wall of windows overlooking the admittedly dull shopping center parking lot. Hefty water glasses in rich cobalt clink on the glass-covered white tablecloths. Most of the multi-level restaurant area is filled with tables and straight-back wooden chairs. But there are a couple of comfy booths covered in nubby fabric with a whimsical old-fashioned travel motif: luggage labels of Paris and New York.

The menu isn’t crammed with the usual red sauce extravaganzas. Maryland-style crab cakes, for example, make an appearance at lunch as an entree ($9) and at dinner as an appetizer ($8.50). Yes, they come with a side of linguine marinara, but the Creole mustard sauce let’s you know where the kitchen’s intentions lie.

Those intentions are personal more than cultural. The variety that approach brings to the menu is clear in the trio of salads offered. There’s the classic Caesar salad modified for the health-conscious age (meaning no raw egg in the dressing), with its crisp romaine, crunchy garlic croutons and salty parmesan; a new-age salad of arugula, peaches and oranges dressed in Grand Marnier vinaigrette; and the best of the three — because of the balance of flavors — is a simple but savory salad of mixed greens with red and yellow tomatoes bathed in a balsamic or raspberry vinaigrette. It is a tribute to the expertise of the vinaigrette that it makes even winter’s horrid tomatoes taste good.

Instead of the traditional veal piccata, the kitchen serves a red snapper with the caper and lemon white wine treatment. Shrimp isn’t just tossed over linguini, it is tossed with garlic and calamata olives and then tossed over linguini to create the jumbo shrimp putanesca. Chicken Anthony blends chicken with the typical accents of prosciutto and fontina cheese, but then tops it all with shiitake mushroom gravy. Panchetta-wrapped shellfish is nothing new, but jumbo scallops smothered by the salty, spicy meat and served with a warm angel hair salad in balsamic dressing is.

Trovato’s is one of the few places in town to offer cioppino ($17.50), the aromatic stew of shrimp, scallops, calamari, mussels and clams in wine and tomato sauce, which would be the essence of Italy if it hadn’t been invented in San Francisco. The only thing needed to go along with this is the restaurant’s crusty, garlic and butter-soaked bread.

In the hunk-of-meat department is the House Specialty Veal Chop; Wild Pork, a double-cut pork chop and sweet Italian sausage sauteed with onions and hot and sweet vinegar peppers; and Beef Wellington Trovato’s ($24.50), a 10-ounce filet mignon with spinach and mushrooms baked in puff pastry with Chianti gravy.

I have had wonderful dishes at Trovato’s, and I have had dishes I couldn’t finish after two bites. Even the same dish ordered on different days fluctuates in palatability. Marinara sauce has been fresh and simple, and it has also been watery with the metallic aftertaste of bad garlic.

Gnocchi Bolognese is often heavy but frankly, I don’t care. Gnocchi is so scarce on menus in this town that I am loathe to quibble when it isn’t light as air, as it should be. Note, however, that gnocchi appears only on Trovato’s lunch menu and isn’t always available then. Call ahead if that’s what you’re craving.

If you aren’t in the mood for surprises, then the thing to have is the one dish that never fails to please: rigatoni in vodka sauce ($10.50). Happily, it’s on both the lunch and dinner menus. I love the contradiction of the homely squiggly pasta and the elegant sauce with its infusion of shallots and cream kissed with vodka.

You can count on the desserts, too, especially the thick creme brulee and the cannoli practically paved with bittersweet chocolate chips.

Amy.jinknerlloyd@creativeloafing.com??