The supremacy of mini-malls has created a situation not unlike that a small child experiences in the days just before Christmas. That wrapped shoebox might contain a pair of socks, a copy of some video game you’re already tired of playing, or the electronic gadget you’ve been gazing at longingly in the store window for weeks. Rattling the box doesn’t work, because toys nowadays don’t have moving parts. You’re stuck waiting for the day when you’re allowed to investigate things fully.
A mini-mall space is the architectural equivalent of a shoebox, both in terms of general shape and in the way it tends to be reused endlessly for new purposes. An excellent case in point is at the Golden Cove shopping center, where almost identical spaces have been turned into a stylish Japanese restaurant, a Subway sandwich shop, a Starbucks – and the most lavishly elegant Italian restaurant in Palos Verdes. If this were a row of shoeboxes, the contents would range from cheap sneakers to thigh-high Prada boots.
The metaphorical Prada boots are a restaurant called Saluzzi, which combines high style and East Coast Italian cooking in a way that is very rare on these shores. Chef Michael Saluzzi was a star in New York and Kansas City before moving to this unlikely spot in Palos Verdes, and while the restaurant is small – only twelve tables – his ambition is huge.
To start with, many standard Italian dishes aren’t on the menu, and some of the things that have replaced them are almost ostentatiously aimed at wild side diners. (If there’s another restaurant anywhere in LA that offers a baked sheep’s head as an appetizer, I haven’t found it. I wanted to order it, but was outvoted three to one at a table of four.) We ordered a starter of gnudi and a Portobello mushroom stuffed with crabmeat, almonds, and fontina cheese.
Gnudi are light, soft dumplings that are often compared to gnocchi, but are really composed of cheese, vegetables, meat, and herbs that are kneaded together, rolled in breadcrumbs, and fried. They are utterly unlike any fried cheese sticks you’ve had before – these had a slight crust with an almost unbelievably soft, fluffy interior. There was flavor too, not just the hint of dairy from the ricotta and Pecorino cheese, but herbal notes from flakes of fresh parsley and chopped spinach, a whiff of garlic, and a meatiness from the finely chopped prosciutto. I could easily make a meal of these – they were served with a very good dipping sauce of roasted tomato and basil marinara, but I was so interested in the basic flavors of the gnudi that I used most of the sauce for the bread. I didn’t even mind missing the sheep’s head.
The Portobello mushroom was a less novel item, but was every bit as good. The huge cap was liberally topped with a mix of king crab and real East Coast backfin lump crab, which was a good move as the two have entirely different texture and flavor. They mixed the seafood with fontina cheese and almonds, and then baked it with a fragrant seafood bisque reduction. There were enough contrasts here for a regular meal, with the natural flavors of mushroom, nuts, and seafood nicely offset by the intense and lightly sweet bisque. The portion was large enough that four of us shared the appetizer and each got a couple of very satisfying bites, and we all would have wanted more had we not seen the massive size of the entrees headed for other tables. I intend to come back here and make a meal of appetizers, because the flavors in the ones we had were so brilliant.
For main courses, we opted for lasagna alla Genoa, tuna “Livorno style”, seafood “giambotta,” and a towering portion of osso bucco. Most people think of lasagna as a Southern Italian dish, even though the first recorded reference to lasagna comes from a Genoese cookbook of 1329. Genoese ingredients are different from the usual American-Italian standard – rather than red sauce there is a rich, creamy Bechamel, and the stuffing is seafood, not meat. Most unexpectedly, At Saluzzi the lasagna is served as a pinwheel of noodles and seafood on a bed of sauce, a visual delight for a very tasty dish. The noodles themselves were thin and soft, not quite crepe-like as in some Genovese lasagnas I’ve had, but not the thick, chewy noodles we expect. The shrimp here set a pattern we saw with the other seafood in our meal – it was cooked very lightly to preserve the flavor and texture, a style Californians might mark as Japanese, but that is also traditionally Northern Italian. This meant you really tasted the sea freshness in the shrimp, a rarity in local Italian restaurants.
The name “giambotta” in the other seafood pasta wasn’t very enlightening – giambotta means “everything tossed together” in Italian (which is coincidentally exactly what Chop Suey means in Cantonese, though there is no other similarity between the two dishes). Giambotta usually refers to a stew made in a skillet using whatever vegetables are handy, along with olive oil, salt, and pepper. True to form, there were vegetables here and it was served in a skillet, but there was also a mix of fish, shellfish, and fat house-made spaghetti. It was a reminder that, as baroque as this restaurant can be with other dishes, they can still make a simple seafood pasta true to peasant fisherman’s flavors that tastes delicious.
Tuna Livorno and osso bucco are very different dishes, one from the land and one from the sea, but share a common theme – a big piece of protein in a robust sauce designed to bring out the essential natural flavors. In the case of tuna Livorno, we had a giant rare Ahi tuna steak topped with a sauce whose principal components were olives, oil, chopped tomatoes, onions, and capers. Had we been served the same dish in a French restaurant that called it Tuna Provençal, we wouldn’t have batted an eyelash – borders and peoples have moved many times over the centuries, and Livorno was ruled by Paris as often as Rome. The fish was cooked just to doneness and pink within, the flavors lightly tart and salty, a perfect match with the buttery fish.
I had hesitated over ordering the osso bucco, a 32 ounce shank that was the most expensive item on the menu at $38.00. It was too much for two people, let alone one, but our server had praised it highly and I decided the remains would go well into the next day’s dinner. They did, though I actually ate more of it than I expected to, since the braising sauce of onions, carrot, celery, and garlic with Amarone wine was particularly tasty. As much as I liked it, I wouldn’t order this again without someone at the table to share with– preferably a meat lover with a very hearty appetite.
I stopped demolishing the osso bucco when I did only because I had seen the desserts go by – cannoli, a sweet that I find delightful when well made and appalling when it isn’t, and sfogliatelle, a pastry so labor intensive to construct that I can’t imagine how anybody does it without going mad. Sfogliatelle are bell-shaped confections of crisp dough stuffed with sweet cheese and citron, then baked and sprinkled with powdered sugar. The name means “many layers,” and when they’re done correctly, they are just that – dozens of layers of lightly crisp pastry, with thick, lightly sweet filling. These were perfect, and so were the cannolis. The best Italian restaurants I had been to before stuffed the cookie-like tube of dough with ricotta-cream and chocolate chip filling only after you order it, so that the contrast of crisp cookie and soft filling is perfect. Lesser Italian restaurants stuff them earlier, sacrificing freshness for convenience. Saluzzi doesn’t stuff them at all, leaving you to do so yourself – the pastry tubes are stuck in balls of filling on the plate, looking like anemones in some undersea landscape. It’s a pretty presentation, and the desserts were delicious, but I actually prefer them to arrive stuffed so that they’re easier to eat neatly.
The only other quibble I had with any aspect of the dinner was with the wine list – the bottles were mostly Italian and all of good quality, but there were very few moderately priced bottles and no wine descriptions at all. A place that aspires and achieves food of this caliber should spend a little time composing a wine list that explains the available choices. With our starters we shared a Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio that was slightly overpriced at $40.00 a bottle, and I matched my osso bucco with a glass of Silver Creek Cabernet. My companions and I wouldn’t have minded spending more to get an exceptional bottle, but we didn’t have enough information to make an informed choice.
That detail aside, our evening at Saluzzi was marvelous – the attentive service, panoramic view of the sea and sunset, and elegant surroundings made it easy to forget that we were in a box. When we emerged and found ourselves again in an everyday Californian shopping center, it was with a sense of dislocation. This was the surprise package that every kid hopes to find at birthdays and Christmas, the one that looks just like all the others and is packed with marvels, and we four grown-up kids were delighted with it.
Saluzzi is located at 31206 Palos Verdes Drive West in Rancho Palos Verdes. Open for lunch and dinner, We-Su. Starters $10-17, entrees $21-$38. Parking lot, handicap access good. Phone (310)377-7200 for reservations.
