West Seattle Trattoria: Pasta Amid The Bustle

Restaurant review XX Angelina's Trattoria, 2311 California Ave. S.W. ($ 1/2) Lunch ($5 to $8) 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily. Dinner ($7 to $13.25) 4:30 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Friday; until 11 p.m. Saturday. Breakfast ($2.50 to $7) 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Sunday. Beer, wine, major credit cards. No smoking. Reservations: 932-7311.

A sign, out of sight of the public, is posted between the dining room and the kitchen of the busy Tukwila restaurant Winners. It is addressed to the waitstaff:

"Pay attention to details," it reads. "Sweat the small stuff."

Until recently, there was a sign pasted to the front window of Angelina's Trattoria in West Seattle. It announced their summer mussel festival, "June 12th - 31st." 31st? (It has since been extended to July 21.)

Thirty days hath, etc. . . .

A very minor detail, and if July came a day late to Angelina's, it's of no great consequence.

But the small, copiously dressed green salad that came with my lunch at Angelina's looked as if it had hung around since late June, whenever it ended. Every cut piece of lettuce was rimmed in limp, autumnal brown.

The waitress apologized, offered to bring another salad (if they had better greens back there, why hadn't they served them in the first place?), offered to exchange the collective wilt for the soup du jour, and was really very sympathetic. But who, I wondered, was sweating the small stuff in Angelina's kitchen? What cook or chef was in charge of paying attention to little green details turning brown?

And that question, when one is pondering the purchase of highly perishable mussels, should not be muddying the path to appetite.

Enjoyable mussels

The mussels, incidentally, were fine. They rimmed an oval plate of perfectly cooked linguine in a marinara sauce ($10.25) heavy with garlic - aggressive but not offensive - and in a rustic way were enjoyable.

In fact, almost everything I subsequently tried in four visits to Angelina's was at least good - and some of it very good.

Angelina's Trattoria is one of Danny Mitchell's three restaurants (a fourth, Bella Luna in upper Greenwood, sold six weeks ago and is now attempting a Spanish transformation as Tapa's). His flagship place, the Trattoria Mitchelli, has been a popular Pioneer Square hangout for years.

They are all bustling, unpretentious, no-frills dispensaries of pastas, hearty sauces and affordable wines - a durable formula for success. Mitchell carries it further, along with a corporate sense of humor - "Mitchelli," after all, isn't Italian - and a fair amount of decorative dining-room energy.

A Caesar Salad ($2.50 when ordered with a main course) a couple of days later was commendable, with herby croutons, a generous dusting of grated cheese and a solid garlic tang to the dressing.

The menu is dominated with pasta choices, and a pasta-of-the-day, with a choice of a half dozen saucings, is an appealing, economic choice: bread and soup or salad is included for a little more than $6. Lately the "daily" pasta (for a week) has been rigatini (a smaller rigatoni).

French Italian soup

We started one lunch with the polenta appetizer, two scoops of a creamy corn meal floating in a light brown moat (rather thin) of stock and Marsala, with a heavy floating of sliced mushrooms under a sprinkling of parsley. An Italian Onion Soup ($1.95) appeared to be a French onion soup with more aromatic herbs - but good.

The Calamari alla Napoletana appetizer ($5.95) is hearty, appealing and loaded with olives, tomato and capers; it bears resemblance to squid poached in a puttanesca sauce.

Chicken Cannelloni ($9.75) is one of the gutsier offerings. The usually tame, cheese-stuffed pasta, is augmented with chicken (chunked instead of ground) and aggressively seasoned with herbs and garlic under an assertive red sauce.

The Mellow Vitello Minnitti ($13.25), two cuts of veal, lightly breaded and pan-fried in brown butter, could have been spared a few minutes over the fire. It emerged dark brown, slightly crisp; like a Wienerschnitzel gone south to a Sicilian beach for a month.

I especially liked the Fettuccine con Pollo e Nocciole ($9.75). Quite al dente pasta, richly dressed with chopped, sauteed chicken breast, garlic, shallots, herbs, fresh-diced Roma tomatoes and toasted hazelnuts in a lively sherry-cream sauce.

Oh, good meatballs.

(Copyright, 1996, John Hinterberger. All rights reserved.)

John Hinterberger, who writes the weekly restaurant review in Tempo and a Sunday food column in Pacific, visits restaurants anonymously and unannounced. He pays in full for all food, wines and services. Interviews of the restaurants' management and staff are done only after meals and services have been appraised. He does not accept invitations to evaluate restaurants.