RESTAURANT REVIEW : No Tears at Crybabies, Just Giddy Good Food

Restaurant success, they say, depends on three factors: location, location, location. Crybabies is in deep trouble with at least two of these.

Who knows why, but this ambitious little Italian restaurant decided to open in a small shopping plaza in Pacific Palisades. No, that doesn’t begin to tell it--it’s in a shopping plaza you’ll never even see unless you drive up Palisades Drive a little.

It looks like many another pizza/pasta place, though of course it’s brand new, and the pizza oven positively gleams. Decor consists of plants, rather elegant dove-gray table tops and several paintings of crying babies on the wall. There’s a counter as well as tables, plus some outside seating to catch the distant sea breezes and the view from the parking lot.

There are surprises lurking here, though. The bread Crybabies bakes, for instance. One day it might be egg bread; another, it might be an exotic loaf seasoned with dried herbs and hot peppers. The Caesar salad is good, and sizable (even the half-size Caesar is huge). And it is positively memorable when the croutons are made from that exotic spice bread.

There’s an antipasto plate, as you’d expect, but your bill lists this as “pate.” The antipasto contains pickled peppers, thin slices of grilled eggplant (deliciously flavored with vinegar), more salad stuff, and in place of bologna an imported French venison pate. What the restaurant calls its “great salad” is just romaine with tomato and red bell peppers, but the dressing really is rather great, made of raspberry and balsamic vinegars with dried tomatoes.

Crybabies has kind of a thing about dried tomatoes, in fact. Two of the best entrees--and they are really wonderful--contain them in different ways. One is “gourmet cheese pasta”: fettuccine with a fantastically rich topping of fontina cheese, whole walnuts and sun-dried tomatoes, tasting almost like meat, in a cream sauce rendered purplish brown by ground walnuts.

The other is a grilled chicken-sausage plate, the sausage made from chicken with typical Italian flavoring of anise and possibly also some cumin. Grilled along with the sausage, though, are amazingly large slices of dried tomato. They’re the ultimate concentration of tomato flavor, dense and sweetish and browned from the grill.

On the other hand, tomatoes don’t always show up where you expect them. Veal tortellini come with a “classic sauce” I’ve never heard of, made with pureed carrot, some hot pepper, and apparently no tomato. It takes a little getting used to, and it does seem a little sweet (though not as sweet as Chef Boy-Ar-Dee), but it is tasty in a giddy way, perhaps a Continental rather than a California sort of giddiness.

Yes, there are pizzas. Clearly this kitchen knows how to make things taste good, but the pizzas are of an odd, mannered sort. Basically, the toppings are rather moist and the dough is rather soft, so count on using a fork. They do taste good, but you may wonder why excellent lime-flavored chicken chunks are served on soggy pizza dough rather than pasta, where they’d seem more at home.

Pasta is not an absolutely sure thing here, however. Spicy chicken is really pretty mild, and its sauce of tomatoes and red pepper flakes is surprisingly soupy and watery, despite the heavy dose of Parmesan, and the underlying angel hair pasta comes off sort of nondescript. And “fettuccine d’amour “ is charmingly named but a curiously bland dish, more or less pasta primavera in cream sauce scattered with poppy seeds. Well, we all know lovers don’t pay much attention to what they’re eating.

There aren’t a lot of desserts, but the ones I’ve had are surprisingly unusual. One was little biscuits of puff pastry coated half-and-half with dark and white chocolate and served with the mixture of fruits preserved in brandy known as bachelor’s jam.

The other was possibly the best tirami su I’ve had in a restaurant--not the heavy, soggy mass of sponge cake mixed with espresso and chocolate and cream usually served, but a light and stylish one: a thin layer of sponge fingers in espresso and Kahlua, with a layer of custard sauce, all surrounded by more sponge fingers. It was light and vividly flavored.

Clearly, something more than just a pizzeria/pasteria is going on here. Maybe this is our first taste of--dare I say it?--Palisades Cuisine.

Recommended dishes: Caesar salad, $6; gourmet cheese fettuccine, $9.25; chicken sausage, $12.50; tirami su, $4.

Crybabies Pasta and Pizza Restaurant, 538 Palisades Drive, Pacific Palisades, (213) 454-5654. Open for lunch and dinner daily. Beer and wine. Lot parking. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $32 to $49.