Mamma mia! It’s delicious

Old-style Chianti bottles wrapped in woven straw sit on the windowsill in Mamma Tanino’s in Sonoma. These relics of a former time are still sold, although almost everyone knows that the wine they contain is invariably cheap and unpleasant. But they remain a symbol of a certain kind of old-fashioned, mom-and-pop Italian restaurant, which characterizes Mamma Tanino’s exactly.

The food at Mamma’s is true comfort food. This is the stuff that fueled us as kids, and that we still hanker for. This isn’t the Disneyfied “Italian food” of The Olive Garden, or the decadent dishes served at emporiums of excess (you know who you are). No, you go to Mamma Tanino’s for the 10 kinds of house-made pasta, for the classic Italian entrees, good wine list, friendly service, and the nightly specials.

As if to cover all bases, executive chef Gaetano Patrinostro and his wife and partner in the venture, Kimberley Strain-Patrinostro, follow their restaurant’s name with “Trattoria Ristorante.” Trattoria is Italian for a small casual restaurant or bistro, while the term ristorante is usually reserved for white tablecloth kinds of places. Mamma Tanino’s is more trattoria than ristorante. The layout zigs, then zags, then zigs again. The tables are bare wood. The view through the windows is of other storefronts and the Sonoma Market’s parking lot. Italian mandolin music plays softly. The art on the wall depicts more of those old fiaschi — the straw Chianti bottles.

But the wine list is up-to-date. Delights lurk among the two sparklers, seven whites, and 12 red wines. The 2004 Righetti Amarone ($50), for instance, is a thick, intense, delicious wine from just north of Verona in the Veneto. There Gianni Righetti crafts amarone from partially dehydrated clusters of Rondinella, Molinara, and Corvina grapes, grown on Righetti’s hillside vineyards.

There’s no super-Tuscan on the wine list, but there is a wine that’s 70 percent sangiovese and 30 percent cabernet sauvignon — roughly the proportions of a “super-Tuscan” — from the town of Liano in Emilia-Romagna for a reasonable $45, seeing as how you can find it online retailing at $38. Among American wines, the excellent 2006 Muscardini Sangiovese from Kenwood is $45. Among whites, the 2006 Lungarotti “Torre di Giano” is $29. Corkage is $12.50.

As you’re seated, a basket of Italian bread and a cruet of olive oil are brought to the table. Then come the appetizers. Panzanella ($8 **½) is an Italian staple salad, here given chef Patrinostro’s personal twist. Instead of crusty day-old bread cut into cubes, the salad presents crunchy slices of toasted bread, tomatoes, pitted olives, small cubes of mozzarella, red onions, olive oil, vinegar, basil, and salt and pepper. It’s an up-flavor version of the old standard.

A cup of Genoa-style Minestrone ($6 *½) had two problems. First, it was too salty — as were several other dishes. And second it had the life boiled out of most of its vegetables. The carrots held up, but the rest were mush. Did it taste good? Hard to tell with the mouthful of salt.

Then came the Calamaretti Fritti ($11 ***), or little calamari, both rings and babies coated with a batter that rendered them golden, crunchy and delicious. They came with a tartar sauce and a spicy tomato-based sauce for dipping.

Gnocchetti Piemontese ($17 ***), or Piedmont-style little gnocchi, were a knock-out. The plate held 17 of these little potato dumplings with sage and a light tomatoey sauce. Chef Patrinostro’s tomato sauces tend not to be the heavy, intensely tomatoey sugo of Sicily and southern Italy, but are created with the regional style of their origin. Thus the Bolognese sauce starts with a mirepoix-like mix of carrots, onions and celery, then ground beef, some ground veal and pork, herbs and tomatoes. Tomatoes aren’t the central ingredient but they lend their bright flavor and acid to make this sauce light and delicate. The menu offers the sauce on pappardelle noodles, but I asked for it on the Capellini ($18 ***), which usually costs $13 and is served with fresh tomato, basil, and garlic — and was obliged. It was exactly the comfort food I was looking for on my first visit to Mamma Tanino’s.

Another worthy pasta dish is the Linguini Vongole ($21 **), linguini with clams. It’s available with either a white wine or red sauce. The clams are meaty little Manila clams farmed here on the West Coast, so they are fresh. It’s a simple dish, but the white wine sauce was a little too salty the evening I ordered it.

Nightly entrée specials are worth checking. On a recent night they included halibut as the fish of the day, osso buco, risotto, veal and cheese ravioli in a porcini sauce, and ribeye steak with a Barolo sauce. Osso Buco ($25 ***), Italian for “pierced bone” was a veal shank braised long and slow in the company of onions, tomato, garlic, anchovies, lemon zest, carrots, celery, stock, olive oil and white wine, making a meaty sauce for meat falling-off-the-bone tender. On the side were pappardelle noodles and broccolini.

Powerful stoves and ovens give professional chefs a great advantage over home cooks. Their stove tops can throw 30,000 BTUs at a food, doing things that 12,000 BTU home units can’t. A good example is the Halibut ($21 ***) at Mamma Tanino’s. It’s flash-seared in a pan, rendering the outside of this delicate fish crispy, while inside it’s still lusciously moist and flaky. At home, the fish would dry out before it achieved that nice crispy exterior. The halibut was topped with a leek and pine nut topping — again, a little too salty — and came with potatoes and broccolini on the side.

If you had to guess which classic Italian desserts would be on the menu, you might think of zabaglione, tiramisu, cannoli and gelati. Except for the zabaglione, you’ll find the rest on Mamma Tanino’s menu. Tiramisu ($7 ***) is a classic version of this creamy, lady-finger-cocoa-liqueur-flavored cake. It’s appropriately light and foamy in the mouth. The flaw with many tiramisus is that they are heavy. Not this one.

The Cannoli ($6 ***½) was excellent. The crunchy-crusty tube of deep-fried pastry was filled with a creamy, vanilla-flavored, whipped ricotta.

To sum up: A fine, traditional Italian eatery — the kind that every town should have for all the kids to remember all their lives and for all the adults to remember when they were kids. Spaghetti rules!

Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review column for A&E. You can reach him at jeffcox@sonic.net.