Rex Still Reigns

A sharp whistle pierces the room. startled, we look up from our pasta, toward the grand staircase where a young man kneels before his blushing girlfriend, proposing right then and there. She nods yes. He slips a ring on her finger. They embrace. The room erupts in applause, and as the starry-eyed couple make their way down the steps and across the room to their table, we smile and raise our glasses in tribute.

Rex has always been the perfect special-occasion restaurant, a place to celebrate a birthday, an anniversary, a romance. As vividly as I recall last year’s marriage proposal, I remember lunching here with several friends the week 15 years ago that Mauro Vincenti opened this unequivocably Italian restaurant. There was nothing remotely like it in Los Angeles--or California. We were thrilled by the 1928 Oviatt Building’s architecture and its sumptuous Art Deco details, by the Lalique glass, the opulent banquettes and polished granite tabletops. Tuxedoed waiters swept by in flotillas, bearing intricate antipasti and primi under silver cloches. We drank two bottles of Angelo Gaja’s ruby Barbaresco from the then-unknown wine region of Piedmont and lingered late into the afternoon, lulled into a feeling of good fortune and well-being by a meal that was stunningly delicious.

Rex il Ristorante introduced L.A. to Italian dining in the grand style. In 1981, when Vincenti unveiled this landmark restaurant, downtown was enjoying a renaissance and the city was on the brink of a restaurant boom. All that’s faded away now, yet Rex hangs in at its difficult locale: Weekend reservations can be hard to come by; other evenings, only a few diners fill the imposing space. Vincenti, however, is as tenacious and as dedicated to his cause as Don Quixote. He’s had restaurants before--first Mauro’s in Glendale, then Fennel and Pazzia, and now Alto Palato in West Hollywood--but probably none as close to his heart as this one.

While Rex is one of the most expensive restaurants in L.A., it is, to my mind, one of the best Italian restaurants in the country. And this year, with a new chef, Rex is in top form. Gino Angelini, who has been here since November, is leaving most other local chefs in the dust. At the stoves since he was 14, the 43-year-old chef has cooked for prime ministers, heads of state--even the Pope. Vincenti hired him away from the Grand Hotel Des Bains in Riccione, south of Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic coast. When he arrived, Angelini executed the menu that Vincenti and previous chef Odette Fada (now at San Domenico in New York City) created.

But now Angelini has introduced his own menu of sublimely elegant contemporary Italian cuisine, brilliantly cooked classics and meats roasted in the new rotisserie. A meal at Rex can start with rosy slices of gently salted prosciutto di Langhirano paired with crunchy shallots in vinegar, a terrific combination of flavors, or with an enticing salad of fresh corn, sweet peppers and eggplant fenced in by green beans. Delicately smoked striped bass, moist and plush, is garnished with curls of shaved bottarga, the pressed salted roe of tuna from Sardinia, for a ravishing first course. Two other antipasti are outstanding: a bowl of farro, or spelt, the nutty brown grain that fed the Roman legions, studded with sweet langoustine and swirled with a heady vegetable broth, and a dish of sea scallops with seared foie gras and golden zucchini blossoms, their slight bitterness a striking contrast to the richness of the scallops and goose liver.

Both Angelini and Vincenti have an abiding respect for quality ingredients. If you eat pigeon at Rex, it is full-flavored and astonishing. Duck, ribboned with fat, is fabulous. Beef is Angus, aged a bit longer than usual to concentrate its flavors. When Roman-born Vincenti is not at the restaurant, he’s back in Italy, tracking down suppliers for extra-virgin olive oil, aged Parmigiano-Reggiano, musky dried porcini, aceto balsamico that’s been aged so long in a series of ever-smaller casks that it pours like black molasses. Vincenti’s attention extends even to humble dried pasta, which he imports from a small producer named Latini. Made from heirloom varieties of wheat and pressed through antique brass molds, the result is spaghetti or spaghetti alla chitarra (so-called because it used to be cut over strings stretched across a wooden box) with an extraordinary texture, the better to hold the sauce.

Angelini is just as painstaking. He makes his own sausages and has figured out how to make guanciale, the cured pork cheek essential to authentic Roman spaghetti all’Amatriciana. Most places substitute pancetta, but it just isn’t the same. You would have to scour the streets of Trastevere to find a spaghetti all’Amatriciana this good: The pasta is perfectly al dente, tossed with just the right amount of fresh tomato sauce sparked with hot red pepper and mellowed with that rich guanciale. Granted, it’s not priced like the peasant dish it is, but it may be better than any other $14 pasta I’ve eaten in L.A. This, along with the equally impressive spaghetti alla chitarra cloaked in bright yellow egg yolk and sharp sheep’s milk Pecorino and that crumbled homemade sausage, is lusty Roman soul food. Angelini also does a remarkable job with the Tuscan pappardelle, inch-wide egg noodles with zig-zagged edges, lightly sauced with a savory duck rag. And his tagliolini blackened with squid ink is a marvelous foil for clams with fresh tomato.

Rimini and the Adriatic coast where Angelini grew up are famous for seafood. He shows why with some of the best--and most intelligently conceived--fish dishes in town. I love the lavishness of charcoal-grilled tuna played against velvety cannellini beans, and the stark simplicity of sauteed striped bass with grilled onions and sweet pea ravioli in squid ink. In a rare misstep, though, a Mediterranean sauce of orange and fennel can’t save the limp slab of tasteless swordfish.

Now that Vincenti has installed a special grill and rotisserie fired with olive wood, it’s the arrosti misti, or mixed roasted meats, that draw me back: loin of pork, filet of beef, chicken, lamb, pigeon roasted with a bay leaf, a sprig of rosemary or a clove of garlic and served with their juices. The rotisserie seems to intensify their flavors, and each bite is tender and moist, their subtly smoky taste lingering in the mouth like a great old Barolo. This is meat worth eating, especially with one of the wine list’s distinguished red wines from Piedmont or Tuscany. There’s also an excellent duck in aceto balsamico sauce. And don’t forget that grilled aged Angus bistecca with a Toscana sauce of green-gold extra-virgin olive oil, anchovies and capers.

As much as I love the food at Rex, the decor is an anachronism. Walking into the restaurant feels a little like walking into a museum of natural history. Except that, where you expect to see a dinosaur skeleton looming, there’s a tired arrangement of palms and dried grasses sprayed gold over an array of bottles of grappa and desserts. More dried flowers are entombed in lighted display cases. Still, with all of its Deco touches, Rex has a stately grandeur. Once L.A.’s most elegant menswear store, Rex’s dark oak dining room is lined on two sides with rows of drawers. It’s tough to resist peeking inside in hopes of finding linen handkerchiefs and silk socks still tucked away.

And speaking of clothes, Rex is definitely a restaurant to dress up for. It suits the setting and the occasion. Because you are about to have one of the truly Italian meals of your life. Right here at home.

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REX IL RISTORANTE

CUISINE: Italian. AMBIENCE: Art Deco room, with piano bar upstairs. BEST DISHES: striped bass with bottarga, spaghetti all’Amatriciana, pappardelle with duck rag, striped bass with pea ravioli, rotisserie meats. WINE PICKS: Gravner Chardonnay, 1993; Castello della Panaretta Chianti Classico Riserva, 1990. FACTS: 617 S. Olive St., Los Angeles; (213) 627-2300. Closed Sunday. Lunch Thursday and Friday. Dinner for two, food only, $65 to $125. Four-course prix fixe menu, $60 per person; six-course, $75. Corkage, $20. Valet parking.