Description
It may be a Canadian import, but Terroni might actually feel more Italian than anywhere else in Los Angeles at the moment, with as many expats at the tables as on the restaurant staff, terra-cotta serving dishes, a roster of decent Italian wines available in half-liter and quarter-liter carafes, and the deftest espresso pull this side of Naples. Terroni, nominally a southern-Italian restaurant, specializes in pizzas - not the artisanal, wood-fired things you find at Mozza and Antica Pizzeria, but stretched thin to order over the lip of a counter and tossed into a regular deck oven. Terroni's pizza is good stuff: skinny, crunchy most of the way through, served as in Italy in individual uncut rounds, topped with things like broccoli rabe and crumbled sausage; Gorgonzola, honey and walnuts; or plain old mozzarella and tomato sauce. The pastas tend to be very good: taqliolini with clams and the dried mullet roe bottarga, a definitive cabatelli alla Norma with sauteed eggplant, and possibly the first L.A. appearance of spaghetti ca'muddica, a Sicilian pasta a little like spaghetti alla puttanesca enriched with toasted bread crumbs. The oddest thing about Terroni may be its name, a nasty term for southern Italians that you sometimes hear directed at Napoli soccer players by ultras in Bergamo and Milan.
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