Café Ravello and Monica's

The old North End in two new bottles

Dining Out by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Café Ravello: (617) 723-5182 48-50 Salem Street (North End), Boston Open Mon-Thurs, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri-Sat, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; and Sun, 1-10 p.m. MC, Visa Full bar Access up a full flight of stairs Street-level access Monica's: (617) 227-0311 143 Richmond Street (North End), Boston Open daily, 5-11 p.m. Beer and wine Two steps up from sidewalk level

Used to be, North End restaurants had one sauce -- a slowly cooked tomato sauce that made fast and satisfying meals on pasta or steamed clams or quickly cooked cuts of meat. If you didn't like tomatoes, there was garlic and oil, and that took care of everyone else. Then came the gourmet revolution, which added North Italian sauces and many new starches, serious wine lists, and serious prices. Something had to give, and what gave was dessert. Quite a few North End restaurants did away with dessert to increase turnover.

But people liked the old restaurants, so periodically their general style is revived in one of the smaller places -- now with some North Italian overlay -- and it becomes successful and crowded. This is the story of Picolo Venezia, Pat's Pushcart, and, to some extent, La Famiglia. Monica's, which grew from a smaller location on Prince Street, is following this path, while Café Ravello is succeeding with something of the same South Italian formula, but applied to a more expensive location that has defeated some more ambitious restaurants.

This is not to say that Café Ravello is your grandfather's Italian restaurant. The difference becomes clear the moment you sit down and find yourself enjoying the Cuban dance-music tapes. The bread is an oily Tuscan-style loaf, and the dip of virgin olive oil is not the kind of thing served to non-Italians in the old restaurants. An appetizer of grilled shrimp ($9.95) has a delicious -- but, again, Tuscan -- underpinning of white beans dressed with sage. The grilled shrimp taste of the grill, somewhat, yet are still tender and mild. The only flaw I noted was that they were served lukewarm -- which is preferable to serving shrimp that has been overcooked.

Calamari fritti ($9.95) is a fine, large platter, dry-fried and quite crispy, though the squid got a little too tough in the cooking. This was offset by a really excellent tomato sauce served as a dip. I wouldn't compare it to the old sauces, with their caramel flavors developed in long afternoons on the stove, but it was one of the richest tomato sauces I've had in recent memory.

A little more time at the stove was also apparent in a special entrée of seafood risotto ($20): mussels and littleneck clams, with quite a few squid rings and some shrimp. Longer cooking toughened the shrimp but softened the squid, and gave the simple sauce of garlic, wine, and shellfish broth a smooth feel. The risotto was just slightly al dente, as I feel it should be, and not crunchily underdone as some chefs seem to prefer. I would have invested more shellfish broth and less cheese in the risotto, but it was good stuff.

A chef's special -- linguine with salmon ($16.95) -- put that good tomato sauce to work in a tricky context. Remember that acidic sauces and fatty-fish fillets sometimes have problems, but this dish got better with each mouthful. The linguine wasn't amazing, but it was very good. The restaurant has a short but very decent wine list, with most bottles under $30. A glass of 1999 Stracelli chianti ($5.50; $21 a bottle) was quite good with this food, both richer and fruitier than the chianti the old places served from soda bottles. But beware: there are no desserts.

Ravello, it should be noted, is trying for a lively bar scene downstairs. This is probably the only restaurant in the North End with a view, and it was designed several owners ago for gazing on "The Boston Skyline." Of course, the big windows are currently dusty and look out at the Expressway, but the ceiling mural of stars is delightful.

Monica's attracted my interest because there actually is a Monica, and because she and her large family come from Argentina. This aroused my hopes for matambre and empanadas, if not a few steak specials, but it turns out that the Mendoza family runs a solid Italian restaurant with an emphasis on quality pasta. They started on Prince Street, then expanded to this location and turned the Prince Street place into a pizzeria.

The starter was Tuscan bread with a very garlicky bean paste. One Argentinism that does peek through is an emphasis on grilling, with a very pretty appetizer of wood-grilled vegetables ($7). Zucchini is the standout, as usual, but eggplant, onion, carrot, and scallions all get the treatment, and the cooks don't stint on good olive oil. The Monica's Antipasto ($8) adds three distinctive cheeses, roast pepper, prosciutto, a small-bore salami, olives, and a little salad.

Littlenecks and chorizos on capellini ($17) showed good work with a fine pasta that easily overcooks, and a tomato sauce of some complexity that pulled together an almost-Portuguese combination of spicy sausage and seafood. A polenta special ($20) was so good I ate quite a lot of the polenta without the salty homemade rabbit-sausage sauce, which didn't impress. I did like the shaved cheese on top, which might have been a good Argentine asiago.

Here the wine list is more economical, with $4.50 glasses of good Berbera d'Asti and chianti. Monica's also has a few desserts and very good coffee and espresso.

The trimmings and the prices change, but these restaurants attest that you can still build a very useful restaurant on a good tomato sauce.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.

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