Campania Trattoria & Café

Remember when Italian food was still fun?

by Robert Nadeau

(781) 894-4280 504 Main Street, Waltham Open Mon-Wed, 5-10 p.m.; and Thurs-Sat, 5-11 p.m. Closed Sun. Beer and wine AE, DC, Di, MC, Visa Up two steps from sidewalk level

Remember how much fun Italian food used to be, before the experts came in and ruined it? Campania revives that fun. The name is from the Southern Italian region that includes Naples and Avellino, and the restaurant touts Neapolitan food. But no regional purists have been allowed to purge the menu of a risotto here or a French dessert there, and the Neapolitan specialties of ice cream, pizza, macaroni, and mozzarella cheese are not overplayed. There's a story here (passed to me by my winemaking mentor, Dr. Rob Friedman of Newton) about immigrant parents and a modest family café developing a devoted following; a son returning from culinary school with big ideas; a few of the old family recipes hesitantly offered and warmly received.

Campania is a jumble of surfaces and stuff: polished copper tabletops, wood menus, stucco and brick and Mexican-tiled walls, wine bottles and baskets of peppers and onions, good things in bottles and jars, herbs hanging from the tin ceiling, paintings evoking a terrace someplace. The food is expensive and plentiful, and you get carried away and eat a lot of it, starting with a thick-crumbed Tuscan white bread, and a crusty bread with a lot of holes in much the style of bread baked in Pompeii (which is in Campania) 2000 years ago. Now and then you might dip these breads into garlicky herbed olive oil.

The antipasto is a tempting way to resolve appetizer questions. You can have a small plate of it, intended for two people, for $9, or the four-person large plate for $18. Servers select the antipasti from a vast buffet of delicacies -- our night the big plate was laden with stuffed eggplant, sliced grilled eggplant topped like a pizza, sliced artichokes, olives, cheeses, fried fish, beans, grilled red peppers, and more.

A grilled seafood platter ($16) is another multiperson appetizer. All the seafood was quite ash-flavored, perhaps from the wood-fired grill, but not overcooked -- not even the squid. The scallops were done to a gentle turn, the shrimps had good grill flavor, and the hit of the platter was four oysters, fresh-tasting under the smoke. The mussels were small but choice, and the underlying salad of field greens vanished in a hurry. Fritto misto ($12) was a big plate of greens with four small fried smelts and a few shrimp. It also is good for sharing, though the real Italian idea of fritto misto is a lot of even smaller fish.

There are plenty of individual appetizers at Campania, though they don't seem as much in the spirit of the place. We did get a big, flat bowl of white-bean soup ($7) that had a lot of pepper and perhaps too much salt, and was somewhat overwhelmed by a giant grilled crouton.

Specials ran to seafood, with stuffed sole ($24) and roast sea bass ($23). The latter was likely a farmed striped bass, but it had a delicate flavor enhanced by plenty of oregano. The former had one of those chef's whimsies of a stuffing with seafood, portobello mushrooms, and spinach, but it was fresh and the dish was fun to eat.

The seafood on the regular menu is very good, too. The surprise of the entrées was a "risotto" en cartoccio ($22). This had real, short-grained risotto rice in a pilaf rather than a creamy, soupy risotto, and was baked, with the seafood, in a paper container. The seafood -- squid, shrimp, and scallops -- emerged delicate and full of flavor. A dish of spaghettini with seafood ($11 half-order/$20 full) had many of the same items (littlenecks, too) and was topped by a bit of grilled lobster, overlaying a nicely done serving of spaghetti in oil and garlic.

For homemade pasta goodness, it would be hard to beat the pappardelle ($10/$18), broad ribbons of fresh pasta with plenty of wild mushrooms to amplify the flavor and extend the texture. Really hungry? Add some large shrimp ($23). Gnocchi ($8/$16) here are the smaller, hollowed cavatelli shape, all the better to complement a first-class Neapolitan tomato sauce.

And, if you want red meat, the assiete de carne ($24) was a no-nonsense mixed grill of duck and lamb. I ordered both medium, and that's how the four slices of duck breast arrived, but the lamb was a kind of double loin steak tied together across the backbone, and the chef cooked it rare. After tasting it, though, I had no argument. Although the grilled meats had a vaguely Tuscan air to them, the whole platter represented international haute cuisine, with slices of glazed pear, a tangle of fried potato strings, and stalks of sautéed broccolini. (Broccolini is a new hybrid that looks like skinny broccoli. Its flavor isn't much different from broccoli, but in appearance it's as cute as baby squash.)

The wine list is all-Italian, as you might expect, and it does include a page of high-quality wines from Campania. Boston wine snobs know about the superlative wines of Mastroberardino, from Avellino, but there is now a serious competitor, judging by our bottle of '97 Greco di Tufo by Terra Dora di Paolo ($7.50 glass, $30 bottle). This is a crisp, fruity white no Californian would spurn, and a worthy rival for Mastroberardino's more traditional, heavier Greco di Tufo, which is also on the list here.

The restaurant's real departure from old-time red-sauce tradition is its long list of fabulous desserts. This is very much in the Neapolitan tradition -- it's a comic-opera town, after all -- but the style here is French via culinary school. Our night there was a chocolate soufflé you had to order ahead ($9), and we were glad we did -- it was impeccably rich and light, with accompanying vanilla ice cream. More-serious chocolate was the truffle flan ($8), a flat little pie of pure candy with mocha ice cream and a syrup-coated wafer sail. Now you can have Italian food with real taste, and your vertical dessert, too! Banana mousse ($8) was even more vertical, two thin wafers of fried banana like frills of ribbon in a breeze, though the mousse itself was more creamy than banana-flavored.

Fruit desserts were represented by a luscious caramel pear crostata ($8) and an apple-phyllo basket that also had lots of raisins in the filling. Tiramisu ($8) was layered in a large parfait glass, with more whipped cream than anything else. Pumpkin cheesecake ($7) -- yes! I don't remember when I've had a such a flight of desserts, topped off with excellent cappuccino and a hazelnut biscotto.

One's check will build up in a place like this, and a few people will ask whether the dishes really have that $40-a-person, epochal quality. In terms of originality and classic perfection, no, they don't. But in terms of savor and fun and mouth-filling flavors, surely they do, which is exactly how Italian food lapped French cuisine in restaurants 15 years ago, before the "experts" ruined it.

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