Italian menus weathered the last restaurant recession well, and that seems to have influenced some obvious recession hedges in recent months. When Joey Crugnale converted four Naked Fish restaurants to his new Red Sauce format, it was clear he’d noticed something. Less obviously, prominent chef/owners are both trimming their menus and opening second restaurants that happen to be Italian. Even Davio’s upscale move is based on a core of proven Italian pastas and antipasti. Now we have Jamie Mammano (Mistral) moving into the Theater District with a stylish and upscale, but very Italian, bar-trattoria, Teatro. To be fair, there’s quite a bit of Italian food on the Mediterranean menu at Mistral. But Teatro has an all-Italian wine list, a short list of Italian antipasti and entrées, Italian-roast coffee, and a highly Italian lack of desserts beyond gelati and sorbetti.

In fact, Teatro is a rather convincing trattoria, pulling European style and character out of what might be viewed as an exceptionally loud, unusually crowded room with tiny tables and no reservations, as in Rome. The space of the lamented Galleria Italiana was small and loud enough, but the new owners uncovered the arched ceiling, covered the walls in white limestone (like a galleria in Venice), and polished up the terrazzo floor. I suppose the background tapes will be motorbikes and Fiat horns? It’s also candlelit and rather dark, but the menu is short and everything we had was terrific, so you could just point or guess and still do fine. Better than fine, in fact — it’s as though you’ve been transported from a kind of non-happening corner of Boston Common to an imaginary Italy of urban but appealing chic.

Food starts with some terrific Tuscan bread and a pour of olive oil sprinkled with thyme and red pepper. My favorite appetizer was a bowl of ribollita ($7), a soup-stew of white beans, greens, bread, and crisp bits of pancetta (unsmoked bacon). So much flavor packed into such a simple-sounding dish! Fried calamari ($11) is perfect bar food, crispy on the outside, sweet and toothsome inside, but elevated by the lemon aïoli that is actually quite lemony, and just touched with garlic. Arugula salad ($8) is likewise simple, but perfectly fresh, sharp-tasting greens with exquisite shavings of Reggiano cheese.

Veal saltimbocca ($20) restores the herbal essence of this much-miscooked classic. Teatro’s kitchen gets a thin, forkable slice of veal, sandwiches it with more sage than prosciutto, and garnishes it with fried sage leaves and a little rich creamed spinach.

Slow-cooked pork shank ($21) could start a fad. The meat looks just like a lamb shank in its dark Marsala glaze, but the flavor is lighter and sweeter, brought out by the sweet glaze and the underlying purée of winter squash, or is that chestnuts? Gratinata of lemon sole ($21) is a piece of soft white fish, surprisingly large in context. (By the way, this lemon sole is not the European fish, but a market term for large American winter flounder — one of the best fish right now.) The dish is made by the garnishes: oddly sweet little potatoes, steamed and then flattened and finished in oil and rosemary, and garlicky green beans.

The wine list is all Italian, with most of the better buys in the reds. We were quite happy with all the above dishes and the 2000 Renato Ratti Barbera d’Alba ($8 glass/$16 half bottle/$28 bottle), the fruity middle-weight wine of Tuscany. Of course, some people will never get past the green-apple martini ($9), which sort of justifies the travesty of a sweet martini in that it is stone cold, and plays the apple flavor rather like the juniper essence of gin. We’re going to overlook that maraschino cherry and the green tint.

Coffee ($1.50) and decaf are Italian roast and very good, although served in a metal pot (which makes the second cup cold). Desserts are mostly ice cream and sorbet, but there is rum cake ($7), offering a little liquor-ish flush that comes off very nicely with coffee. The sorbets and ice creams are served in interesting oblong bowls that sit on the table as though tipped 45 degrees. Of the sorbet ($8) flavors, the apricot is superb; insist upon it exclusively. The lemon is not quite, and the raspberry is not quite not quite. The gelati ($8) are very rich and all good, although I would rank the chocolate above the blackberry, and the latter above the vanilla.

Because Teatro doesn’t take reservations and likes a fashionable look, it gets clubby and slow when full, but service is excellent if you get in early, or when the theatergoers head off to their shows a little before 8 p.m. I didn’t see anyone famous eating there, but I could have missed someone important, because I always fall for that trick where the chef hypnotizes you with tasty food so that you don’t notice things perceived with the other senses — such as the sight of movie stars or the sound of echoing voices. You even lose the common sense to question a sweet martini. I don’t know why more chefs don’t use this trick. Maybe they’re distracted by the movie stars or the clamor of the kitchen.

Since Teatro has a short menu, I have a little space to discuss an issue in food politics, actually a book called Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (University of California Press, 2002), by Marion Nestle. I recently attended a talk by this biochemist and nutritionist turned journalist, and it was one of those queasy revelations, like when the cartoon character finally looks down and realizes he has walked off a cliff. My cliff was that I thought I understood where corporate crime ends and individual responsibility begins in the food world; I’ve been slapping corporate food around for a long time. I was quite certain that fast-food French fries aren’t good for you and taste even worse. I was also quite certain that people who sue fast-food companies because they are obese are crazy, even though people who sue cigarette companies because they have lung cancer are justified.

But now I have looked at the facts, and I am falling for the argument I dismissed before.

Nestle’s killer exhibit is three slides. The first is the now-controversial USDA food pyramid, with a large base of carbohydrates (from which some nutritionists would like to remove white bread and potatoes), and a little point of sugars and fats (from which some nutritionists would like to exempt " healthful fats " ). The second slide is the food-advertising pyramid, in which the bottom three layers support a second pyramid almost as big as all the other food groups combined. The advertising budget for a popular sugared cereal or fat-laden snack food is about 10 times a modest budget for a nutritionally more neutral product like, say, Altoids. But that budget is again 10 times larger than the most money the government has ever spent in a year to promote the real pyramid.

Then there’s the third slide: what people actually eat, the consumption pyramid. And it looks almost exactly like the advertising pyramid. I’m sure that some of the more libertarian Phoenix readers will be eager to help me here. There has to be some counter-argument that will spare me the obligation to join in all the inevitable investigative reporting about what the big food corporations (now owned by the tobacco giants, in some cases) knew and when they knew it, and how they plotted to make us all fat and dead before our time. Doesn’t there?

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com