Angelini Osteria is almost everyone's favorite Italian restaurant in midtown: an informal room with well-designed trattoria cooking, a place to settle into for a plate of bombolottior a Sunday saltimbocca, where whatever diet you happen to be on at the time will be accommodated without a fuss. Some nights, it feels as if everybody in the room knows one another, but you're in on the party too. You drink well, you eat well and you go home. A lot of chefs have come out of that kitchen, including Ori Menashe of Bestia.

But while Gino Angelini, the owner and chef, is a genial presence in the osteria, bouncing from table to table in his trademark red skullcap when he is in the mood, a certain contingent of his customers has always wished that he had a bigger stage, especially after his restaurant La Terza closed a couple of years ago. Angelini, a native of Rimini on the Adriatic coast, was the last chef at Mauro Vincenti's Rex, the grandest restaurant ever to open in Los Angeles, and then at Vincenti, the brilliant Italian restaurant in Brentwood — he is capable of cooking at the very highest level.