Unbelievable Meatballs, and the meat and cheese plate is tastier then an ice cream cone in the desert!
Comments (0) Best Italian Restaurant - 2011
Cucina Alessá, Laguna Beach
234 Forest Ave.
Laguna Beach, CA 92651
949-497-8222
Readers' Choice: Roman Cucina
Alessandro Pirozzi is three-for-three. His Newport Beach original still puts out the pasta plates that established his street cred. When he built his second, the Huntington Beach Alessá, it quickly became a two-story palace to worship his mastery of the Italian food arts. Order a pizza or the butternut squash ravioli with brown butter and fried sage leaves, and you'll be bowing down like the rest of us. But with his newest restaurant in Laguna Beach, he has outdone himself, completing a trilogy that bests The Godfather in batting average. In addition to his original menu, there's a prosciutto-and-mozzarella bar and a salad called fragole with strawberries that bursts in vibrant red and yellow. And for this third masterpiece in a series of masterpieces, a modernist crudo of yellowtail wrapped into bundles with apples and limoncello gelée has a more welcome role than that of Sofia Coppola in that other Part Three. $$
