From coast to coast

AT Ristorante Max recently, the quality control has just arrived from Italy. Owner Massimo “Max” Carro’s father, Francesco Carro, stands on the dining-room side of the open kitchen, inspecting each plate as it goes out, occasionally whispering a comment to his son. Max’s mother, Raffaela, takes up a position near the stoves, where she can watch the chefs work up close.

Max, who grew up at his parents’ hotel and restaurant in Positano, Italy, and has just opened this Newport Beach restaurant with his American wife, Arian, looks understandably nervous. Though he’s been dividing his time between the family’s Ristorante Max in Positano, and catering in Orange County and Beverly Hills for the last few years, this is his first venture on his own.

Dressed in black, with crossed Italian and American flags embroidered on one side of his jacket and the restaurant’s name bracketed by the locations Newport Beach and Positano on the other, he approaches one table to ask if everything is all right. Then he rushes to greet a party of newcomers before racing back to the kitchen to pick up a plate of salty-sweet prosciutto di Parma and a basket of bread for a table across the room.

The bread, dense and yeasty with a pale brown crust, is baked in-house. But the real stars of the bread basket are the crunchy, hand-rolled grissini (bread sticks) and strips of dough zig-zagged at the edges and deep-fried to a bright gold. Our party devours one basket and asks for more, they’re that good.

The minute I heard from a friend who’s from the Amalfi Coast that a true southern Italian restaurant had opened in Newport Beach and the food tasted like home, I made plans to go. A serious southern Italian restaurant would be something very different than the northern Italian, mostly Tuscan, places that dominate the Southland.

Ristorante Max takes pride of place in a tony strip mall on Westcliff Drive between the 55 Freeway and Balboa Island. Inside, though, if you ignore the slapdash Christmas decorations, it looks very much like a restaurant anywhere along the Amalfi Coast, with its whitewashed walls and windows that open onto a spacious outdoor terrace.

Family origins

INSIDE, the walls are hung with paintings of Positano, the same view and almost identical paintings of the fabled resort town over and over again -- and all for sale. There, that one -- the dark-eyed Italian waiter points at the landscape to a pink building close to the water, is another of the family’s restaurants. Then he proceeds to describe the specials. Lasagna. Yes. Tagliolini with scampi. Yes. Orata (sea bream) cooked with tomato sauce, capers and olives. Another yes. We fill in with dishes from the regular menu and add a few antipasti to share.

This is all good, but don’t you want to order the ravioli? the waiter asks, concerned that our proposed menu is leaving out what he considers the best dish of the day. They’re fresh, made just this morning.

Ravioli it is.

Order the bufala mozzarella with tomatoes and basil, and you get an entire ball of cheese sitting on a bed of greens decorated with bright red balls of cherry tomatoes. The mozzarella tastes like bufala -- richer and sweeter than cow’s milk -- and is about as fresh as it gets here, more than 6,000 miles from where it’s made. The tomatoes, though, are not the best, even granted that they’re out of season. Grilled calamari is a salad too: the same sprightly greens topped with the most tender, tasty rings of calamari and cubes of golden-fried potato.

Eggplant parmigiana may be a cliche, but at restaurants in and around Naples, it can be sublime. Here, the cooks treat it with due respect, sending out a shallow casserole that’s still bubbling from the oven. Slices of sumptuous eggplant are layered with fresh mozzarella and a fresh, loose tomato sauce. It’s one of the better versions I’ve had in this country, because it’s not overdosed with cheese or oozing grease. Part of the secret is that lovely tomato sauce, which is made exactly the way they make it on the Amalfi Coast. It hasn’t been cooked for hours or dosed with tomato paste. It’s just pure tomatoes with a hint of garlic and a lyrical note of sweet basil.

That light hand is evident in the spaghetti with pomodorini (little tomatoes) and basil. Does that sound boring? When it’s made well, as it is here, the tomatoes sweated until they give up their juices, it really is something great. The pasta is perfectly al dente, each strand coated in just enough of the tomato sauce, served in a swirl on the plate and crowned with a basil leaf. The taste is so elemental and delicious, it’s easy to imagine sitting down to a plate of this almost every day.

I also like the rigatoni in a Neapolitan ragu with fluffy, inch-wide meatballs. Again, the pasta is perfectly al dente, and sauced with a judicious hand. Lasagna, layered with that same meat ragu and cheese, is lighter than northern Italian versions, and tastes as if it’s been assembled minutes before.

Tagliolini with scampi is less thrilling, mostly because the scampi, cooked heads-on and butterflied, have an unappealing cottony texture. And delicate zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta are encased in a batter that has the stiffness of a plaster cast.

Fresh tomato sauce

AND what about the ravioli? When the waiter sets down the plate of pasta and I take a bite of the red-sauced ravioli, I want to thank him. This is real ravioli, supple and fresh, filled with a delicious blend of ricotta, a little mozzarella and swatches of spinach. The sauce is the same fresh, loose tomato sauce perfumed with garlic and sweet basil.

At the next table, a trio of middle-aged men and their wives are talking wine and boats. A birthday party erupts in a wobbly version of “Happy Birthday” to squeals of laughter. And at the bar at the far end of the room, a couple smooches shyly. It’s, I guess, amore.

Without the full gamut of Mediterranean seafood that makes eating along the Amalfi Coast so wonderful, the chefs are left with a not very inspiring list of main courses. That baked orata special is quite good, though perhaps the fish is buried under too much tomato sauce. But because the sauce is the kitchen’s strength, the cooks resort to it again and again.

A platter of sauteed mussels and clams is a bargain at $18, but just OK; the clams are a bit tough and the juices are overly salty. Grilled lamb chops, though, are delicious little morsels on the bone. And the cooked veal “carpaccio,” covered in a drift of arugula leaves and shaved Parmesan, turns out to be a fine, light main course. The veal is barely cooked through, so instead of drying out, it keeps all its delicacy. Pastas are really main courses too, the portions are so generous. You’d never be served pasta in such large portions in Italy.

And I wish Max hadn’t opted for such giant, fancy, white porcelain plates. They’re oversized for the tables, completely impractical and make eating awkward.

Chef Alfonso Fusco, who also comes from Positano, can cook pasta and tomato sauce with the best of them, but the restaurant could be even better if somebody took the effort to look for top-notch produce and suppliers of meat and especially seafood. But, then, not many Italian chefs in this country make the effort to set foot in the fish market or the farmers market.

The dining room is a bit disorganized and even when the restaurant is half full, the food can be very slow in coming from the kitchen.

The wine list has a refreshing regional bent with a number of whites, such as Fiano di Avellino and Greco di Tufo, which have been made in the Campania region for centuries and are ideal with southern Italian cooking.

Desserts are not a strong suit. You can order a standard tiramisu, or a torrone semifreddo, half-melted and achingly sweet. Profiteroles are buried in pastry cream, and a strawberry tart is undone by a rigid crust. Go for the cheese plate of four or five selections, all from Campania.

The best ending to a meal at Ristorante Max is an espresso. It’s a real espresso, short and dark. Hold the lemon peel. You’ll get a taste of it in the house-made limoncello offered at the end of the meal, just as the family does at its restaurant in Positano.

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Ristorante Max

Rating:* 1/2

Location: 1617 Westcliff Drive, Newport Beach, (949) 515-8500.

Ambience: Southern Italian restaurant in tony Newport Beach strip mall feels like Italy with its whitewashed walls and spacious outdoor terrace. The diners look as if they’ve just come from a golf game or the beach.

Service: Solicitous and helpful, if a bit disorganized. When it’s busy, food can be slow coming from the kitchen.

Price: Antipasti, $13 to $18; pasta and risotto, $18 to $25; main courses, $18 and $29; cheese plate, $16; desserts, $10.

Best dishes: Eggplant parmigiana, grilled calamari salad, ravioli al pomodoro, spaghetti with cherry tomatoes and basil, rigatoni al ragu napoletano, lasagna, grilled lamb chops, cooked veal “carpaccio,” cheese plate.

Wine list: A fairly standard Italian list, except for a special emphasis on wines of Campania; corkage fee, $25.

Best table: On the outdoor terrace.

Details: Open for lunch and dinner from 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Friday, for dinner from 5 to 11 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Full bar. Parking in lot in front.

Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.