"Clooney Carpaccio" via Locanda del Lago

George Clooney is not just a piece of meat.

Still racking your brain over how to celebrate George Clooney's birthday this year? We know, we know, it's nearly as stressful as Christmas. Thankfully Locanda del Lago, the Italian restaurant that specializes in the cuisine of Clooney's favorite party spot, Lake Como, has you covered.

Today through May 7, (Clooney's birthday is actually May 6, but who couldn't use an extra day of Clooneymania?) the restaurant will be offering a special "Clooney Combination" at a price of $19.61, to honor the year he was born.

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Anne Fishbein

Guanciale pizza at Sotto

Before they opened Sotto last year, Steve Samson and Zach Pollack went direct to Naples and hauled in all the raw materials to build a proper pizza oven -- that would be 15,000 pounds worth of cement, bricks and Vesuvian sand. So heavy were these building blocks that the delivery truck nearly toppled over when it came time to unload the parts. The truck eventually was righted, as was the world of Los Angeles pizza.

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Garofalo pasta

There are movies where food has a starring role. And then there are times when eating is just another extra in the background. But when detail-minded Woody Allen shot his newest film, To Rome With Love, no morsel was left to chance.

As with any Italian-based film, eating looms large (that's what people do there, right?) So when the characters played by Jesse Eisenberg and Ellen Page decide to cook up something together, they head to the supermarket to shop for the main star of their meal: pasta.

What do they grab? Eschewing the industrially produced boxes of Barilla or Buitoni, they grab a big bag of Pasta Garofalo. Good choice.

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amazon

It's hard to flip through Made in Sicily without thinking of it as an island-specific version of Bocca, one of our favorite books last year. And not simply due to the style of the recipes and book layout. Like Bocca, this is the work of a top London chef dishing up his tribute to his family's classic Italian fare -- here, Giorgio Locatelli of Locanda Locatelli.

Apparently we simply need to move to London to find that seppioline ripiene (cuttlefish stuffed with breadcrumbs, capers and anchovies), spaghetti con gamberi e pistachio (spaghetti with shrimp and pistachios), and sorbetto ai fichi d'India (prickly pear sorbet) that we're craving. Prickly pear in Sicily? According to Locatelli, "Sicilians love prickly pears ... [which were] brought to Sicily from South America." Now we know. But we were supposed to be talking about Made in Sicily.

This is Locatelli's second book, a sequel to Made In Italy, which a press release notes sold 100,000 copies (!) -- a shocking number as this is a cookbook, not a novel with cinematic potential, and the author is not a television celebrity but simply a darn good chef.

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Guzzle & Nosh

Charcuterie platter (left), arrancini (right) at Il Covo (bottom).

When we last checked in with Jared Meisler (Roger Room, Bar Lubitsch) nearly a year ago, he and business partner Sean Macpherson were in the very early stages of revamping beloved Sunset Blvd. watering hole Coach & Horses. Beyond hinting at a February or March opening for the bar, Meisler remains tight-lipped about the details. In the meantime, he became a restaurateur, quietly opening Il Covo a couple of months ago on 3rd St.

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A. Froug

Eatalian Cafe's Speciale pizza

Keep chewing. Close your eyes and the scene is clear: You're eating pizza in Bologna, a softly lit neighborhood haunt, where in the corner rests a majestic oven built from the soil of Mount Vesuvius. Open your eyes and the illusion disappears: You're eating at Eatalian Cafe, in a cavernous warehouse in Gardena, white walls and steel mozzarella cheese machines reflecting light back and forth, where the pizza-making operation stands next to an espresso kiosk, a gelato bar and a display case stacked with golden, buttery, baked goods.

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F. Friesema

Jonagold apples

Congratulations, Highland Park! Because you've finally transcended a soul-crushing abundance of taqueros, great bars and really good regional Mexican restaurants with a slightly befuddling celebrity-chef-owned trattoria of your very own. The conceit here is re-invented red-sauce Italian cooking, enlivened by high design -- plywood fins; green soffiting; red walls etched with abstracted spaghetti -- and from the day it opened, Maximiliano's was as popular with Mt. Washington families as it was with the local starter-home crowd. Chef Andre Guerrero also has the Oinkster a couple miles north in Eagle Rock, ran swank restaurants like Max, BoHo, Señor Fred and Marché, but Maximiliano's is probably the only restaurant of its type between Silver Lake and Pasadena.

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B. Hansen

Judy Zeidler and books

Westsider Judy Zeidler has written what seems like a zillion cookbooks, but she's found a new angle for her latest, Italy Cooks (Mostarda Press, $32.95). It's a personal travelogue as well as a collection of recipes.

For decades, Zeidler and her husband Marvin (Marvino in the book) have traveled to Italy, first on business for his clothing line, Zeidler & Zeidler, then, as they fell in love with the country, spending months there each year.

With this book, you'll travel with them, meet their friends and join in their meals. "I always kept a daily dairy of where we went and what we ate. We became Italian tour guides on paper," Zeidler says.

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Anne Fishbein

Our wide-ranging restaurant critic Jonathan Gold returns to the Westside to take another bite out of Sotto.

Sotto is a different kind of Italian restaurant, a shrine to the awesome heat of its oven, a place where the hot, fresh bread can come with pureed lardo instead of olive oil if you like it that way. A special of pan frattau, a kind of Sardinian chilaquiles made with flatbread instead of stale tortillas, is fried with a butcher's bouquet of lamb's innards. And the bruschetta may be smeared not with olive paste but with ciccoli, a paste of lard pureed with pigskin that is one of the signature preparations of the Italian nose-to-tail thing. Samson and Pollack may be pizzaioli in public, but they really seem to be abattoir jocks instead.

Read the complete story in "Counter Intelligence: Meat lovers' pizza," and check out Anne Fishbein's photo gallery. If it doesn't make you hungry for a "crisp, sauceless calzone, the size of a Fendi bag and stuffed with escarole, olives and a slug of creamy burrata cheese," we dont know what will.

There'

B. Hansen

Andre Guerrero in front of Maximiliano's wall

s spaghetti on the wall at Andre Guerrero's (The Oinkster) latest restaurant, Maximiliano, which opens Friday (yes, Friday) in Highland Park. Nobody threw it there, and the staff didn't forget to clean it up. It's a design feature, a red wall patterned with pale, slinky, spaghetti-like strands.

You can double the fun if you pose by the wall with a bowl of old fashioned spaghetti and meatballs. It's one of the best dishes, fine-grained meatballs of veal, pork and beef seasoned with lemon and fennel, tossed with spaghetti and plain tomato sauce.

It's an example of what Guerrero is doing at Maximiliano, taking Italian favorites and preparing them well. The menu is comfy and familiar: think Margherita, pepperoni and sausage-mushroom pizzas and, among the pastas, capellini with tomato and basil, spaghetti with olive oil and garlic and tagliatelle with Bolognese sauce. Desserts include cannoli and spumoni.

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