When it arrived, I opted to keep it - bird in the hand and all that. I had actually ordered the pappardelle with braised pork by mistake, intending to get the tagliatelle al ragu. Many of the dishes are a revelation, a joy to behold. It’s stuffed with braised beef cheeks, and flavored with 12-year-old balsamic, brown butter and sage. As is the scarpinocc, which looks a bit like candy bonbons, rolled in plastic, with a twist on either end. But the ricotta gnocchi, with its house-cured pastrami “lardons,” is at both meals. The bavette - a ribbon pasta that’s like tagliatelle, only narrower - appears on the lunch menu with a rock shrimp ragu, and on the dinner menu with the same rock shrimp ragu, but also with a stretchy stracciatella cheese, which costs $4 extra at lunchtime. As well lasagna should be - a proper lasagna will leave you in no shape at all to return to work for the afternoon.īut mostly, the pastas overlap - though they may be a bit simpler at lunch than at dinner.

There are seven pastas for lunch, eight for dinner, with plenty of overlap, though should you develop an obsession with the lasagna with a “Hollywood” ragu (which seems to mean extra meaty) it’s served at dinner only. (A hallmark of the new wave of pasta shops.) The menu is short, which I assume allows the small kitchen to do what it does as well as can be done.īrussels sprouts at Jame Enoteca in El Segundo (Photo by Merrill Shindler) The staff here - young, cheerful, anxious to please - wear T-shirts that read, “Good With My Hands.” Which may, or may not, mean they help roll the several pastas, all of which are made by hand. This is cooking that leaves you dreaming of eating more. To call the food “tasty” doesn’t do it justice. But not nearly as well as they would in Jame, where the brief menu dazzles with every bite. It’s a small space, just nine tables inside, three outside, where you can watch locals park, and skedaddle into The Donut, Chicken Dijon, Havana Sandwich and Waikiki Hawaiian Grill. Jame is really grandiose in terms of its food. Which they’ve done, with some of the best pastas to ever grace the tables of Southern California, at pasta-intensive restaurants like Felix, Uovo (which serves nothing but!) … and most recently, the sublimely good El Segundo mini-mall pasta shop called Jame Enoteca - which, despite its name, doesn’t (as of this writing) serve wine. While we were avoiding carbs on the Atkins, the South Beach and the paleo diets, carbs were plotting a return from the shadows. While those of us who pursue the latest diet trend with all the fervor we give to the pursuit of a perfect slab of toro over rice, the massive return of pasta comes as something of a shock to the system (as my mother would have put it).

Jame enoteca