On a well-trafficked stretch of Melrose Avenue, book-ended by the equally busy Rossmore Avenue and Larchmont Boulevard, Osteria Mamma welcomes guests to its warm and unassuming dining room. Old family photos (most of them taken decades ago in Padua, Italy) adorn the walls, Italian tunes permeate the air and owner (and certified sommelier) Filippo Cortivo hovers around the bar. This has been his home since 2010, and it’s been a family operation since day one.
Cortivo’s mother, Loredana “Mamma” Cecchinato, was the queen of Osteria Mamma until she died in 2015. She grew up in Padua and was a self-taught and formidable cook, especially skilled at regional dishes. But she’d never cooked professionally until Cortivo opened his first restaurant, Osteria La Buca, in Los Angeles in 2004. She terrified the other kitchen staffers immediately, hollering at them for refrigerating mushrooms on her first day on the job.
“The next morning, no one showed up but the dishwasher,” Cortivo recalls. “She looked at me and said, ‘Put the apron on.’”
Though also not formally trained, Cortivo knew his way around the kitchen. As a teen, he scouted and left home to play volleyball. Hungry for home, he would call his mother to guide him in recreating family recipes. When he left Italy in his 20s, he landed jobs in various restaurants before eventually feeling ready to open his own place in L.A. Using his family’s recipes as his “north star,” he bought ingredients from Italian importer Guidi Marcello (which is still open in Santa Monica), and was resolute about using double-zero flour (the standard in Italy), despite its high cost and the fact that it’s more painstaking to work with. He opened Osteria Mamma only after he’d built up and then sold Osteria La Buca.
It’s a family affair. Cortivo’s sister is co-owner of the restaurant, and their father still makes pastas by hand for the day’s dishes, as he has done for years. Nieces and nephews come and go, busing, waiting tables and more. If you want to learn a little Italian while you dine, you likely can, as so many of the staffers are native Italians and love connecting over their culture and cuisine. And if you want a lesson on Italian wines, this is your classroom and Cortivo is your teacher, with 90 percent of his wine list coming from his home country.
But what to order for your meal? I brought my 10-year-old daughter with me recently, and we hemmed and hawed over the multi-page menu featuring antipasti, pizzas, pastas, salads and more entrees, eventually settling on house-made gnocchi and a plate of green spinach ricotta ravioli, both superb. Cortivo has his own “sentimental” favorite on the menu, of course: the Reginette della Mamma, a dish of wide noodles with wiggly edges that he says are ideal for soaking up the sauce of guanciale (cured pork), sausage, radicchio and cream. Other musts are the branzino (he gets the fish from Italy), the tonnarelli allo scoglio (a traditional seafood pasta with clams, mussels, calamari and shrimp) and the risotto de mare, made with saffron and mixed seafood. And always take note of the specials, which are enticing. A recent offering was a ruby-red beet spaghetti piled atop a layer of Parmigiano cream sauce and sprinkled with guanciale. No matter what you select, I’d bet you an order of linguine al pestaccio that you’ll feel the love in each bite.
“What we do, we do it with a lot of passion,” Cortivo says. “It has always been about giving to our customers. We think of them as a family. And the best compliment I get is, ‘Filippo, I felt for the last two hours [I was] in Italy.’”
So take a trip to Italy via Osteria Mamma, or let Loredana “Mamma” Cecchinato’s legacy bring a bit of Italia to you. Cortivo happily shares his mamma’s recipe here so that you might do just that.
Reginette della Mamma
Total time: 45 minutes
Servings: 8
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
3 garlic cloves, smashed
1 pound sweet Italian pork sausage, removed from its casing
1/3 cup salt pork, thinly sliced
1½ cups dry white wine (the better the wine, the better the result)
1½ pounds Treviso radicchio (about 5 heads), julienned
¾ cup heavy cream
1 cup freshly grated Parmigiano cheese, loosely packed
¼ teaspoon pepper
1½ pounds reginette pasta, freshly cooked
Heat 1½ tablespoons of the oil in a large skillet. Add the garlic, sausage and salt pork, breaking up the sausage with a wooden spoon, and cook for 5 minutes over medium heat.
Remove and discard the garlic, then add the wine, stirring to deglaze the bottom of the pan. Cook over medium heat until the wine evaporates, about 8 to 10 minutes.
Heat the remaining 1½ tablespoons of oil in a separate large skillet and sauté the radicchio rapidly over medium heat until soft and slightly browned, about 3 to 5 minutes. Add it to the sausage sauce and reduce the heat to low.
Add the cream and grated cheese to the sauce and cook over low heat until the cream is reduced to a light, creamy consistency, about 5 minutes. Add pepper to taste.
Put a little sauce in a large serving bowl. Add the freshly cooked reginette pasta and slowly mix together. Add more sauce gradually, letting the pasta absorb it little by little.
Serve immediately.