By Paul Reidinger

AT FIRST GLANCE there appears to be nothing out of the ordinary about Vino e Cucina Trattoria. The city is full of similar trattorias, with their sponged yellow-gold walls (a color presumably meant to evoke the autumn hills of Tuscany) and their menus replete with the Italian standards, from insalate caprese through saltimbocca alla Romana to tiramisu. The neighborhood is, perhaps, a bit rougher than most; the restaurant is virtually tucked beneath the Central Freeway viaduct, in whose cold shadows the luckless gather with their shopping carts. Cars whiz by insanely along Third Street toward the bright lights of Market. If there is ambience here, it is of the gritty, urban, down-and-out sort, the kind most of us would associate more with the old industrial cities of the northeast and not at all with boomtown San Francisco.

But the boom done gone, and Vino e Cucina is now an oasis of warm elegance in surroundings of hard-bitten, wind-blown rubbish reality. It is also, as the street placard proclaims, winner of the Bay Guardian's 2002 Best of the Bay Reader's Poll as "best Italian restaurant," and that in truth is the detail that attracted our attention. To be the best Italian restaurant in a food-obsessed city with deep Italian roots – that's big, that's epic, and inquiring minds want to know more. We want to unravel the magical mystery of Vino e Cucina.

I find myself torn, in Italian restaurants, between an instinct for the familiar – for one of the greatest attractions of Italian cooking is its familiarity – and a restless desire for something new, something unexpected, a fresh vista. A lunchtime visit to Vino e Cucina was not reassuring. The menu's offerings seemed fine but undistinguished; we opened with a decent antipasti plate ($8.50) of grilled eggplant, zucchini, and red bell peppers, along with black olives, fresh mozzarella, rolls of prosciutto, and – slight wrinkle – pepperoncini halves stuffed with grana. It was good, but a little too chilly overall, as if it had just been pulled from the refrigerator.

But we became positively nostalgic about it when the pizzas arrived. Although these had been made to order, I found the napoletana ($9.95) – which promised a sassy mix of fileted tomatoes, black olives, anchovies, capers, oregano, and mozzarella – to be blandly encumbered with too many raw chopped tomatoes and too little, or nothing, of the other promised ingredients. I detected no capers, for instance, or anchovies – and what kind of Naples-style sauce can you manage without those tangy stalwarts?

A bit better was a Sicilian pie ($9.95), with a rich and well-seasoned tomato sauce and plenty of chunks of boneless grilled chicken breast and kalamata olives. But there was something unrefined about it, and it hardly seemed Sicilian. We took our leave having been less than impressed: the restaurant's look was appealing and the service was good, but the food seemed no better than indifferent.

In politics this phenomenon is known as "lowering expectations" and is practiced as an art, but for a restaurant it seems like a needlessly risky strategy. Nonetheless it can be a powerful experience to find food that exceeds expectations. We returned to Vino e Cucina one cold evening not too many days after the tepid lunch and were regaled with dish after dish that succeeded, sometimes unexpectedly.

I'd never heard of pesce spada ($7.75 on the menu, $8.75 on the bill), which turned out to be a kind of cross between ceviche and beef carpaccio: paper-thin strips of swordfish, marinated in lemon juice, scattered with poppy seeds, and topped with a shaggy lawn of chopped arugula (for nuttiness), pipings of lemon-mustard mayonnaise (for creaminess), and a few shavings of pickled ginger (for secret-ingredientness). A small masterpiece.

The standards were solid this time. Minestrone ($2.75 for a cup) needed salt, but its tomato broth was thick, and in it bobbed large chunks of root vegetables (the bounty of winter) and zucchini. And a quattro stagioni pizza ($11.75) – subdivided into sections of ham, mushrooms, and artichoke hearts, with plenty of mozzarella and tomato sauce underneath and asparagus spears on top – clearly had been made with more care than its lunchtime counterparts. Among other things, it was granted those few extra moments in the oven that mean the difference between a crisp crust and a spongy one.

Seafood ravioli ($12.95) is another dish you don't see all that often. Vino e Cucina's version consisted of three plum-size pillows stuffed with bits of Dungeness crab, prawns, and bay scallops – leftovers, almost certainly, but culinary inventiveness is often about leftovers – bathed in a red-pepper coulis made velvety by a not insignificant amount of cream.

And – a final rarity – a crostata di mele ($5.50), a length of shortbread covered with lightly baked apple slices and whipped cream, surrounded by a fabulously thick, darkly sweet caramel sauce. Here, at last, was an apple dessert for a certain special someone who dislikes apple desserts. He even snapped up the last piece, which never happens even with desserts he purports to like more. I can't think of a higher recommendation than that – excluding, of course, poll results.