Oliveto is an institution, an Oakland favorite for Italian food, built on the reputation of chef Paul Bertolli. With Mr. Bertolli scaling back to start the Fra’Mani salumi company, I was interested to see if the restaurant’s rep was still deserved under recently promoted sous chef Paul Canales.

This two-story building houses some of the best Italian cooking on the West Coast and one of the more interesting chandeliers. Check out this metal spiral deal.

We received a complimentary dish of balsamic-marinated olives. I preferred the dark ones.

It’s almost redundant to mention another Bay Area restaurant with a great loaf of bread. But I’ll do it anyway. It’s my website, dammit!

Here’s the evening’s sampler plate of Oliveto’s famous house-made salumi. There are slices of spicy salumi on the left and cuts of toscanello on the right, along with crostini slathered with ciccioli. Spreadable meat was much better than it had any right to be. In fact, it was delicious, especially with olive oiled toast. Not only was the salumi great, but the little mound of Dijon mustard on the right was the best mustard I’ve ever tasted, gritty from whole seeds, a little sweet and a little spicy.

Check out this charcoal-grilled, pancetta-wrapped loin of rabbit served on a bed of carrot-studded braised lentils. The dish was sensational. The fancy Italian bacon was crispy, and the rabbit was insanely tender. The lentils filled out the rest of a comforting winter meal. If it were up to me, the world would be pancetta-wrapped.

Nettle pappardelle with Hoffman Farm hen featured a sensational tomato sauce and tender chunks of dark-meat yardbird.

This was a fantastic side of cauliflower with capers, made tender from being cooked in brown butter.

We still had to drive home to Los Angeles, and it was already past 8 p.m., so we skipped dessert and hit the highway. Not that we needed dessert to know Oliveto’s Italian cooking was still on a high plane.

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3. Michael Mina - San Francisco, CA - Sunday, February 19, 2006
4. A16 – San Francisco, CA – Sunday, July 23, 2006
5. Al-Watan - Hawthorne, CA - February 3, 2007

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