By Frank Sabatini Jr.

One of the most ambitious Italian restaurants to land on our local map has arrived in a most unlikely place. If you’re hungering for dishes like Puttanesca pizza, lamb osso buco or a panini layered with imported salumi, look no further than the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, where Bottega Americano occupies an 8,000-square-foot area off the main lobby.

Bottega is more than a restaurant. Its stunning design greets with a market stocked with prepared foods, dried pasta, bagged beans, cookbooks and other eye-grabbing items. Just beyond is a tastefully showy food hall of sorts, where guests dine amid various kitchen stations specializing in key components of Italian cuisine.

The pizza and salumi stations, for example, feature communal high tops spanning out from their marble counters. There’s also a pasta kitchen, with its window draped in strung fettuccine, plus a seafood area slinging mussels, oysters and fried calamari. At another end of the room is an inviting booze bar, where cocktails named Trevi Fountain, and Roman holiday rule the day.

Touted as a “modern-day piazza capturing Old World charm,” Bottega was launched by a quartet of local entrepreneurs that includes restaurateur and caterer Giuseppe Ciuffa and Chef David Warner, who last worked at JRDN in Pacific Beach.

A recent lunch visit with a friend proved that the culinary forces behind the venture have effectively nailed down the beauty of contemporary Italian cooking and the marvelous ingredients that go into it, though with the partial exception of the spaghetti and meatballs I craved that day. More on that in a bit.

Di Stefano ricotta is a lovely starter that could essentially qualify for the dessert menu. The young, creamy cheese was served with a piece of juicy honeycomb on top. Their combined liquids teamed up with ripe persimmons to form a thin, fruity sauce similar to what I’ve seen used sometimes to accent panna cotta.

Another appetizer, eggplant caponata, was rife with additional caramelized vegetables such as onions, celery, fennel and tomatoes. But unlike traditional Sicilian recipes for the dish, it carried whispers of some type of baking spice that we enjoyed but couldn’t identify — perhaps cinnamon or nutmeg.

Bottega’s chopped salad raises the benchmark on what a good salad should be. It harbored numerous ingredients that more modest Italian restaurants would consider too costly, such as aged Provolone, artichoke hearts, endive and finocchiona (fennel-infused salami) seen hanging at the salumi station. The salad’s oregano vinaigrette tasted unobtrusively perfect.

We followed up with an excellent wild mushroom pizza, crowned also with Fontina cheese, caramelized onions and thyme and cooked in eyeshot of our table. In addition, my friend ordered potato gnocchi that were pleasantly lightweight. Dressed in smoked tomato sauce, the dish adopted its richness from burrata (young mozzarella) and bread crumbs.

My entrée, spaghetti with meatballs, was disappointing and puzzling. I first devoured a meatball made with a mix of beef, pork and veal. It was love at first bite. But when twirling through the pasta, excessive blasts of sodium ensued.

The spaghetti featured dual sauces — herby pesto and classic tomato. After isolating each of them on my fork, neither tasted salty. The problem originated with the spaghetti, whereby the water used for boiling it was likely over-salted, which indicates that the chef on duty either loves the stuff, or according to cooking lore, is actually in love with someone.

That aside, we left impressed by Bottega’s progressive Italian offerings and its charming, culinary-emporium atmosphere. Located a stone’s throw from the new San Diego Public Library, the concept enlivens the area with an air of both newness and nostalgia. Even if browsing through while not hungry, chances are good that you’ll at least end up coming away with an almond biscotti in your mouth.

—Frank Sabatini Jr. is the author of “Secret San Diego” (ECW Press), and began his local writing career more than two decades ago as a staffer for the former San Diego Tribune. You can reach him at [email protected].