By Frank Sabatini Jr., Restaurant Review

One of my benchmarks for determining if I’ll return to a restaurant is when I originally dine there not-so-hungry and end up eating everything on the table. Such was the case at Davanti Enoteca, where starting with the first couple of courses, the meal I shared with a friend smacked of novelty and kept getting better.

Nestled within Little Italy’s thicket of pasta kitchens, Davanti joins a mounting cache of Italian restaurants along India Street that defy the status quo, where classics like lasagna, shrimp scampi and chicken Parmesan have fallen to the wayside. In fact, as we soon noted of the menu, there are barely any pizzas or pasta dishes containing tomato sauce.

Davanti marks the first San Diego venture for Chicago restaurateur Scott Harris, who has since opened an additional location in Carmel Valley along with his neighboring Mia Francesca. He currently owns more than 20 restaurants, mainly throughout Chicago. In keeping with his hometown style, Davanti greets solidly with interior brick walls, distressed wood panels and cozy dining areas flanking a good-vibrations bar.

Harris fills a niche with several plates you won’t find anywhere locally, starting with “truffle egg toast” from the antipasti section. Nuzzled atop a chubby square of bread are two soft-cooked egg yolks that merge with judicious measures of Fontina cheese. As your waiter cuts into the “nest” tableside, the bread becomes lusciously soaked while surrounding pieces of asparagus and droplets of truffle oil breathe earthiness into the scheme.

An oozy egg yolk takes center stage again as it’s cleverly captured inside a large, single ravioli, filled also with ricotta and spinach. A labor-intensive dish by all accounts, Harris says it’s the original recipe made famous at San Domenico Restaurant in Imola, Italy. Browned butter serves as the sauce, further ravishing your taste buds with a dreamy richness that supercedes even the most cholesterol-ridden concoctions in French cuisine. Eat it while musing repeatedly that you only live once.

Most of the dishes are medium-portioned, ideal for twosomes. Foccacia di Recco, however, could easily extend to a tagalong. Spanning a rectangular board and voted “Best New Dish” by Chicago Magazine after Harris introduced it to Chi-Towners, the ultra-thin, no-yeast flatbread teases with a middle layer of soft cow’s cheese. Frost it with the accompanying fresh honeycomb and the whole thing ties together in delectable fashion. A small jar (“vasi”) of eggplant puree with pesto, tomatoes and young mozzarella was also abundant, given that it comes with a stack of thick, grilled bread.

Zigzagging the menu categories with a high-performing Malbec on our table called The Seeker, we encountered roasted cauliflower salad dressed in preserved lemon vinaigrette. Spiked with piquillo peppers and green olive tapenade, the combination proved stimulating while giving cauliflower its deserved moment in the spotlight. Most of the other salads appear equally unconventional: roasted squash with farro grain and whipped goat cheese; escarole with apples, celery and Pecorino; and hearts of palm with chili oil and pink peppercorns.

After making a sizable dent into a sauceless pizza topped with prized Taleggio cheese, braised leeks and mushrooms, we saved room for one of the simplest, most flavorful linguine dishes I’ve encountered lately, named “Cacio e Pepe.” We’re told there’s an exact science to this signature recipe, which combines specific amounts of black pepper, Pecorino cheese and pasta water. The outcome is a perfect balancing act of spicy and tangy that becomes impossible to stop eating.

Lemon tiramisu and a chocolate-packed tart mantled with chocolate meringue carried us to the finishing line, though with limited success considering we had them doggy bagged. It was apparent after taking a couple of baby bites that they too possessed the power to keep our mouths wide open while our stomachs begged for closure.