Superfine Playa Is A California-Italian Restaurant With Brightness To Spare

Los Angeles chef Steve Samson is a pasta maestro who’s known for his resolutely Italian food at Rossoblu, where he specializes in regional dishes like tortellini en brodo and tagliatelle Bolognese with “not too much tomato sauce.”

The food there is about Samson’s taste memories, about having a mom who’s from Bologna and about the childhood summers he spent there with his grandparents. It’s about hewing to tradition.

But Samson wants to make something clear with Superfine Playa, the vibrant California-Italian restaurant he’s opening with his wife, Dina, on Wednesday.

“I have absolutely nothing against tomato sauce,” he says.

One terrific dish at Superfine Playa is spaghetti with baby tomatoes, garlic, basil and olive oil. One reason this is on the menu is because Dina knows there might be guests who come in and want a vegan pasta. So Steve is resisting his natural urge to put cheese atop the spaghetti quadrati. There’s no need for cheese here. The combination of baby tomatoes and perfectly seasoned tomato sauce creates a sweet, savory, sour, umami-rich explosion of tomato flavor.

It’s a reminder that simple things can be the most delicious things. It’s a pasta that shares a worldview and flavor profile with the game-changing spaghetti pomodoro that Scott Conant created at Scarpetta in New York 15 years ago. It’s also tomato-forward in the way that Rich Torrisi’s excellent tortellini pomodoro at Torrisi Bar & Restaurant in New York is. Which is to say, Superfine Playa is serving one of the best tomato pastas that has ever existed in America.

Steve Samson has gone from “not too much tomato sauce” to something like “all of the tomato flavor,” and you can bet that the Westside of Los Angeles will be here for it.

He’s also serving eggplant Parm and mafaldine with meatballs, but Superfine Playa isn’t a heavy Italian-American restaurant with plates drenched in cheese and red sauce. This is lighter and brighter Los Angeles food. The menu has lots of elaborate salads (something you don’t see much of in Italy), lightly cooked vegetables, tuna crudo and dazzling entrees like grilled Baja California striped bass with warm potato salad, yellow tomato sauce and Castelvetrano olive pesto.

The Samsons have lived in the area for more than 15 years. They’ve raised their children here, and they know that Playa Vista is full of families. So Steve is working on a kids’ menu and also thinking about crowd-pleasing lunch options that might include a chicken parm sandwich. For dessert, there are hand pies and cannoli. Later this year, Superfine Playa will start firing up its pizza oven and make hybrid New York/Neapolitan-style pizzas like the Samsons have at Superfine Pizza next to Rossoblu downtown.

“We want to create a restaurant that people in the neighborhood feel comfortable coming to multiple times a week,” Steve says. “We also want it to be something that they feel like they can be proud of. We really wanted to make a menu that appeals to everyone and to have a place where people feel comfortable coming with their kids or a group of friends.”

So the Samsons are attempting to thread the needle between destination restaurant and family-friendly neighborhood spot. Dina, who runs the front-of-the-house, was happily shocked when Steve decided to put pasta with meatballs on the menu. (”He always used to say, ‘We don’t do that in Italy,’” she says.) But Steve chose mafaldine instead of spaghetti to make things a bit more interesting for him, and mafaldine is a pasta that holds sauce well. He’s hesitant about putting spaghetti and meatballs on the kids’ menu, because he knows adults are going to ask for it if they see it. (So look, grown-ups, just get the spaghetti pomodoro and the mafaldine with meatballs and go wild.)

Italy and California are similar, Steve points out, because so much of the cooking in both places is about using local ingredients. But there’s a difference in philosophy.

“Here, you get this beautiful market produce and I think it’s important to preserve the color and texture,” says Steve, who’s finding many ingredients at the Playa Vista farmers market.

“The kind of food that Steve’s done in the past is very traditional Italian,” Dina says. “Everything is super cooked off. Everything is like braises: ragus or braised vegetables. So this really gives Steve a chance to show that he can do something that’s more Californian. I love it. Personally, I prefer to eat this way.”