The prosciutto and peach salad had great ideas but were flawed in its execution. When fresh bread and umami butter meet it’s delightful, and so it was here. Umami butter is a modern variant on the classic French compound butter it’s what happens when you take savory items like garlic, anchovy, and olives and puree them into butter, then chill it overnight so that the flavors meld. It wasn’t a conventional ciabatta, because the loaf was domed rather than fairly flat and didn’t have the large holes that are typical, but it was good bread served hot. We started with a prosciutto and peach salad, a spicy Caesar, and what was described as a small ciabatta loaf with umami butter. Somehow they’re managing it, and based on two visits they’re generally successful. This is an amazing way to run any kitchen in California, where most people don’t know or care about the different textures of pasta, and it seems absurd in a place with a kitchen this small. The mandilli, thin flat sheets of pasta, are offered only with the three-nut pesto, the tagliatelle only with the ragu sauce. Instead, each of the seven pasta dishes uses a different handmade pasta. The menu here is relatively short, but nevertheless, there is a wide range of dishes, because this is not the usual Italian menu where pastas and sauces are combined in infinite varieties. The servers were working at top speed while Melissa ducked in and out of the small kitchen. We were almost the last ones seated for the evening, and throughout our meal more people walked up only to be turned away. When our party of four arrived for a late supper there wasn’t a seat to be had, but after a short time they squeezed us in at an outside table. Which it seemed half of the local population was doing when we showed up last week.
They are hands-on owners, and you’re likely to meet them if you stop by for lunch or dinner. Thanks to a dispute with another restaurant over the name, the former Workshop Enoteca is now Jame Enoteca, the JA being the first two letters of Chef Jackson Kalb’s first name, the ME the same for front of house veteran Melissa Saka. The new tenant was an upscale Italian restaurant specializing in housemade pasta, with a kitchen run by a veteran of Melisse, Factory Kitchen, and other elite restaurants. I don’t usually call restaurant owners’ judgment into question in reviews, but when I first visited the eatery, then called Workshop Enoteca, my first thought was, “What were they thinking when they did this?” The small space in the corner of a mini-mall was formerly a modest diner that handled a lot of takeout orders, a business model that seemed sensible for the location. Jame Enoteca is a promising and ambitious new arrival in an unlikely location