Worth Waiting For

You don’t want to go to this restaurant. It’s already too crowded, the 20 seats are jammed up against each other and people stand by the door waiting. The kitchen is slow--it can take an hour to get your good little pizza or your veal with rosemary and potatoes or your freshly made pasta.

What do people see in the place, anyway? Trattoria Farfalla, 1978 Hillhurst Ave., (213) 661-7365, is just a little storefront, with barely a pretense at decoration. You can watch the cooks running frantically around in the kitchen that takes up half the restaurant. And you can not only see the pizza man twirling the dough and shoveling the pies in and out of the wood burning oven, but you can listen as he chops the garlic. And sometimes when the phone begins to ring the lone waitress seems so harried that it’s hard to resist the urge to get up and answer it yourself.

And that, of course, along with the reasonable prices (pastas are $6-$8.50) and the good, simple Italian food, is the why all of Los Feliz is charmed by its newest little restaurant. If you happen to live in the neighborhood, you probably do want to go there after all.