This is one of my favorite restaurants in LA. Unfortunately, I don’t get to go there as often as I’d like as it’s all the way in Beverly Hills. It is surprisingly inexpensive considering its location and the quality of its food. The appetizers are around $10, pastas around $20, and meat courses under $30. To me, the five-course tasting menu is the best deal. It is what I usually get when I go as you get to taste 5-6 different courses, which are usually all amazing. It’s great because it claims to be a five course menu but they usually give you five food courses and then they throw in the dessert as a 6th.

I went there yesterday with some visiting family members. There were a bunch of people so we ended up ordering a la carte. I noticed they had raised the price of the five-course tasting menu from $55 to $60 but it’s still a good deal regardless.

We ordered a few different antipasti to share- fried calarmari, polenta porcini and spinach & pear salad. My favorite of the three was the polenta porcini. I was expecting it to be thick polenta cake but it was thin and porridge-like and I was a bit disappointed when I saw it. It was amazingly unexpected to find it fabulous. It was topped with some kind of bachamel cheese sauce and had chunks of porcinis in it. The polenta itself was extremely flavorful, very mushroomy flavored and tasted like a mushroom porridge. After I got home last night, I kept thinking about it and craving for it.

As my entree, I ordered the ravioli vitello, which is basically a grown-up version of Chef Boyardee (in a good way). When I was a kid, I used to LOVE Chef Boyardee and I remember it being one of the most delicious things of my childhood. I had it again after I had grown up and discovered that it was not as delicious as I remembered it being. I wasn’t sure whether they had changed the recipe or my tastes had evolved but nonetheless it was disappointingly gross. Anyway, the veal ravioli at Piccolo Paradiso is exactly as wonderful as I remembered Chef Boyardee ravioli being when I was a kid. It’s really the perfect ravioli with finely ground veal and an nice homemade pasta wrapper. It’s the perfect ratio of pasta to filling tossed in a ground veal olive oil sauce that is not too heavy. Everyone else got other random pastas which they said were very good but I did not try; and my cousin got the New York strip steak, which looked delicious and came with a huge salad topped with, I kid you not, 2×3″ SHEETS of freshly shaved parmesan. They really didn’t skimp on that. I’m pretty sure it was good because he inhaled it in less than 10 minutes.