Another bread oven showstopper is listed as a starter: hot puffed pita with mini souvlaki of lamb ($18). The pairing seems quintessential Shire: Mediterranean-flavored marinated lamb with a "buttered hollandaise," as her longtime colleague Mario Capone, the executive chef, described it (only a Shire kitchen would call something a buttered hollandaise); a microgreens salad with big sugared whole walnuts; the pita slathered with gremolata, the Italian garlic and green herb sauce. It’s too much—or would be, if served in anything more than this small, provocative sampling.

You can skip the "house-made mozzarella" category, which is latching on to an L.A. trend (Mario Batali’s Osteria Mozza) but doesn’t even feature homemade mozzarella in all the items—not such a bad thing, as Italian can be better than homemade, and the kitchen buys decent Italian mozzarella to pick up the slack.
Aside from the aforementioned pita with souvlaki, the appetizers weren’t memorable, either. So go straight to the spaghetti, at Scampo a category of its own, with seven listings ($12–$22). The kitchen uses several thicknesses of pasta, Capone explained, and the one they chose for the Bolognese ($16) seemed just right, with a classic, perfectly tossed-off sauce that gets a nice smoky addition of bacon and pancetta just before serving. Carbonara with fresh peas ($14) was satisfying, too, with hole-in-the-middle bucatini rather than spaghetti, plus more nice bacon flavor and a Shire-size dollop of butter.

Main-course "plates" were the most variable, but did include a rock-solid kurobuta pork chop and green onion tart ($29)—you’d be hard-pressed to find a better big piece of grilled, juicy meat. And taking from her wretched-excess Excelsior classic, there’s butter-poached lobster scented with vanilla, here served with a very creamy corn pot de crème and greens ($48). Cherry-charred duck ($30) had too much fat left under the skin, but the meat was dry anyway; spatchcocked (semiboned and butterflied) quail with oven-browned semolina gnocchi in a yellow raisin sabayon ($28) was drowned in a cream sauce that neither the delicately flavored meat nor the nicely soft semolina managed to rise above. The fish offerings were fine, if unremarkable. Case in point: the farmed salmon ($29), served tuna-rare to bring out the oil, with roasted hazelnut oil and tangy citrus spinach whose nuttiness and tang were so muted as to be barely detectable.

Desserts, though, are a Shire favorite, and I’ve always been impressed that she doesn’t turn her back on the sweet, as so many proud chefs do. There’s a cookie plate ($10) with, if you’re lucky, a lacy brown-sugar cookie that has perfect snap and sweetness, as well as two great icy choices: watermelon sorbet with a lime-tequila cookie ($10) and cherry gelato studded with hard little cocoa nibs that explode with flavor. Maybe, just maybe, we can get her to make that Baileys butterscotch sauce she says is a part-time obsession. It’s great to have the Lydia obsessions back, and available nightly.