Eighty-one-year-old Angie Capone arrives at Antonetta's restaurant at 6:30 in the morning, five days a week. Each day, she makes her signature red sauce for the restaurant. She also makes gnocchi, and, on average, 200 or so meatballs a day. Once lunchtime arrives, she's everywhere: bussing tables, seating people, taking the time to catch up with regulars, tying a lobster bib on a customer in a suit to keep sauce from getting on his shirt or tie. She's been doing this for about 18 years. Angie's brother, Antonetta's owner Nick Petrillo, has begged her to take a day off, to scale back a little bit, but she won't hear of it. Although her son, Nick Capone, does much of the day-to-day cooking at Antonetta's (he's makes it possible for the restaurant to serve 200 people or more each day), Angie Capone is the heart and soul of Antonetta's restaurant. And the palpable love that she puts into the food explains, at least in part, why this tiny restaurant on Jay Street has been a destination for almost 20 years.

On any given Friday night, you can expect to wait for about a half an hour for a table in Antonetta's rec-room-like dining room. But once you are seated at one of the tables, you get the sense that you can stay there forever if you want to. At some point in your meal, Petrillo will wander by to say hello, an island of affable calm amid the bustle of customers and wait staff. The waitresses have all been there for at least a decade (one of them has been there for 18 years). They are friendly, efficient, and even motherly in a brusque, no-nonsense way. If, by the end of your meal, you don't feel like family here, it's not any fault of theirs.

You won't be coming to Antonetta's for the location or the atmosphere. What will keep you coming back again and again is the food. Cheap, overwhelmingly plentiful, and so carefully prepared that you'll wonder if Angie herself is tasting each dish as it goes out, this is food without irony. There is no whimsy on Antonetta's menu. It is what it is, and what it is is spectacular. Nearly everything that comes out of the kitchen is topped with Angie's red sauce. The core ingredients are Italian sausage, pork butt, tomatoes, and tomato paste simmered slowly for at least eight hours, reducing into a thick, rich, deep-red sauce with a near-perfect balance of sweetness and acidity. The finishing touches vary from day to day - one day there was a bit more basil and oregano in the sauce, one day a bit more crushed red pepper - but it's wonderful on anything and everything.

Antonetta's lunch menu is straightforward, pastas and parmesans (veal, chicken, and haddock) on one side, sandwiches on the other, with daily specials posted on boards around the dining room. Dinner has a few more options, mostly sauteed or broiled dishes that are consistently very good, but the real star here is anything with that sauce.

Take the stuffed shells ($6.95): four pasta shells the size of a child's fist, cooked to just past al dente (they'd slide around on the plate when you tried to cut them otherwise), and filled with a smooth and flavorful mixture of ricotta cheese, parmesan, and parsley. By themselves, these would be quite good. Dressed with that sauce, though, they are sublime - the fat in the cheese offset by the acid in the sauce, the sweetness of the sauce bringing the herbs in the filling to the front.

The same alchemy takes place with Angie's homemade gnocchi ($8.25). The little dimples in these otherwise smooth potato dumplings acted as cup, adding just a tiny shot of red pepper and tomato to each bite, and rounding out and lightening a dish that, in other restaurants, is often too leadenly heavy to finish. We didn't manage to finish the gnocchi here either (the portions hover somewhere between extremely generous and huge), but we didn't leave feeling heavy or uncomfortable as often happens.

The star of the special menu is the lasagna ($6.95). I have never seen a portion of anything that is as large as the lasagna served at Antonetta's. Eight or nine inches long, five across, and four high, this imposing tower of pasta, meat, cheese, and sauce actually took my breath away, first with longing and then with trepidation about how I could possibly eat that much in one, or even three, sittings. Just moist enough to release wonderful aromas and flavors in each juicy bite, but solid enough that it hung together right to the very end, maintaining its beautiful structure, this may have been the best lasagna I've ever tasted.

Saving room for pasta and sauce is admirable, but missing out on the soups would be a serious error. The chicken soup ($2.95), a rich meaty broth full of carrots, escarole, onions, tiny meatballs, and acini (peppercorn-sized bits of pasta) reduced my dining companion to smiling somnolence. My lentil soup ($2 per cup), dark and thick with the bright green fragrance of celery, was mellow, warm and surprisingly refreshing.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about Antonetta's is that they like to see a good eater. One lunchtime, when I asked for the dessert menu after working my way through lentil soup, a salad, a plate of veal parmesan, spaghetti, and most of a loaf of bread, my waitress patted me on the shoulder and called me a good man. I've been waiting my whole life for someone to praise me for being a good eater.

To find Antonetta's in City Newspaper's online Restaurant Guide - including a map, user reviews, and more - click here.

Antonetta's

1160 Jay St. | 328-1830

Monday-Friday 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., Friday 4:30-9 p.m.