Saturday, 6:10 p.m. The sitter is late. My wife left 10 minutes ago, afraid that we'd lose our reservation. My 5-year-old dining companion, who is staying home tonight, is going ballistic because a) he has not napped, and b) he really wants the sitter, who he treats like a rock star, to get there so that they can break into the popcorn. If my blood pressure were a stock price, you'd be calling your broker and telling him to sell NOW, before the price crashes. I'm a little stressed out.

Saturday, 6:30 p.m. I'm sitting with my wife at a quiet table in Ristorante Lucano on East Avenue. She's smiling, halfway into her first glass of a very nice merlot. A plate full of plump, glossy black mussels in white wine and herb broth has just slid onto the table. I've been sitting down for about two minutes, and our waitress has just delivered a glass of Montepulciano, and started to run through the night's specials. I can actually feel the muscles in my shoulders and jaw unclenching. I'm smiling, too.

From the street Ristorante Lucano doesn't look like the most impressive place. Tucked next door to a dry cleaner in an awkwardly-located strip mall at the busy intersection of Winton Road and East Avenue, the storefront does not scream upscale restaurant. In fact, unless you are looking for it, you might not notice it at all. And that's just fine with the hundreds and hundreds of people who count themselves among Lucano's regulars - it's hard enough to get a reservation on a Saturday night as it is.

Chuck and JoAnn Formoso have created the quintessential Italian restaurant in this awkward location. This is not a red-sauce joint, by any means, but it is also not an Italian steakhouse (although there are a fair number of steaks and chops on the menu, including an enticing dry-aged strip steak offered as a special on a recent visit). It is straight-up Italian food, based on family recipes as interpreted and tweaked by Chef Kevin George. The chef brings a high level of technical expertise to bear on Lucano's high-end comfort food. The stuffing in a quartet of oven-baked butterflied shrimp (gamberi, $10) was cut in precise and uniform brunoise rather than shredded, as fine-grained stuffings often are in busy kitchens, and the mirepoix was sweated to extract every bit of flavor from it. Skate wing is a long and wide piece of fish - nearly impossible to cook and turn successfully without breaking it into unsightly pieces, or at least doing some minor damage to the fish. Chef George sent us a piece of skate that very closely resembled an angel's wing - a sweeping, feathered curve of delicate and sweet fish spread out over the plate and finished with a lemon-butter and caper sauce ($15). Such attention to detail bumps Lucano out of the ranks of run-of-the-mill Italian and into a class all its own.

Mussels are made or broken both by the quality of the mollusk and by the broth in which they are cooked. Chef George's garlic, herb, and white wine broth was rich and full-flavored, a nice dip for each of the plump and juicy Acadian mussels ($13) that were heaped on the plate between my wife and I. Our server, and several kitchen runners, attempted to take the plate away after we finished the shellfish, but we defended it against all comers, mopping up every last drop of sauce with chunks of toothsome bread.

Unable to decide which of the various pastas to order, I persuaded our helpful and accommodating server to bring me half-portions of both the pappardelle alla montanara ($18) and the gnocchi al sugo di agnello ($17). Both were superb, and I found myself torn between sticking with one dish and taking the other home, or giving each of them equal time (in the end, I did a bit of both). The pappardelle - wide, flat strands of pasta - were tossed with homemade sausage, mushrooms, chunks of eggplant, and what could only be San Marzano tomatoes. The resulting mixture brings sweet tomato together with just the right amount of spice and fat to create what I was willing to declare the perfect pasta sauce - until I tasted the lamb sauce on the gnocchi. Chef George braises whole legs of lamb for his sugo di agnello, eventually shredding the fragrant meat from the bones and incorporating it (along with at least some of the braising liquid) into a slow-cooked tomato sauce along with rosemary and other herbs. There is no cream in this dish, but something about the starch in the gnocchi and the richness of the sauce made it taste, well, creamy - deeply, deliciously creamy.

My wife found herself unequal to the task of finishing even half of her gigantic portion of orecchiette lucane, a sauté of shrimp with fava bean puree, mushrooms, roasted red pepper, tomato, and what the menu calls a "hint of black truffle" ($19). I could smell that "hint" from across the table, and I'm certain that I saw other diners raise their heads in covetous wonder as well. The chef incorporates truffle butter into the sauce, and finishes the dish with truffle salt. The result is a luxurious entree that that you will not want to share with anyone, no matter how much you might love them (my wife even made sure that she got to the leftovers before I did the next day).

A fortunate family is one which has a good mixture of cooks and bakers. The Formosos are such a family. JoAnn's father is a semi-retired pastry chef who learned his craft while serving in the Italian navy. He makes Lucano's justly famous cheesecake and tiramisu, both of which are astoundingly good (the trick is to somehow save room for them). His cheesecake, in particular, is very close to the Platonic ideal: creamy and rich without being overly heavy, dense without being dry, with the thinnest of sweet crusts to hold the whole thing together.

Saturday, 8 p.m. My wife and I gather up our coats and a small tower of take-out containers, and head for home - happy, warm, and relaxed for the first time in what feels like weeks. For the past two hours the biggest problems I've had were choosing what to eat and finding the stomach capacity to hold it all. We should all have such problems.

Ristorante Lucano

1815 East Ave. | 244-3460, ristorantelucano.com

Lunch Wed-Fri 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m.; Dinner Tue-Sat 5-10 p.m.