Delfini Citta, Beverly Hills

Motivated by the success of their first restaurant, the beachside Caffé Delfini in Santa Monica, co-founders Alessandro Ercoli and Gianpietro Silardi joined forces with Franco Lupinacci to expand their culinary expertise to Beverly Hills. The result of their collaboration is Delfini Città, which holds true to the threesome's Roman roots by welcoming whole families to carouse across several upscale Italian dining rooms, a chic bar, and a rustically urban pizza lounge where head pizza chef David Santiago unleashes his award-winning brick-oven pies.

In the central dining room, plush red pillows are individually strung behind the benches of long wooden banquet tables, offering each guest a comfortable way to recline between bites. Textural, but primarily monochromatic artwork adds sleek panache to the setting without steeling attention away from Luca Buaffi's Italian dishes, including hearty pastas and free-range veal in delicate wine sauce.

Wherever a group decides to enjoy dinner, the glow of moonlight is never far away, as most of the walls are littered with enormous picture windows. To continue revelry even after dessert, patrons can stop by the bar for a recommendation from head bartender Mark Disalvo, who mixes a diversity of Italian-inspired cocktails as well as pours from a vino list that includes more than 20 world wines and 50 by the bottle. Then, amid Delfini's low light, tipplers can enjoy their libations of choice while watching black-and-white movies on the bar's flat-screen TV, originally purchased in 1932.