EATS

It's Friday night, and among the array of raw and prepared foods set up in front of her is a bowl filled with four pouches bound in green and white wrapping. This is burrata imported from Italy, a brand of the highly perishable cheese labeled "caseificio voglia di latte." When my time in the pecking order arrives, Silverton unwraps one of the pouches, dresses the burrata simply with olive oil and soft shards of braised leek, and puts it on the far side of the counter with two slices of grilled, garlicky bread. Our server then picks it up to present it properly.

I pick up my knife and fork to tackle this bulb of cheese. It has a knot on top, a traditional fillip. The knife slices through and a juicy mingling of cream and curds seeps onto the plate. It's not liquid, this center, it has body. Jane Black, a writer at The Washington Post, wittily dubbed burrata "the molten chocolate cake of cheese." I find that funny but not quite apt, maybe because I'm so sick of molten chocolate cakes and burrata of this quality still feels fresh.

The taste is sweet and mild, milky but also more savory. Its outer layer has more snap, but mixed with its lush innards it's the absolute definition of creaminess. The couple next to us notices me twitching with happiness.

"Now try it with the bread," says the blonde woman. I plop an overgenerous blob on top a chunk of toast. An almost embarrassing overlap of crunching and slurping commences. Rapture.

I quiz Silverton about the burrata.

"It's the best one I've found," she says. "I like others, too, and a couple made in LA, but I've never found one better than this. It arrives in a shipment through a distributor in San Francisco every Thursday. We sell out of it by Saturday."

For contrast, I order a panino made with scamorza (smoked mozzarella) and pickled peppers and mole salame from Armandino Batali in Seattle (they served this salame on the salumi plate at Nove in Victory Park when last I was there). It's lovely, but I'm not over the burrata yet. It's hard to find burrata that approaches this quality in Dallas. The Mozzarella Company makes some that's available at Central Market, and though I'm a huge fan of Paula Lambert and her products, her burrata is a little sturdier than the ones I've had in California.

And there is plenty of the California-made burrata (from a producer named Gioia) available at Mozza, accompanied by prosciutto di Parma cut on gleaming, fire-engine red machines, or with speck and fresh peas and mint, or grilled asparagus and brown butter with guanciale and slivered almonds ...

We move on, to a patty of crispy pig's trotter meat with chicory and intense mustard; to a big raviolo filled with fresh ricotta and an egg yolk that oozes sexily when you cut into the pasta; plump pieces of grilled octopus with an earthbound trio of potato, celery and lemon; near-perfect agnolotti filled with a funky amalgam of meat; a shallow, precise tart filled with fig and strawberry jam; and an almond cornette, essentially a croissant layered with almond paste too rich for breakfast but stunning for dessert. It came with a little blood orange compote and yogurt gelato.

It was all quite spectacular - my friend Kim even found a stunner of a Sicilian wine that was a bargain at $39. The place was crazy crowded with the LA scenesters, the men with their ponytails or fluffed out heads of hair, and dolled-up women who like they either are or were once actresses. What I loved about this restaurant, though, was that even though it's become the center of hipness, the food has no artifice. It's not pretty or ostentatious - it's a lump of off-white cheese in a bowl with light green oil, offering me the essence of Italian food in a way few restaurants in America have the resources or confidence to do.