Sorrento d’Italia

Flavor: Just like Nonna used to make

Ambiance: Hamishe with a flair

I’m willing to wager Sorrento d’Italia’s regular customers won’t read this review. Not because they aren’t Xpress readers — although the diners I saw certainly didn’t fit the stereotype of alternative news junkies — but because they’re already convinced Sorrento’s serves the best food this side of Umbria. If I wrote I was served undercooked shoe on a stick, they’d likely fume the shoe was made by Prada and the portion was generous.

Other restaurants have patrons. Sorrento’s, a homey Italian dining room slapped on the back of a skuzzy-looking motel in East Asheville (the far less-refined — and unrelated — establishment has been the source of constant agita for restaurant owner B.J. Jabari) has parishioners, a faithful lot of eggplant-parmesan disciples who always give heartfelt thanks before eating.

“I loooove this place,” a frequent diner testified loudly when her meal arrived.

“This is my absolute favorite restaurant ever!” exclaimed a college-aged woman seated at another table with two friends. Her devotion was so intense, I half-expected her to reveal to her server that she and her companions were actually in their 60s, but kept their youthful looks by eating countless plates of Sorrento’s shrimp scampi.

Snatched conversations aren’t always a component of restaurant reviews. That’s because restaurateurs usually conspire, through a combination of table spacing and subdued background music, to make dining an intimate experience. While Sorrento’s has a quiet, relaxed ambiance, it doesn’t offer much in the way of privacy. Given a choice of seating on a recent visit, we selected a tiny corner table. We had just enough time to pour a glass of the super-sweet house Sangiovese from the tabletop carafe before Jabari approached us and insisted we move to a less-isolated spot.

Jabari explained the two-tops had been shoved to the back of the dining room because the other 10 tables did a far better job accommodating Sorrento’s oversized plates. Her command of basic restaurantese — my guest was momentarily befuddled by the term “two-top” — perfectly illustrates the blurred distinction between front and back of the house at Sorrento’s.

Eating at Sorrento’s is, by design, like eating in someone’s home. The hostess floats between the kitchen and dining room and works hard to keep all her guests engaged in conversation. The night we ate there, Jabari, who was exquisitely dressed, paused at every table, sometimes even sitting down for a glass of wine. Every dish we sampled was prepared with loving care under the supervision of Jabari’s son Bill, a graduate of A-B Tech’s culinary program, who took ownership of the restaurant a few years back.

But eating at home has its drawback. Only at home — or Sorrento’s — would a cold, limp salad of wax and kidney beans count as antipasti. Too many mistakes — a basket of tasteless white bread served with margarine and a tiramisu crushed beneath the weight of its top-lying layer of zabaglione — smacked of the worst of home cooking.

Still, Sorrento’s is a winning antidote to the generic Italian chain restaurants that ply their customers with sugary tomato sauces and clabbered alfredos while piped-in accordion music blares in the background. Though it indulges in Italian kitsch — hanging the muted peacock-green walls of its railroad-car-narrow dining room with images plucked from Italian culture, high and low; Mona Lisa fixes her enigmatic gaze on a painting of a peasant slurping spaghetti — Sorrento’s has the meatballs to get away with it.

Ah, those meatballs. An owner’s statement included in the restaurant’s menu says “B.J. has worked very hard to introduce true Italian cuisine to Americans who up till then thought of Italian fare as only lasagna or spaghetti and meatballs,” yet Sorrento’s phenomenally well-seasoned meatballs, simmering in a house-made marinara, don’t deserve to be marginalized.

The meatballs are the stars of the complimentary antipasti platter, a changing assortment of palate-whetting nibbles that includes the lackluster bean salad, deviled eggs, tuna salad and cold rotini. Meals also include a handsome house salad, made with organic field greens.

Diners may opt out of the free salad and order — for $14 — a Ceasar salad for two, prepared tableside. Jabari built her reputation on a bed of romaine, concocting an original recipe for Caesar salad that won an award in international competition in 1978. The Ceasar cart she wheels from table to table, dousing the lettuce in olive oil and lemon juice, twisting a few teaspoons of herbs from her tall grinder and squeezing anchovy paste from a tube. On the night we sampled, the superbly fresh salad badly needed a mite more garlic and half as much lemon juice.

But it’s hard to fault a salad made just for you. Service at Sorrento’s is wonderful, with every server apparently as entranced by the restaurant as the adoring fans seated at its tables. When I asked for a wine list, our waiter produced a pair of bottles to sample, nearly breaking into a dance when I selected his favorite. His enthusiasm extended right to the end of the menu, earnestly telling someone who asked about the cheesecake: “It’s not as good as the tiramisu, but it is spectacular.”

The entree list at Sorrento’s is long. There are more than 30 main dishes available, including lobster ravioli, pollo piccata, veal saltimbocca, lamb, steaks and trout. I didn’t come close to trying them all. And to the Sorrento’s worshippers who consider themselves members of the “pollo parmesan” or “pesto verde” denominations, I’m sorry for that.

The entrees I did sample were solidly good. The linguine with clams in white wine sauce, prepared with fresh Virginia clams imported by a customer, had an overly soupy sauce and two unopened clams — a fact noted by our attentive and concerned server — but the flavor was well-balanced. I enjoyed the chicken-and-sausage cacciatore, even though the pasta didn’t taste homemade, as the menu implied. But I might have been even happier had the dish been remade as a sausage-and-sausage cacciatore. There was nothing really wrong with the tender strips of free-range chicken, but the house-made sausage was terrific.

A surprising number of savvy local diners still don’t know about Sorrento’s. That’s a shame, because there’s not another restaurant like it in Asheville. It’s worth a visit, even if the food is less than spectacular.

The tiramisu, previously touted as spectacular-plus, was a mess of taste bud-numbing mascarpone and cream. “Oh good,” Jabari cackled good-naturedly when she saw a slice of it on our table. “The sex cake!” I’m not exactly a private person, but even I was taken aback. You usually have to go home for someone to loudly announce details of your personal life to a roomful of people. Praise be Sorrento’s for saving us all the trip.