RESTAURANT REVIEW : Huge Portions and a Pastry Zealot: Louise & Amy Could Sink a Wardrobe

The concept, on the surface, is sheer genius: Take a highly successful Italian bistro and combine it with an upscale dessert factory in the ‘90s mode. And behold--Louise’s Trattoria and Amy’s Hand Made Ice Cream & Desserts, two food palaces with but a single entrance.

The idea is to order pizzas, salads and pastas (themselves all unquestioned ‘90s foods) from one side of the restaurant, then order dessert from the other. And when I say dessert, I mean something like s’more, a huge concoction of graham cake, vanilla ice cream, chocolate shavings, hot fudge, homemade marshmallow sauce, everyberry sauce and whipped cream. You could get an ice-cream headache just thinking about it.

Execution of the concept is another matter. Louise’s, the Glendale restaurant with an in-house Amy’s, is a place destined for standing room only at peak hours--namely, evenings and weekends, when the kids show up in force and it gets hectic. Louise’s/Amy’s has been overrun every time I’ve dropped in, and both seating and service have ended up being a trial by fire.

Louise’s occupies the right half of the restaurant, a long, narrow and deceptively large seating area dominated by a Daliesque mural, faux marble-topped tables and hard-backed wooden chairs. Amy’s has the left half, where ice cream is scooped and dessert oeuvres are put together, and there is no question that the ice cream section is designed for speed rather than comfort. (The bad news: If you come only for dessert, here’s where you’re going to have to sit.)

The middle, smack in front of the door, is a sort of demilitarized zone. It’s where you wait for the hostess, right next to a glass case filled with Louise’s salads and Amy’s cakes. You can work up a serious appetite waiting for a table in this place.

This particular Louise’s is the latest member of a small chain that already has ties with Amy Pressman, the Amy of the ice cream side. Every Louise’s branch serves Amy Pressman’s delicious breads--trendy loaves with names like potato-onion baguette and olive five-grain, baked in a commercial facility that Pressman recently opened in the city of Vernon--but this location is special. It also features (on a rotating basis) almost 30 of the pastries Pressman has made famous in her Pasadena store, Old Town Bakery.

Huge portions have long been the stock in trade at the Louise’s chain, where salads in enormous mounds, pizzas with thick, slightly doughy crusts and homemade pastas tossed with extra-virgin olive oil are consumed with a frenzy. One night when the complimentary focaccia was delivered, my friends gasped--instead of a plain, low-rise pizza bread, we got steamy-hot oversized bread cubes brushed with garlic and olive oil, topped with little bits of crisped green onion and cut-up sun-dried tomatoes. And we gobbled it right up. “We’re supposed to eat more after this?” someone asked.

Then the dishes started rolling off the assembly line: cold crisp chicken ravioli in a sesame-ginger vinaigrette atop a mountain of salad greens, an outrageously large chopped salad, a pizza called village special (with seven toppings, big enough to choke a horse), good herb-roasted chicken served with delicious lumpy mashed potatoes and a smoked turkey sandwich on olive bread, accompanied by a crock of grainy mustard that made everyone’s nose itch.

On second thought, maybe the desserts were what was making our collective nose itch. Amy’s ice cream runs a whopping 40% butterfat, just like the ice creams served at Spago or Campanile--nearly twice the fat content of Haagen-Dazs. The flavors are on the rich side too: Totally Vanilla, speckled with Tahitian vanilla bean; Buttermilk Pecan, loaded with brown sugar and big chunks of roasted nuts; White Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup, made with homemade peanut butter and Belgian white chocolate.

I must confess to knowing Amy personally, from her days as pastry chef at Parkway Grill in Pasadena. Believe me, when it comes to pastry, the woman is a zealot. Some of her stuff is positively dangerous: Milky Way cake, a yellow genoise with milk chocolate icing masking a rich caramel glaze; Almond Roca cake, an almond-flavored cake enriched with Amaretto liqueur, praline butter cream and pieces of homemade toffee; three-nut caramel cake, which looks like the world’s richest hunk of brittle; Zucotto, a dome-shaped slice of fruit, nuts and cream.

And there are about 25 others. Imagine what diabolical things you can do if you add a little 40% butterfat ice cream to them.

One night, four of us dived into a single banana split like attack dogs, fighting over the really ripe banana, the chocolate cake, the vanilla ice cream, the three nuts in caramel, the butterscotch, the everyberry sauce, the hot fudge, the white hot fudge, the chocolate shavings, the whipped cream and nuts and cherries, until it was no more.

Yow. I think I’ll go and conceive myself a new wardrobe.

Suggested dishes: Louise’s chopped salad, $5.50; herb roasted chicken, $9.50; three-nut caramel cake, $4.50; s’more, $4.75.

Louise’s Trattoria and Amy’s Hand Made Ice Cream & Desserts, 130 N. Maryland St., Glendale, (818) 241-8860. Lunch and dinner 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 11 a.m. to midnight Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 10 p.m. Sundays. Beer and wine only. Parking in adjacent structure. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner and dessert for two, $25 to $40.