Rosso finds a brilliant new color for Italian

It’s been a long time since a Plaza restaurant justified its buzz. The sexy, inventive new Italian establishment inside the new Hotel Sorella does — and then some.

Rosso (it means red in Italian) is a fresh, vibrant addition to the Country Club Plaza. The seventh-floor restaurant is officially Italiano only during the evening, and even then, executive chef Brian Archibald stresses that he’s not turning out that country’s traditional cuisine. “I don’t want people to think they can come here for a plate of scampi,” he says. For that, after all, you can still go elsewhere on the Plaza.

And I don’t want scampi here anyway, not when I can have Archibald’s starter of roasted prawns, offered on a cloud of creamy herbed polenta. Better yet, I can eat more of the wood-roasted prawns that come atop a dish of linguini tossed very discreetly in fresh basil pesto.

According to the menu, that latter dish isn’t pesto linguini but “Linguini (pesto-ish).” The menu has a tendency toward cuteness — especially on the dessert list — expressed primarily with an abundance of quotation marks, as in a risotto verde that lists among its ingredients green olive “dirt”). That sounds grating on paper, but when you’re sitting in this sleek but informal space, it’s just another sly detail in a very likable venue. It’s far less serious than you’d expect from a place where the average dinner tab for two runs at least a C-note.

Is Rosso worth the dough? Absolutely. The dining room — done in shades of Pompeian red and black with soft white upholstered furnishings — is shiny and sophisticated and inviting. And Archibald’s culinary sensibility is as distinctive as that of the hot young chefs in Westport or the Crossroads (other parts of town where scampi is, thankfully, off the table).

The first night I dined here, I was seated at a table near the windows, which overlook not the postcard-pretty Plaza but the winding stretch of Ward Parkway leading to the neighborhood’s western side. I found myself preferring that view, with flowing headlight ribbons replacing post-holiday Plaza lights and the strolling shoppers. There’s something deliciously subversive in a room confident enough to face the wrong way.

This renegade quality extends to Archibald’s spin on Italian favorites. The spaghetti and “meatball,” for example, is made not with spaghetti but with the thicker, ropier bucatini noodle and topped with a single, handball-size sphere of pork, veal and beef molded around a center of meaty Bolognese sauce. At $28, it’s one of the least costly dishes on the dinner menu, and it’s memorably satisfying. That goes as well for one of the better starters, a big bowl of peppery wild-boar sausage smothered in a parmesan broth and scattered over and around the lightest, most delicate pillows of gnocchi you’ll find in the metro.

The menu isn’t elaborate. There are just 10 entrées, and only one of them, a risotto with fresh asparagus and summery sweet peas, is meatless. But when Archibald scores, he does so masterfully. Case in point, a gorgeous dish of succulent veal short ribs, braised for six hours with blood-orange juice and lemon zest and served with a jumble of pappardelle streamers, disarmingly tart from an evanescent blood-orange-butter sauce. The ribs were so rich that I almost regretted having started the meal with a cup of luscious cream soup made with parsnips, Granny Smith apples and chestnuts. Almost. (More regrettable is that you can’t have this nearly perfect soup as a main course with, say, a few slices of nutty, crusty bread.)

I made a separate trip to sample Rosso’s ruby-red beef carpaccio, sliced from Kansas wagyu and arranged like flower petals around a pile of spicy arugula lightly dressed in lemon juice and olive oil. It’s not an inexpensive starter, but on the bitter night I ordered it — seated this time near the room’s glass-paned gas fireplace — I felt that I deserved it. (This room makes you feel a certain welcome entitlement. Own the feeling.)

I was certainly treated as if I deserved it. The service at Rosso is low-key but gracious and observant. The restaurant’s manager, Dean Smith, knows his stuff: He was the general manager at the legendary Starker’s for years.

The dessert list at Rosso is unabashedly arty, centering on such dishes as open-fired rosemary-mascarpone cheesecake and almond-butter cups made with burnt bananas. I usually detest deconstructed sweets and s’mores about equally, but the “s’mores” and berries here somehow won me over. If you think those ingredients don’t really go together, well, that’s why you share. I liked nibbling on the dessert’s house-made honey marshmallows and intensely flavored cinnamon malted ice cream, while my dining companion gobbled up its pieces of dark chocolate and fresh berries.

As in all hotel dining rooms, Rosso wears a different daytime personality. The breakfast menu is straightforward, and the lunch selections include somewhat smaller versions of a few dinner items. Oddly, there’s also a midday version of a blue-plate staple, the sloppy Joe; this one, though, is made with lamb, pork, veal and beef poked into freshly baked bread. I suppose, by now, I don’t have to tell you that it’s called the sloppy Luigi — or that it’s terrific.