The all new VIVO! Restaurant features fine Italian cuisine in a trattoria style setting. Chef Roberto Donna, introduces his favorite dishes from his native Torino, Italy - "These will be original country dishes made with top ingredients. Just like the dishes from Torino." Dishes homemade pastas, woodburning oven pizza and rotisserie chicken as well as regional items such as poached eggs served over soft polenta and roasted double cut pork loin chop with citrus sauce.

The interior design of VIVO! ristorante is simplistic and modern surrounded by subdued hues of yellow and blue with paintings by local artists. Currently on display is a collection of mixed media and acrylics from artist Anne Marchand. The main dining room seats up to 64 guests. Chef Roberto Donna has resumed his much anticipated wine dinners at VIVO!

Reviews

" I want to lick the plate," my friend whispers across the table at VIVO!, which opened in November, still a member of the Donna empire. Too bad my pal's order of creamy polenta, enriched with melted, mildly nutty fontina cheese and set off with a perfect poached egg, is out of my reach, or he'd have some competition. But I'm busy carving into a rotisserie chicken; scented with garlic and rosemary and partnered with delicious wrinkled roast potatoes and a fluff of greens, the bird is vanishing before his eyes. This is the kind of deeply satisfying Italian cooking turned out by former I Matti chef Ivan Escobar that keeps people packed in like Lifesavers on a Saturday night.

I was eager to embrace VIVO!; its stretch of Dupont Circle desperately needs a restaurant whose cooking doesn't taste like it came out of a package. Still, like the date who asks for your number but then fails to call, this spare storefront can be unpredictable. One day, I return to the office raving about the lusty, house-made pork sausage, arranged around wilted fresh spinach; the next visit, I'm apologizing to my guest for its saltiness. Anchovies spread with parsley sauce taste as if they, too, passed through a salt mine on their way to the table, while raviolini stuffed with roasted meat and vegetables go down both tough and dull. A special of saffron-tinged risotto with grilled shrimp is decent enough, but at $21.95, I want a better story to bring home-the kind of story I get later, in a lunch of hand-made agnolotti, light pillows of pasta fattened with spinach and ricotta in a lovely, smooth mascarpone cream sauce.

There's more to admire. VIVO! is among a handful of places I think about when I'm hungry for blistered, thin-crusted pizza from a wood-stoked oven (an oven that brightens the setting with its flames). I'd also head in this direction for a grilled lamb steak, thin but succulent and accented with oregano and garlic. Minestrone, a soup of the day, is merely pleasant, but its deep, slanted yellow bowl is so attractive, I start rethinking my kitchenware. Who cares if Elvis is singing in the background? The walls showcase a changing display of original art and the waiters endear themselves with their graciousness, even when the courses are slow coming to the table. Give me some more of that egg-topped polenta, and VIVO! starts living up to its translation: Alive!

Partial reproduction of a review originally reported by Mr. Tom Sietsema in The Washington Post, 2000.