Tutto offers nothing new under the Tuscan sun

Service: of the long-aproned supper club variety, but a little forgetful

Best dishes: saffron pappardelle with lamb, seared sea scallops, roasted beet and goat cheese salad

Vegetarian selections: a few

Price range: $$$

Credit cards: all major

Hours: noon-10 p.m. Sundays, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays.

Children: not great for small children

Parking: Good luck. This is Roswell.

Reservations: yes

Wheelchair access: full

Smoking: no

Noise level: moderate

Patio: yes

Takeout: yes

Address, telephone: 942 Alpharetta St., Roswell. 678 878 2525

Website: tuttokitchenandbar.com

Instead of directing you to Opentable (like most restaurants) or asking you to phone in your reservation (the stubborn few), Tutto Kitchen & Bar has its own online reservation system. You request the table and, before long, you get an email sent from the owner’s smartphone that reads, simply, “Thank you.”

As first impressions go, this one says youthful, modern, not the same ol’ same ol’. In other words, it doesn’t prepare you at all for Tutto, which is more of a throwback.

Are you from somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon line, a Rust Belt city, or some other place with a large Italian-American population? Then you know this restaurant, which set up shop late last year on the edge of the Historic Roswell dining constellation. It’s wineglasses and tablecloths, a soundtrack given over to jazz standard crooners, and a waiter who disperses the parmesan from a lofted spoon like manna.

And you more or less know the menu, which gives equal weight to pastas and entrees, and offers up three soups as well as its version of many time-tested menu items.

Whenever a reader calls me and asks, “So where’s a good Italian restaurant?” and I detect a certain mix of impatience and nasality in their voices, I hear “transplant” and know they’re not looking for Antica Posta’s Tuscan perspective or Boccalupo’s creative invention. They’re looking for the kind of updated supper club Tutto tries to emulate.

Yes, tries. You want to get swept up in the whole thing — the pasta, the red wine, the “who can say no to a cannoli?” It gets close, but the cooking doesn’t quite muster that old-school charm or finesse.

You can have fun, particularly if you focus more on the small plates and starters. Get fried goat cheese balls, which aren’t luscious and pepper-prickled like the ones at Ecco, but, hey, it’s fried cheese. A mixed roasted beet salad tossed with thick curls of fennel and more goat cheese made for easy eating, as did a plate of slivered grilled octopus, penuriously portioned but tender and tasty nonetheless.

Things get less appealing when the nostalgic dishes don’t live up the flavors of your sense-memory. Minestrone landed with a thud, its few veggies overwhelmed by chickpeas, kidney beans and flabby pasta. It’s springtime, people.

Rigatoni in a sweet, sweet tomato sauce arrived with veal meatballs cut with so many breadcrumbs that they seemed a little creepy, like the meatballs from your memory of a junior high school cafeteria.

Saddest for me, ex-Yankee that I am, was the lunchtime sausage and pepper sandwich. Lemme tell ya: on the Jersey Shore that means a link of spicy, fennely sausage and grilled sweet and hot peppers on a hoagie roll that soaks up the juices. Here, we got a baguette on which a saute of sliced peppers and sausage arrived with marinara sauce and wrinkly melted cheese. It was a Stouffer’s French bread pizza.

But there are bright moments. Saffron pappardelle with bolognese and a scoop of green “pesto ricotta” to incorporate was pretty to look at and lusty in flavor, with big chunks of meat. Seared diver scallops arrived nicely cooked and sided by a rich risotto that was hard to stop eating.

I’m not sure I’d order the chicken breast, its skin obliterated by a blanket of cheese and its garnish consisting largely of canned artichoke hearts. But I’d give the breaded veal cutlet topped with an arugula and tomato salad another go, hoping the chef would pound it out flatter and fry it crisper the next time.

Service tries to get that tone of long-aproned supper club warmth and assurance, but it is undone by a few too many small gaffes. Twice during one meal we had to hunt down silverware.

But everyone is so friendly, I can’t get my nose too bent out of shape. Besides, there are crisp cannolis for dessert. And, seriously, who can resist a cannoli?