Sparks, Nev., stunned after student kills teacher, himself

SPARKS, Nev. — A middle school crowded with parents dropping off their children and students hurrying to class erupted into chaos Monday morning as a student drew a semiautomatic handgun and opened fire, killing a teacher and wounding two students before fatally turning the gun on himself.

The unidentified shooter was dressed in khaki slacks that are part of Sparks Middle School's required uniform, witnesses said. He shot one 12-year-old boy in the abdomen and another 12-year-old boy in the shoulder, Sparks Police Department Deputy Chief Tom Miller said, adding that both wounded boys were listed in stable condition. But he declined to identify any of the students or provide additional details, other than confirming that the shooter had committed suicide.

Witnesses said the slain man, identified by family members as eighth-grade math teacher Michael Landsberry, tried to intervene before the boy with the gun aimed his weapon at him and fired.

"We've got video we have to review, people we've got to talk to," said Tom Robinson, deputy chief of the Reno Police Department. "But in my estimation, he is a hero. We do know he was trying to intervene."

Relatives said Landsberry, 45, was the kind of teacher who would have tried to stop the attack.

"It doesn't surprise anybody that that's what Michael would do," Chanda Landsberry said of her brother-in-law. "It doesn't feel real. It's totally surreal to have it happen."

Kyle Nucum, 13, told the Reno Gazette-Journal that he and several students were near the basketball court when they heard a loud pop. "Everybody was screaming," he said.

Kyle said he saw a student point a gun at a teacher who had ordered the student to put the weapon down. "And then the student fired a shot at the teacher. The teacher fell, and everybody ran away," he said.

Four or five more shots were heard as students fled across a field to a nearby house to get away, Kyle said.

Sparks Mayor Geno Martini said late Monday that there still was no indication of the shooter's motive, but that the boy shot the two students before being confronted by Landsberry. Martini described Landsberry as a "well-liked teacher by students and faculty" who had served in the Nevada Air National Guard and had done two tours of duty in Afghanistan.

"This happens in other places but you never expect it to happen in your city, especially in a safe family town," said Martini, who has lived in Sparks all of his life.

Dale Lundin, site facilities coordinator at the school, said Monday was "a very scary morning."

"I was in the building ... a few minutes before the entry bell rang, and then there was a lot of commotion going on out in the hallway," he said. "I stepped into the hallway, heard a couple of gun shots."

After seeing that the hall was clear, Lundin went into his office and locked the door.

"I could hear the police out in the hallway, but we're trained to not open the door or go out until it's clear," he said. "The staff and the students both did a very good job because we've gone through these 'code reds' before.

"You never really think that it's going to happen at your place of work, or in this case, your school. When it does happen, it kind of puts you in shock."

The entire shooting episode lasted only a few minutes, with the first calls coming in to authorities at 7:16 a.m., police said.

"Law enforcement officers were on the scene in less than three minutes from the first calls," Mike Mieras, chief of police with the Washoe County School District, said at a news conference.

But by then, it was over.

Classes were immediately canceled, and the school will stay closed the remainder of this week, district officials said.

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School iPads to cost nearly $100 more each, revised budget shows

Providing Apple iPads to Los Angeles students will cost nearly $100 more apiece — or $770 per tablet, a new school district budget shows.

This potential sticker shock can be avoided, but only after the L.A. Unified School District has spent at least $400 million for the devices. In other words, the district would have to buy nearly 520,000 iPads before getting lower prices. Officials did not answer questions Monday about how much the district would then spend on the remaining tablets.

The newly disclosed price, a 14% increase per iPad, appeared in a revised budget released in advance of a public meeting Tuesday on the $1-billion project.

The new spending plan for the first part of the project delays some costs and shifts others.

The goal is to provide iPads to every teacher and student, so officials remain optimistic about achieving the discount, even though start-up problems emerged immediately this fall. More than 300 students deleted security filters, allowing them to browse the Internet freely and prompting officials to suspend use of iPads at three campuses.

Parents also have expressed confusion about their responsibility for the devices. And officials have yet to purchase mechanical keyboards that will be necessary to use the iPads on new standardized tests.

The earlier cost estimate for each iPad "preceded the actual procurement process," the district said Monday in response to questions from The Times. "The negotiated discount [i.e. $678] does not go into effect until the district has reached the $400-million spending threshold."

The structure of the deal raises the stakes for what L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy recently referred to as a "pilot test." If the district pulls out of the deal, or buys fewer tablets from Apple Inc., the iPads become considerably more expensive.

The district began the rollout of the tablets with a $50-million budget that is supposed to outfit all students and teachers with iPads at 47 schools. That cost includes training and upgrading wireless Internet at these campuses.

That budget allotted $20.3 million for iPads, based on an early estimate of $650 per device. The revised budget adds more than $4 million for the tablets.

Another higher cost is classroom carts, which are used to charge the iPads and keep them secure. The cost for this first phase rose to $3.2 million from $2.6 million.

To keep the overall budget at $50 million, the district postponed some elements, such as a system for providing online courses. It also shifted costs to the general fund, which is used for basic operations. That shift is relatively small, about $550,000 at this point, although it's unclear whether more expenses would be transferred in the future.

The iPad project is funded almost entirely with school-construction bonds, a strategy that has attracted some criticism.

The price per device, higher than retail, includes a protective case, a limited three-year warranty, technical assistance and training, and one Apple TV setup per 20 students. The cost also includes curriculum from Pearson Education Inc. that is still being developed.

Overall, "we are right where we want to be," according to a written copy of the budget presentation.

Another topic at Tuesday's meeting will be the progress in getting schools ready for iPads.

In December 2011, the Board of Education approved broadband network upgrades for 138 schools. In the two years since, 40 projects have been completed; 39 more are in the construction phase.

Separately, 74 additional campuses were authorized in June. Of these, none have been completed, but nearly all are underway. The district has more than 1,000 schools.

Last week, Deasy proposed extending the schedule for completing the iPad distribution by a year, from December 2014 to December 2015, to deal with logistical challenges and as a response to critics inside and outside the system who say L.A. Unified is taking on too much too quickly.

howard.blume@latimes.com

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Shutdown likely to delay stimulus tapering, Fed official says

WASHINGTON — A top Federal Reserve policymaker said the central bank was unlikely to start reducing a key stimulus program for "a few months" because the partial government shutdown has muddied the economic picture.

Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said Monday that he would need to see strong jobs reports and signs that the nation's economic output, or gross domestic product, was on the upswing before he would support tapering the monthly $85-billion bond-buying program.

And if the economy got weaker, the Fed might need to increase its asset purchases rather than reduce them, he said.

Evans is one of 11 voting members of the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee, which holds its next meeting Oct. 29 to 30.

"October is a tough one," Evans told CNBC-TV of a possible decision to start tapering next week.

"December? I think we need a couple of good labor reports and evidence of increasing growth, GDP growth," he said. "It's probably going to take a few months to sort that out."

Economists said the 16-day shutdown probably cut about 0.6 percentage point from economic growth in the year's fourth quarter. It also stopped the production of nearly all government economic reports, a significant blow to the ability of Fed officials to gauge the strength of the recovery.

The data will start flowing again this week, highlighted by Tuesday's release of the September jobs report. The report had been scheduled for release Oct. 4.

Analysts project that the report will show the economy added 185,000 net new jobs in September, up from 169,000 the previous month. The unemployment rate is forecast to hold at 7.3%.

Evans said he wanted to see the economy consistently adding about 200,000 jobs a month, which it had been doing this year before labor market growth slowed in the summer.

But Evans warned that political fighting over fiscal policy in Washington was a drag on economic growth. And he said another budget and debt-limit fight looming early next year would be a factor in the Fed's decision-making when it meets in December.

"It's very difficult to feel confident in December given we're going to repeat part of what just took place in Washington," he said. "There was a lot of fiscal drama, which I think caught everybody's attention."

jim.puzzanghera@latimes.com

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Rim fire puts a dent in High Sierra wildlife habitat

GROVELAND, Calif. — The Rim fire that scorched a huge swath of Sierra Nevada forests also severely altered the habitat that is home to several of California's rarest animals: the great gray owl, the Sierra Nevada red fox and the Pacific fisher.

The fire burned 257,000 acres of High Sierra wilderness straddling the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park that harbors a geographically isolated and genetically distinct clan of roughly 200 great gray owls.

The blaze also came within 12 miles of 10 breeding pairs of the subspecies of red fox clinging to survival in the cold, steep slopes above the tree line, raising fears they could have been eaten by coyotes trying to escape the smoke and flames.

The existence of the foxes, which were thought to have been wiped out in the 1920s, was confirmed in 2010. They are currently under consideration for listing under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Federal wildlife biologists are also concerned about the loss of potential habitat for the Pacific fisher, a member of the weasel family. Pacific fishers, members of an isolated Southern Sierra group of about 500 individuals that live in dense old-growth forests south of Yosemite's Merced River, are under consideration for federal listing.

"In the Rim fire, only birds that could fly the farthest and animals that could run the fastest survived," said John Buckley, executive director of the nonprofit Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center. "It killed squirrels and bears. For animals of which only a handful exist, it could be especially tragic."

The exact toll on wildlife will not be known until biologists are allowed to survey severely burned areas, which, for safety reasons, could remain closed for more than a year, federal forest officials said.

Even without that information, federal agencies are developing post-fire management strategies such as reforestation and salvage logging projects to protect certain species from extinction. That effort has been interrupted by the federal government shutdown, which furloughed federal wildlife biologists.

Preliminary reports from the fire area indicate that the blaze destroyed or damaged dozens of nesting and roosting areas for spotted owls, goshawks and great gray owls — the largest owl in North America. They stand 2 feet tall and have a 5-foot wingspan, with piercing yellow eyes accented by large facial disks.

Roy Bridgman, wildlife biologist for the Stanislaus National Forest, said he "visited a great owl nest that had been around for 20 years and it was collapsed. For a species with a tiny population, any loss at all is a big hit."

On a recent weekday, however, John Keane, a U.S. Forest Service research wildlife ecologist, found a reason for cautious optimism at an expanse of lush meadowlands about 10 miles west of Yosemite where he has studied great gray owls for 15 years.

The meadows edged with 80-foot-tall cedars and ponderosa pines were spared by the fire, which began burning in August. Peering through binoculars and methodically scanning the treetops, Keane said, "If I had to put money on it, I'd say there are still owls here."

Future research will help determine whether enough of the owls survived in the region to sustain the state-endangered raptor.

Two months after the fire raged across one of the wildest areas in the state, rare and common animals alike continue searching for food and shelter in, as one resident put it, "patches of green, wherever they can find them."

Lill Mcleod, general store manager at Camp Mather, a tourist destination about a mile away from the meadowlands patrolled by great gray owls, said, "Starving animals including countless bobcats and at least four mountain lions have been coming after the squirrels and chipmunks in the camp."

"The heartbreaker," she added, "was a horribly injured, emaciated bear we found staggering along a road here. He couldn't see or hear or smell because his head was so badly burned. He had a broken paw and kept wiping his face in the dirt."

That bear, along with an injured cub found a few days later, was euthanized by California Department of Fish and Wildlife game wardens. Three other adult bears were found dead nearby, Mcleod said.

Local populations of bears, deer and other relatively common animals are expected to recover. But prospects for the black-backed woodpecker, a candidate for listing under the California Endangered Species Act, remain uncertain.

The woodpecker plays a key role in post-fire forest ecology by creating nesting holes in snags for other birds and mammals such as Western bluebirds and squirrels, environmentalists say. It is also threatened by the salvaging of burned trees.

Those competing interests are already playing out on fire-stripped slopes where the woodpeckers are feasting on wood-boring beetles that began swarming dead trees while they were still smoldering.

Beneath the woodpeckers, crews with chain saws and big-rig trucks were removing snags and salvaging timber from roads and utility corridors.

"We're looking for silver linings," Bridgman said with a sigh. "But we're caught between extremes."

louis.sahagun@latimes.com

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Budget battles could slow 2014 business travel spending, group warns

Spending on business travel is expected to surge in 2014, a sign of continuing confidence in the U.S. economy. But the rosy business outlook could be marred by further feuding in Washington that leads to another government shutdown.

The message of caution came from a survey released last week by the Global Business Travel Assn., the trade group in Virginia for corporate travel managers.

Based on business indicators, the group predicted $288.8 billion in spending in the U.S., which would be a 7.2% jump over 2013. It represents 459 million trips for the year, which would be a 1.6% increase from 2013.

During the depths of the recession, that number dropped to 434 million person-trips in 2009. The industry still has a long way to go to come near the high of 576 million business trips in 2000.

The study results were released a few days before Congress and the White House reached an agreement to settle a 16-day partial shutdown. But the budget deal is temporary, raising the chance of another deadlock in January or February that the business travel group fears could slow the nation's economic momentum.

"Another self-destructive U.S. government shutdown will absolutely have negative consequences for business travel and the economy as it would only further damage our country's reputation as a place to do business," said Michael McCormick, the travel group's executive director and operations chief. "It is critical to this country's future position as a leader in the global economy that our elected officials work to keep the U.S. open for business."

Nonstop flights from Dallas' Love Field sure to spark airfare battle

An airline battle is about to heat up in Texas as a result of a little-known law set to expire next year. The good news is that airline passengers should claim the spoils in the form of lower fares.

The so-called Wright Amendment, championed by then U.S. Rep. Jim Wright (D-Texas) in 1979, was intended to restrict airline traffic out of Dallas Love Field and direct more growth toward the then-fledgling Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The legislation was supported by business interests in Dallas.

The amendment has had direct consequences for Southwest, which is headquartered at Love Field and operates one of its biggest hubs at the airport.

Over the years, many of the Wright Amendment's restrictions have phased out. The last limit prohibits nonstop flights from Love Field to 41 states, plus the District of Columbia.

Once the last restriction expires Oct. 13, 2014, Southwest is expected to add many new nonstops from Love Field, putting the low-cost airline in direct competition with American Airlines, based at nearby Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

"Where Southwest decides to take on American Airlines we are likely to see spirited competition and cheaper prices for both leisure and business travelers," said Rick Seaney, founder of the travel website Farecompare. "American Airlines will be very aggressive in keeping its lucrative business customers. Look for them to use price matching, loyalty miles, upgraded aircraft and increased flight frequencies."

Southwest can't wait for the Wright Amendment to expire.

In the lobby of its Love Field headquarters, the airline has installed a countdown clock that will reach zero Oct. 13. The slogan "Nonstop Love" is emblazoned on the clock.

"Southwest will bring our legendary fares to these new nonstops," said Southwest spokeswoman Whitney Eichinger. "Having Southwest in these nonstop markets will create competition and fares that will be good for consumers."

hugo.martin@latimes.com

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Gala opens Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills

The event: The "Grand Inaugural Gala" to celebrate the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. Presented by Salvatore Ferragamo, the affair came with cocktails, a gala dinner, fashion show of the Italian designer's latest collection and the first-ever performance in the Center's 500-seat Bram Goldsmith Theater.

The setting: The brand new "Wallis," designed by architect Zoltan Pali of SPF:architects to incorporate the city's Italian Renaissance-style post office and temporarily house a pop-up Ferragamo boutique.

The show: Not to forget its post office past, "A Dream in an Envelope" had John Lithgow, Diane Lane and Kevin Spacey reading classic letters from Will Rogers, Martha Graham, Groucho Marx, Peter Tchaikovsky and Tennessee Williams. Onstage too were tap-dancing postmen; dancer Lil Buck; a beautifully executed pas de deux; and Terri White belting out "This Joint Is Jumpin.'"

"Why don't you give these birds the dough," said Lithgow, as he read Will Rogers' good-humored request for government funds to build the post office.

The glittery crowd: Wallis Annenberg and Jamie Tisch co-chaired the event, and although Brad Pitt and Robert Redford, the honorary co-chairs, did not attend, there was no shortage of star power.

"Brad is fighting zombies somewhere and Robert is lost at sea," said Tisch, referencing their recent movies, adding that the two asked her to "extend their deepest gratitude to Wallis for the creation of this wonderful center."

Celebrities abounded, as did business, social and cultural leaders, including, among others actors, Charlize Theron, Jodie Foster, Amy Adams, Nicole Richie, Joe Jonas, Jason Bateman, Courteney Cox, Evangeline Lilly, Demi Moore, Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Chord Overstreet, Tim Robbins, Sidney Poitier, Gwen Stefani, Gavin Rossdale, Abbie Cornish, Geena Davis, Josh Duhamel and Dita Von Teese; Bram Goldsmith and Paula Kent Meehan, for whom the new theaters are named; Eva and Marc Stern, Lori and Michael Milken, Sherry Lansing, David Bohnett, Ron Burkle, Candy Spelling, Carolyn Powers, Deborah Borda, Ann Philbin, the night's speakers Ferruccio Ferragamo, Beverly Hills Mayor John Mirisch and the center's board chair, Jerry Magnin.

Quotes of note: "I don't have enough adjectives for this beautiful new auditorium," former California Gov. Gray Davis said.

The numbers: With tickets priced from $2,500 each and tables ranging up to $100,000, the celebration attracted 1,000 guests, enough to require two performances in the new theater.

image@latimes.com

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Inconclusive autopsy of baby found in New York shopping bag

NEW YORK — An autopsy of a baby found in a teenage girl's shopping bag at a New York City lingerie store was inconclusive, and more tests will be needed to determine how it died, the city medical examiner's office confirmed Saturday.

The needed tests could take a few weeks as police continue to look into the case, officials said.

Preliminary reports from detectives were that the baby was born alive and possibly had been asphyxiated, but chief New York Police Department spokesman John McCarthy said the case was still being investigated and that police were awaiting the medical examiner's determination of the cause of death.

The case began Thursday when a security guard stopped Tiana Rodriguez and Francis Estevez, both 17, to examine their bags at a Victoria's Secret store in midtown Manhattan. The guard found the dead baby in a bag Rodriguez was carrying, police said.

Rodriguez told detectives she was carrying the remains because she had delivered a day earlier and didn't know what to do, authorities said. Police believe Rodriguez delivered at Estevez's house.

Both girls were arrested on petty larceny charges. It was unclear whether either has a lawyer.

Rodriguez was taken to a hospital and remained there Saturday, and a woman who answered the phone at a possible home number for her said she knew nothing about the matter.

A woman who said she was Estevez's mother said she hadn't spoken with her daughter since her arrest and hung up.

The Associated Press is identifying both teens because in New York, the legal system treats older teens as adults, and their cases are handled in criminal courts. Suspects between 7 and 15 may be charged as juveniles and their cases handled in family courts.

One of Rodriguez's neighbors, Zami Ford, told the Daily News she was unaware of the teen's pregnancy and stunned by the allegations.

"She's a good girl," Ford told the newspaper. "I can't believe she would do that."

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Milo & Olive's Erin Eastland plans a fruity fall

Erin Eastland, fan of microplanes and Broadway musicals, is the new executive chef at Santa Monica restaurant Milo & Olive, after a seven-year tenure at Cube Cafe on La Brea Avenue. Born in Syracuse, N.Y., Eastland graduated from Trinity College in Connecticut, then moved to New York, working as garde manger at restaurant Calle Ocho then cheese manager at Le Petite Chateau before earning her diploma at the French Culinary Institute. In 2005, Eastland moved to Los Angeles and eventually landed at Cube Cafe, overseeing the seasonal, regional Italian-inspired menu. At Milo & Olive, the menu spans wood-fired, free-range chicken meatballs, pastas such as spaghetti with Dungeness crab and Calabrian chile, and pork belly sausage pizza with escarole.

What's coming up next on your menu?

Persimmons, satsumas, blood oranges ....

Latest ingredient obsession?

Cauliflower — it seems to be flying off the shelves. We are currently doing it wood-fired with orange brown butter and sea salt.

The one piece of kitchen equipment you can't live without, other than your knives?

We need Microplanes. ... It's like a fight to get one, and when I buy a new one it's like Christmas.

Favorite kitchen soundtrack?

Mark Knopfler, Phish, Emmylou Harris, any Broadway musical, bluegrass, Snoop Dog, Grateful Dead.... Seriously, I am eclectic when it comes to music. I sang a cappella in college, so I love anything I can sing to.

What's your favorite breakfast? Breakfast burrito, hands down. Fig at Fairmont puts French fries in theirs. Everyone should do that 'cause it's delicious!

Milo & Olive, 2723 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 453-6776.

— Betty Hallock

betty.hallock@latimes.com

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Gala opens Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills

The event: The "Grand Inaugural Gala" to celebrate the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. Presented by Salvatore Ferragamo, the affair came with cocktails, a gala dinner, fashion show of the Italian designer's latest collection and the first-ever performance in the Center's 500-seat Bram Goldsmith Theater.

The setting: The brand new "Wallis," designed by architect Zoltan Pali of SPF:architects to incorporate the city's Italian Renaissance-style post office and temporarily house a pop-up Ferragamo boutique.

The show: Not to forget its post office past, "A Dream in an Envelope" had John Lithgow, Diane Lane and Kevin Spacey reading classic letters from Will Rogers, Martha Graham, Groucho Marx, Peter Tchaikovsky and Tennessee Williams. Onstage too were tap-dancing postmen; dancer Lil Buck; a beautifully executed pas de deux; and Terri White belting out "This Joint Is Jumpin.'"

"Why don't you give these birds the dough," said Lithgow, as he read Will Rogers' good-humored request for government funds to build the post office.

The glittery crowd: Wallis Annenberg and Jamie Tisch co-chaired the event, and although Brad Pitt and Robert Redford, the honorary co-chairs, did not attend, there was no shortage of star power.

"Brad is fighting zombies somewhere and Robert is lost at sea," said Tisch, referencing their recent movies, adding that the two asked her to "extend their deepest gratitude to Wallis for the creation of this wonderful center."

Celebrities abounded, as did business, social and cultural leaders, including, among others actors, Charlize Theron, Jodie Foster, Amy Adams, Nicole Richie, Joe Jonas, Jason Bateman, Courteney Cox, Evangeline Lilly, Demi Moore, Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Chord Overstreet, Tim Robbins, Sidney Poitier, Gwen Stefani, Gavin Rossdale, Abbie Cornish, Geena Davis, Josh Duhamel and Dita Von Teese; Bram Goldsmith and Paula Kent Meehan, for whom the new theaters are named; Eva and Marc Stern, Lori and Michael Milken, Sherry Lansing, David Bohnett, Ron Burkle, Candy Spelling, Carolyn Powers, Deborah Borda, Ann Philbin, the night's speakers Ferruccio Ferragamo, Beverly Hills Mayor John Mirisch and the center's board chair, Jerry Magnin.

Quotes of note: "I don't have enough adjectives for this beautiful new auditorium," former California Gov. Gray Davis said.

The numbers: With tickets priced from $2,500 each and tables ranging up to $100,000, the celebration attracted 1,000 guests, enough to require two performances in the new theater.

image@latimes.com

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Counter Intelligence: Jonathan Gold reviews Terroni downtown

New restaurants have been opening downtown in impressive numbers this year, important places, many of them, carved out of the grand Beaux-Arts spaces some of us forgot even existed in Los Angeles, fitted with elegant cocktail menus, equipped with culinary pedigrees. People have stopped complaining that all the good new restaurants are on the Westside and started complaining that all the good new restaurants are downtown — and a decade ago not even the most ardent advocate of Historic Core redevelopment could have predicted $150 omakase sushi on Main Street, or refined tasting-menu restaurants, or Italian kitchens finicky about the provenance of their buffalo mozzarella. Even with setbacks like the recent closing of the gastropub Parish, it is clear that valet parking is winning out over the SROs.

The latest reclamation project to hit the Historic Core district is Terroni, a vast new restaurant from the owners of the splendid, relatively modest pizzeria of the same name near the Farmers Market, occupying a lavish bank building built in 1924. Where the Beverly Boulevard place is low-key enough to include a foosball table as part of the décor, the downtown restaurant has soaring gilt ceilings and a glassed-in wine room. Where Italians sometimes outnumber Angelenos in the midtown Terroni, downtown is pretty monolingual.

PHOTOS: Inside Terroni

In Toronto, where the small chain is based, Terroni is famous for its idiosyncrasies, for its small insistence on maintaining its Southern Italian identity. In L.A., where some diners have nightmares about displeasing their sushi chefs, it's just another restaurant.

Still, the new Terroni appears almost as if the owners were checking the conventions of a postmodern Italian restaurant off a standard list. A movie screen that day in, day out shows nothing but Fellini's "La Dolce Vita"? Check. Taped Italian-language lessons in the bathrooms? Check. Tables numbered in Italian, a wall of hanging meats, and a chandelier that looks as if it were purchased at the estate sale of a Tuscan castle? It goes without saying.

The urban infatuation with Italian food has been going on for a long time in North America, the tropes are well-established, and the job of a smart designer is to position the clichés in a way that lets us know that he or she knows that we're in on the joke too. It's a delicate line between inlaying recipes on a dining room wall as kitsch and inlaying recipes as forward design — and the difference, I think, may be as small as the elegance of the font.

But nobody has ever questioned the solid virtues of the cooking at Terroni: the plates pairing sliced San Daniele prosciutto or cured duck with vegetables and creamy burrata cheese; the pleasant fried zucchini flowers stuffed with herbed ricotta or the stolid deep-fried rice cones called arancini; the pungent bresaola or the correct beef carpaccio plate. Some Italian restaurants may be curing more of their own meats by now, and others may have larger cheese selections, but the point is made.

The pastas are all made in house, and cooked a few seconds short of al dente, but you are generally better off sticking with Southern Italian classics like cavatelli alla Norma with fried eggplant, or spaghetti ca' muddica, like a pasta puttanesca enriched with breadcrumbs, than you are with Northern Italian-leaning pastas like tagliatelle in a dullish Bolognese ragù or bucatini in a wildly unbalanced Amatriciana sauce. (I really like the maccheroncini Geppetto with sausage and sharply bitter dandelion greens, and the vibrant spaghetti al limone with spinach and capers.)

Terroni was really early on the "no substitutions, no modifications" thing — I'm pretty sure staff at the Beverly Boulevard restaurant used to wear T-shirts with that legend printed on the front. In practice it didn't end up amounting to that much, although you were generally denied grated cheese if your waiter suspected you were about to put it on seafood pasta, and salads are served with good, spicy olive oil but no vinegar, which you are told is inappropriate.

But you are probably here for the pizza — crisp, hand-stretched, and relatively thin; big enough to serve as a main course for two or three; served as a standard Margherita with tomato, mozzarella and basil or topped with relatively imaginative combinations like the white mangiabbun with rapini and sausage; the Italia-Germana with mushrooms and ham; or the Santo Spirito with fresh marbles of mozzarella, cherry tomatoes and Sicilian anchovies. I like the unpronounceable c't mang, a white pizza with ripe, sliced pear, a bit of gorgonzola melted into the mozzarella, and transparent, honey-brushed slices of the smoky Italian ham called speck, like a cheese plate in the form of a pizza.

As at all proper Southern Italian pizzerias, the pies are delivered to the table intact, unbesmirched by the touch of a pizza wheel. Pre-cutting slices makes the crust cold or soggy, you are informed. And as fervently as you may complain about this in person or on Yelp, the kitchen is unlikely to change its mind.

jonathan.gold@latimes.com

Terroni

Solid Southern Italian cooking in a grand downtown space. But the restaurant still won't slice your pizza.

LOCATION

802 S. Spring St., Los Angeles, (213) 954-0300.

PRICES

Appetizers $6-$20; salads $7-$15; pastas $15-$20; pizzas $13-$19; desserts $7-$9.

DETAILS

Open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 11 a.m. to midnight Friday; 10 a.m. to midnight Saturday; 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday. Credit cards accepted. Full bar. Valet parking. Takeout.

RECOMMENDED DISHES

Spaghetti ca' muddica; maccheroncini Geppetto; pizza c't mang; bombolone alla crema.

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