Casual Italian for your Ft. Lauderdale jaunts

Every once in a while you have to head north on 95 to visit grandma, hit the IMAX, or drop grandma off at Butterfly World so you can go back to the IMAX, and see the crap out of How To Train Your Dragon again. For a place that gives you somewhere to eat other than Las Olas, get to D'Angelo.

The chiller little bro of the famed Casa D'Angelo spots in Boca and Ft. Laudy, D'Angelo serves traditional Italian light fare (much of it cooked in a wood-burning oven) and tapas in a clean, narrow space with a wine bar and TVs showing vids about Italian food, which's kinda like watching a Dane Cook special while hanging out with Dane Cook, except you won't want to ram a carving knife into your temple. Tapas include a seafood medley of calamari/shrimp/smelt fried in semolina flour; crispy fontina polenta w/ reggiano & roasted porcini; and creamy burrata cheese over arugula and figs; plus a raw fish roster that includes both octopus and swordfish carpaccio, the latter w/ orange & shaved fennel, which is so much hotter than the fennel they had in the 80s. For slightly heavier stuff, there're wood-oven frittatas like the Cozze (mussels, fresh plum tomato, sweet garlic), and pizzas made by three pie guys from Italy (working with similarly imported flour) include the Estiva (stracchino cheese, asparagus, fresh tomato) and a bevy of white pies like the Piemontese (taleggio cheese, porcini mushroom, truffle oil) and the Ferrara, with gorgonzola, walnuts, and fior di latte mozzarella, which you'll order in large instead of venti, and boy, will that show them!

To accommodate further fatness, there're nightly specials like red peppers stuffed with aged fontina and veal, and portions of a baby pig that's de-boned and roasted after marinating in herbs for two days, which is also the only way to see How To Train Your Dragon. Damn, that movie's good.