Lunch Tues-Fri 11:30 am-2 pm; dinner Tues- Thurs 5-9 pm, Fri-Sat 5-10 pm.

It had not been a good week. It was too many good-bye parties. It was a head cold. It was not enough sleep. It was time for decadent, sentimental food.

I wanted veal parmigiana--or, in the parlance of my youth, veal parmesan--pretty much the meanest thing you can do to veal: smother it in tomato sauce and drown it in mozzarella cheese. Some dim puritanical voice in me insists that if you're going to eat veal, it ought to be allowed to be delicate, flavorful, and there, not just lying inert at the bottom of a sea of toppings. But that's how I remembered it from Rocky Lee.

Rocky Lee was an Italian restaurant in New York City, famously patronized by Frank Sinatra (pictures of the actor as a young boxer hung in the bar, a smoky, sophisticated, slightly disco-feeling room where children were unwelcome), but for us it was the restaurant where my brother could run around like a banshee. It remains my standard for great pizza, but that's another story--the story here is Filiberto's.

Filiberto's is a different strain of nostalgic Italian: red-checkered tablecloths and wine-barrel décor. I won't insult your intelligence or the restaurant's regular customers by nattering on about unpretentiousness. Let's leave it at this: Mozzarella and tomato is called mozzarella and tomato instead of caprese, and the food is delicious. If you are inclined to sentimentality, you might get a little weepy. I did.

Why? The meatballs are stupendous: creamy, beefy, almost as finely textured as pâté. I tend to prefer meatballs that use more than one meat, but these (all-beef, enriched with egg) are very good. Two regal ones appear with pasta ($10.95)--not quite enough meatballs for my taste, but it's still a lot of food. The veal ($14) was nowhere near the glorious train wreck I remembered from Rocky Lee, but a lighter, elegant variation: a lightly breaded cutlet with a smear of tomato and a nice lid of chewy cheese.

It's all here: scampi, piccata, clam sauce. We scarfed down a bowl of mussels in garlicky, winey sauce ($10)--nothing subtle here--and then soaked bread in the leftover broth. The hammers of sadness subsided to pinpricks.