Primavera is apparently an unprepossessing, multipurpose Italian restaurant serving large portions of hearty food, from three-egg breakfasts to take-out pizza to evening seafood specials. The owners are Salvadorans with substantial North End experience who bring real skills to certain dishes. That means there are some gourmet surprises here, especially on the dinner menu.

You have very little clue of this walking in. It’s a clean room with lots of tables and booths, but the colors don’t quite match, and the main décor consists of more than 20 hanging lamps and ceiling fans — enough to start a small lamp store. The quarry-tile floor is cold in the winter, although the room is warm and well-lit. Despite lavender walls, framed Italian prints, and a real wine press in the back, the room looks like an oversize pizza parlor.

Sit down and order, though, and you start noticing touches like the slice of lemon in the ice water and the good grated cheese (right on the table with salt, pepper, and red-pepper flakes). The soft bread and packaged butter are not special, but soon enough you can have some of the best chicken soup ($1.95) in Boston. It comes in a bowl twice the size offered by most restaurants, with a lively clear stock and plenty of white meat, potatoes, and carrots. Italian grandmothers made soup like this, but so do lots of people in the higher altitudes of Central and South America. Scarola ($1.95) is the same stock, but with greens and meatballs.

Fried calamari ($4.95; $6.95 as an entrée) is also close to the standard for Boston. The squid are lightly breaded and quickly fried, but what stands out is the rémoulade-like mustard-mayonnaise dip. A stuffed mushroom ($3.95) is only a single portobello, but it’s stuffed with real duxelles, those micro-diced mushrooms patiently sautéed in butter that most chefs learn to make in classical training and never use again. Even more old-fashioned and remarkable is the lemony sauce, possibly real hollandaise, that tops the mushroom. You could get mushrooms like this in continental dining rooms 30 or 40 years ago, but now you can have one in the middle of nowhere between Roslindale and Mattapan.

"Chicken, ziti, broccoli" ($8.95) is something of a signature entrée here; it’s just lots of those three fine ingredients tied up in an impeccable, light white sauce. A whiteboard special on baked haddock and shrimp ($14.95) offered four large shrimp nicely done in the dry heat, and two small fillets of haddock baked under a layer of sauce. The grilled-vegetable garnish included onions and bell peppers, but also tomatoes topped with butter crumbs and broiled, and excellent roast potatoes. Again, what this evokes for me are the better moments of the old 1950s-era continental restaurants — the fine dining rooms and grand-hotel venues — rather than the North End.

Chicken Marsala ($8.95), however, is just what you would seek out in the North End. Here, it’s a complex, almost-Chinese sauce of reduced wine with lots of mushrooms and boned chicken pieces, which are tender and not dried out, if somewhat overwhelmed by the flavor of the sauce. Veal cacciatore ($9.95) doesn’t look like it would be served in the North End — more sauce, smaller pieces — but the essential flavors of good veal, onions, and bell peppers are all present, and in a thicker sauce than Italian hunters had time to produce.

Of the side starches, I preferred the triple scoop of real mashed potatoes to the equally large portion of overdone angel-hair pasta with a good marinara.

The cannoli ($2.95) are outstanding, with crisp shells and a sweet, fresh ricotta filling. The tiramisu ($3.50) is a good-looking square with more liqueur and whipped cream than many, but enough sponge cake to hold its shape. It’s also lower in coffee and chocolate flavors than the norm. Cheesecake ($3.50) is very sweet and not ricotta-based, like some Italian cheesecakes. It’s the creamy kind, with a few cherries, as in New York. A piece of chocolate cake ($3.50) was beautifully decorated with chocolate sauce, but the cake itself was dry and blah.

The atmosphere at Primavera reflects its obvious usefulness, with a working-class crowd at breakfast, and lots of police and social workers both eating in and doing take-out at lunch. But the evening hours are an undiscovered treasure: this restaurant is so much better than it has to be that it will eventually pick up a considerable trade of budget-minded gourmets from Roslindale and Jamaica Plain. It’s not a romantic restaurant (unless the nearby cemeteries are a turn-on), but it’s a swell place to eat well and talk with friends. It’s bright enough to read the lengthy menu, and quiet enough to hear what others have to say.

After a recent column noted my unwillingness to review Chilean sea bass (Patagonian toothfish) until the fishery for this slow-reproducing species is better regulated and self-sustaining, reader Jacob Sloane sent me the address for the Seafood Watch Web site run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. There you can check the status of all kinds of seafood, and print out a wallet card with quick references on local or worldwide species. It’s at www.mbayaq.org .

An e-mail from another reader, Glendine, noted my review of the deep-fried Twinkies at Anthem (Twinkies, alas, are in no way endangered) with a frightening reference to a British restaurateur in New York who offered them a year or so ago, based upon a popular food in Great Britain, deep-fried Mars Bars. Although I am not so sure about adding to our collective knowledge of deep-fried junk food, you can read the whole sordid story at www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,54280,00.html, or worse, you can Google "fried Twinkies" and get that story and dozens more from around the US. It would appear that the outbreak began at state fairs and such, but has infected upscale menus here and there as well. These things always become more virulent when they jump from one species of eatery to another. I don’t imagine we will see regulatory relief any time soon, as no one wants to offend the enormous block of voters for whom the right to deep-fry is as American as corn dogs and apple pie.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com .