Fundamental Northern Italian.

Via Emilia 240 Park Ave. S. (betw. 19th & 20th Sts.), 212-505-3072

Emilia-Romagna is a relatively new name for an old swath of Italy. North of Tuscany and the Apennines but well south of Venice, the region's cities?including Bologna, Parma, Modena and Ferrara?were medieval power centers. Today they're associated with food and race cars. The most prominent offerings at Bologna's airport are cured hams and Ferrari caps. I learned that, plus a lot about Emilia-Romagna's cuisine, during a recent ten-day trip there.

Manhattan has a restaurant that flies the region's flag: Via Emilia, named for the Roman-era road that runs through it. The trattoria is a few years old and quite successful, owing to low prices and a defiantly dignified stance among the tourist-trap restaurants along Park Ave. Every night, weary travelers peruse Via Emilia's posted menu and quickly decide to make themselves at home in its no-frills dining room. Emilia-Romagna is the wellspring of an elemental Italian harmony, second in the U.S. only to cheese, sauce and crust. I'm talking meat and pasta. Both at Via Emilia are pretty good.

The restaurant serves up a significantly lighter version of regional fare, which is surely the only way it could survive. In an alley next to the cathedral in Ferrara, I ate at a restaurant Copernicus supposedly frequented, enjoying such dishes as rigatoni and cheese baked in a sweet, crusty pastry, and a local, traditional sausage that's aged for a year then boiled soft and lumped onto a pile of steamy mashed potatoes. We encountered homemade ribbon noodles thick as Japanese udon and cold cuts with more in common with boar's head than Boar's Head.

Manhattan's Via Emilia is more of an opportunity to get your feet wet as far as Northern Italian goes. You can even beg off entirely, via penne al pomodoro ($7.50) fragrant with fresh tomatoes, or spaghetti frutti di mare ($9.50), tossed with the shellfish's own natural sauces.

Otherwise, start with gnocco fritto. The antipasto ($6.50) consists of assorted salumi and a basket of puffed fried dough. The latter arrives hot and surprisingly dry. The idea is to pull the bread apart and wrap pieces of it around strips of cured meat to make little sandwiches. They don't do mustard in Emilia-Romagna?the cold cuts there are always strong enough not to require further seasoning. Here, of course, leaving ham in the open air for a year would probably get you arrested. Yet Via Emilia manages to come through with some decent coppa. The mortadella and salami are okay, especially with the crisp fried bread. Via Emilia smiles on its customers by generously weighting the gnocco fritto meat plate with prosciutto?the only Italian cold cut imported to the U.S. in large amounts. (It's an exception because a coalition of Parma-area producers got together and hammered out policies to satisfy FDA requirements.)

Another true regional first-course is tortellini in brodo ($6): meat-filled pasta rings in chicken soup. Via Emilia's broth tastes mysteriously like hot water, but the tortellini proved entirely authentic. A hearty touch of smoke in the meat filling, and the noodle surging toward maximal hardness in the knot of each tortellini were crucial details rendered right.

If there's a reason there aren't more Emilia-Romagnan restaurants in New York, it's probably the wines. Natives drink a lot of lambrusco, a sparkling red wine, usually served cold. The cheap versions can be sweet or dry, though either is likely to have a sour note and a certain harshness. The stuff will never catch on here, but lambrusco does go well with a hearty, meaty meal?you can practically feel the stuff break down the fats you're consuming. Try it if you're going to go multi-course at Via Emilia. The restaurant usually offers a dry one (currently Serie A) and a sweet one (look for the word amabile in the name) by the glass for $6 each.

I'd never really enjoyed bolognese sauces before visiting the region?always too sweet. Over there, though, meat is never a tasteless sponge for a sauce. As is the case with Northern Italian cold cuts, ragu meats are substantial on their own. Even simple chops have layers of flavor, either from some type of salting or curing, or maybe just because of the way animals are raised. One ragu-sauce dish we sampled featured tortelloni sauced with butter and sage and stuffed with mashed ripe pumpkin practically glistening with natural sugars. You needed meat in every forkful to get the full effect.

Via Emilia's tagliatelle al ragu ($8.50) evades these weighty issues. It's basically egg noodles and chopped meatballs. The egg pasta is advertised as fresh-made in-house, but it's hardly a sure bet against Ronzoni in a blind taste test. You get a big, filling pile, and the meat and pasta together aren't wholly without flavor. Somehow, the same ingredients in a different form?Via Emilia's lasagna ($14)?come off fresher. The difference might be a few more choice tomatoes, or maybe it was the springy sheet of fresh pasta that lent the homemade feeling.

Three tortelloni dishes are also pasta-course highlights. In sharp contrast to the restaurant's authentically cute tortellini, the sibling is a monster: pillows of pasta the size of a toddler's fist, full to bursting with spinach and cheese ($12), chicken and mushrooms ($14) or pumpkin ($12). The pumpkin one demonstrates another clever sidestep of the problem of presenting the region's cuisine off the continent. The orange mash is spiced with nutmeg and amaretto cookies, Thanksgiving style. It's a clever touch, mitigating the need for robust meat. The dish would have been even better if some flavor from the sage leaves atop it had been dispersed in its butter sauce.

Veal scalloppine ($15) doesn't bring the kind of chop you'd want to taste all alone with a touch of lemon. The dish squeaked by with a delicate sheet of quality parmesan and a shower of eraser-sized bits of asparagus.

An entree of grilled bluefish ($13) was a pleasant surprise (Emilia-Romagna has a coast, with a beach resort called Rimini, but I didn't make it there). An encounter with what must've been a white-hot fire left this usually unctuous fish as flaky and juicy as seabass, with flavor twice as muscular.