At these restaurants, you don't have to worry about the labels on your clothes, or paying too much for a trendy "saketini," or if your grandmother will be as comfortable eating there as much as your teen.

When you go to Laura's Gourmet Restaurant, in Windsor Terrace, which has been serving their classic Italian fare for more than 20 years, you are graciously welcomed. The staff includes owner Laura Leone, manager Jaennette (her daughter) and chef Sal (her husband), and they're all confident about how the dishes taste, the freshness of their ingredients and their authenticity. (Leone says her family makes regular trips to Italy to pick up hard-to-find ingredients.) All that's left is customer service, which is easy for the effusive Leone, who makes spot-on wine recommendations and generally bubbles over with enthusiasm.

She recently spruced up the restaurant's decor with dramatic velvet drapes and fresh paint. ("I'm a dancer, so I like it to look like a theater," Laura said earnestly in her heavily accented English.) Although Laura's does sport linen tablecloths and glittering chandeliers reminiscent of the Metropolitan Opera, the restaurant, with its open kitchen, is comfortably informal.

Laura's menu of antipasti, soups, salads, pastas, brick oven pizzas, seafood and meat entrees has remained constant, but she frequently offers special holiday menus, including a $35 prix-fixe four-course Valentine's Day dinner, beginning with a champagne cocktail, for Monday, Feb. 14. While the price seems remarkably low on a day when most restaurants gleefully gouge customers, it's a typical strategy for Leone. Her goal is simply to please her customers. She doesn't even feel self-pity over having to work on holidays.

"I don't mind, because I'm surrounded by family and nice people," said Leone. "We'll celebrate later on. I want to accommodate my customers and make them happy. I have the best of both worlds."

Whether diners are celebrating a special occasion or grabbing a quick bite after work, Laura's menu is flexible enough for both.

"Everything on our menu is carefully prepared from old family recipes and simply the freshest food we can find," said Leone. "Some of our recipes originate from the Genovese region of Italy, where my mother [Rosetta Forconi] and I come from, some from Tuscany where my father is from, and some from Sicily, where my husband comes from."

Sal is joined in the kitchen by chef Giorgio, who has been with the restaurant for more than 15 years; and Forconi's fantastic contributions to the menu include mushroom ravioli in cream sauce and the "grandmother's cake."

Whether it's the lemon in the water or the charmingly mix-and-matched plates or fresh flowers on the tables, the details are attended to here. The basics, such as Forconi's earthy porcini and portobello mushroom ravioli or the light, housemade gnocchi with bright-green pesto sauce, are so good they're memorable.

Laura's also offers thin-crust pizzas fresh from her wood-burning oven. Her margherita pizza - served on a white platter with pretty blue flowers - with fresh mozzarella, fresh tomatoes and basil would give Grimaldi's a run for its money.

While an entree of prosciutto stuffed with not-so-fresh shrimp in a salty brown gravy missed its mark on this evening, Sal's chicken in a complex cognac cream sauce with mushrooms and red peppers was a nostalgic trip down memory lane. It tasted like the chicken a la king of my youth. Among the list of vegetables served as side dishes, the garlicky, sauteed fresh zucchini was served in a giant heap that we continued to enjoy the next day.

For dessert, ask Laura for her recommendations. We were thrilled with the gorgonzola, with its buttery texture, that she paired with a sweet pear and the aforementioned grandmother's cake, a lemony custard torte with pine nuts that was a refreshing pick-me-up after our feast.

For a light meal of wine and pizza, or a four-course extravaganza, Laura's continues to offer great Italian classics for all occasions.