Frank Bonanno oversees a burgeoning group of local restaurants, the newest of which is Lou's Food Bar, a down-to-earth American comfort-food den with an affinity for market-driven French influences and, on occasion, Italian-American dalliances. This is a neighborhood joint, pulsating with lively crowds, where you can sample a plate of portly housemade sausages followed by Frenchy escargot bobbing in butter and end with spaghetti and meatballs. Bonanno could pull flavor out of a newspaper, but his spaghetti and meatballs, thick-walled blades of bucatini swathed in a straight-up tomato sauce whomped with garlic and overlaid with pudgy meatballs stuffed with housemade mozzarella, is a wistful tribute to what life was like before pasta was relegated to purgatory.