Find your way into this location-challenged, oddly named restaurant and you're in for a thoroughly entertaining, out-of-Tucson experience.

Just make sure you experience it Sunday night, when Mona Lisa Corleone Restaurant sizzles and pops like a giant wok of street-fair Kettle Corn.

The furniture, decor, lighting and feel of this hard-to-find-the-first-time place behind the Maverick King of Clubs are posh but friendly and distinctly somewhere-else. You feel like you're in a movie, one fuzzily set somewhere back East, somewhere in time.

Veteran Tucsonans will remember this as the Pawnbroker (Jerry Riopelle, anyone?), and it's still more or less laid out like a multilevel bar, with great booths lining the walls. It was later Corleone's Bar then Corleone's Restaurant before the owners of the former Mona Lisa Bakery at Kolb and Broadway took over management this April and combined names.

Sunday nights, Paul Elia and Tony Bruce make their way from the stage through the maze of tables and a bustling army of Sicilian-clad servers, belting out mostly Sinatra and Bennett, respectively. An appreciative crowd - and I mean appreciative - applauds, cheers, calls out requests and snaps fingers. And get this, most of them can snap right along with the beat. The mature yet energetic vibe is pretty contagious, even for someone as snotty and jaded as I am.

Oh yeah, the food. It's pretty fun, too.

You'd expect a place like this to be your basic Italian-American, red-sauce joint, but its Sicilian cuisine is much more interesting.

I was instantly hooked on the unbeatable fresh bread, which takes the form of biscuitlike slabs that flat-out sing with drizzles of olive oil.

I loved the crunchy, sweet marinated vegetables in the Antipasto Siciliano ($9), which also featured roasted peppers, planks of fresh mozzarella and slices of Genoa salami, Mortadella sausage and Provolone cheese, all strafed with a good, sticky balsamic vinegar.

A bigger serving of succulent roasted peppers was my favorite part of the Sicilian Sausage Platter ($15), as the nautilus of sausage was a tad on the tough and dry side. It was accompanied by spaghetti interspersed with what seemed like 20 or more cloves of garlic, excellently roasted to a good sweetness without tasting the least bit burnt.

The Grilled Fresh Salmon ($16) featured a moist, flavorful filet accompanied by fettuccine in an excellent, subtly gauged lemon cream sauce and a nicely done side of vegetables.

For dessert, the Spumoni ($5) ice cream was decent and served in a large portion. The Chocolate Cannoli ($4), though tasty enough, almost got the best of my burley companion, who put considerable effort into cracking its thick, dark shell.

A place just four months old that's already doing this much business is bound to have a few kinks to work out, but all in all, we had a very satisfying dining experience.

Our server was friendly and efficient, and the bussers were lightning fast at refilling water, pulling plates and bringing more bread.

How they tended the sea of tables without running smack into one or both roving crooners is a question only a choreographer could answer - one charting out the dinner scene of a raucous but tasteful musical.