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Angelina's Ristorante, the Tucson area's newest tapas restaurant, is a study in contrasts.

Service fluctuates wildly from spot-on professional to chaotically clumsy. Upscale inclinations are interrupted by sports-bar accents. The menu swings from inventive tapas to sloppily dispatched pizzas.

You walk away thinking that Angelina's hasn't really figured out what it wants to be — tapas-and-martini bar or pizza parlor and sports bar?

The restaurant opened early this summer, replacing Sasso's Pizza & Deli, in a strip mall in Oro Valley's Rancho Vistoso neighborhood. It's owned by Jennifer and Mario Harmon, who oversaw the final months of Sasso's before transforming it into Angelina's.

Faux-leather chairs and high-back booths and tall tables are set against dark purple and maroon walls, creating a tony lounge ambience. A bar runs half the length of one wall. A larger-than-life panel TV fills out most of the remaining wall. (You can see the screen from nearly every angle of the dining room.)

The bar is the perfect refuge for a solo diner or those waiting for a table. Bar tables line one wall, and on a recent Friday night they were full of diners nibbling on tapas and sipping wine or martinis.

Mario Harmon is the creative force behind the menu, which fuses cultures as far-reaching as Indian and Spanish, Mexican and Thai. Seafood is a big draw on the tapas menu and makes guest appearances on several pizzas.

He plans to tweak the menu monthly, adding and subtracting to give diners new surprises alongside old favorites, Jennifer Harmon said.

Mario Harmon also developed the exhaustive martini menu. There are about 50 varieties that employ variously fruited vodkas — orange, strawberry, cherry, white grape — and a wide array of spirits — schnapps, cognac, limoncello, créme de cacao and rum among them.

The pizza possibilities are equally endless — 69 varieties, from the lowly pepperoni to a duck confit, paired with Fontina and goat cheeses and caramelized onions. You can also create your own.

In two visits — on a bustling Friday night in mid-August and about a week later for lunch— the pizza disappointed. An Old Prospector ($20.95) — a meat-lover's delight of pancetta, pepperoni, Italian sausage, ground sirloin and Genoa salami — was a bit well done on the edges. But it had a more-pronounced-than-necessary burned flavor, most likely because it had been cooked in an oven not fully cleaned of the pizzas that came before it.

A meat supreme calzone ($16) the next week was even more evidently overcooked, but the calzone's construction was more baffling than its burn. Angelina's shapes the dough like a moon crescent, then plops the toppings in the middle beneath a thin blanket of dough. The crust goes from heavy on the outside to thin in the middle, creating a wobbly support system for the tangy pairing of cold cuts and meat.

It might look creative, but it's a challenge to eat without the toppings falling onto your plate.

That is, if you have a plate. During the first visit on that bustling Friday night, we found ourselves staring at our newly delivered pizza for nearly 10 minutes before our server brought us plates. She would have forgotten altogether had we not made eye contact as she busied herself wrapping silverware in napkins at a service counter near the kitchen.

The gaffe was one of many that night. We would like to chalk it up to the restaurant being busy. But many of the service missteps — customers being seated, then ignored to the point that they left; turning others away at the door with a dour prediction of a long wait; returning a pizza to a customer who complained that it was burned with the kitchen's declaration that it was just fine — were inexcusable and avoidable.

They also detracted from Angelina's eclectic menu, which includes dozens of creative tapas. The fork-tender braised angus beef swimming in a roasted smoky tomato sauce reminiscent of a mole (Yucatan braised beef, $9) was decadently rich. The crispy calamari flash-fried and topped with smoky chorizo and canellini beans spiced with slices of jalapeño (spicy fusion calamari, $10) was exquisite.

Executive sous chef Tyler Finlayson executes Harmon's tapas creations with nearly flawless effect.

Each is nicely plated, with coulis that doubles as eye candy and flavor enhancement. The raspberry chipotle sauce drizzled on the Southwestern coconut shrimp ($9), for example, was a sweet and spicy complement to the crunchy, slightly overcooked sweet battered shrimp.

The tapas are generous enough to share, or, when combined with a house salad or another tapas, big enough for a meal.

Service at the lunch visit the next week was a happy turnaround — perfectly timed and nearly flawless. Our server was professional and engaging, advising that the Texas cheese-steak sandwich ($10), fat with thin-sliced beef and kicked up with tongue-burning jalapeños, was big enough for two; and explaining the difference between Japanese and American Kobe beef (one is actually from Japan, the other is Kobe-style beef from this country) when we ordered an American-style Kobe bacon cheeseburger ($11).

Thick slices of double-smoked bacon added smokey hues to the juicy, melt-in-your-mouth burger, contrasting with the Cheddar and Gruyère cheeses. A garlic aïloi was spread sparingly on a crispy toasted ciabatta — the bun was a bit overcooked around the edges, but not enough to ruin the burger — and it came with crispy, garlic-flecked fries.

For us, it defined what we think Angelina's should aspire to be: a restaurant that can transform a lowly burger into a gourmet meal with a few fine flourishes.