LATIN AMERICAN FOOD has developed a schizophrenic quality in this city. You have, on the one hand, a wealth of taquerías, with their order lines and their plastic trays, along with a wealth of appealingly cheapo places, which serve basically the same food but add rudimentary table service, usually in slightly divey surroundings. And, on the other hand, you have all the "nuevo Latino" spots – Maya, Alma, and Destino among them – in which the familiar ingredients of Latin American cooking get a good dressing-up and the check is seldom insubstantial.

But (if I may paraphrase Gertrude Stein), there is no middle there. Perhaps "no" is a bit too strong, but it has long seemed to me that there's a distinct shortage here of the Latin American equivalent to the trattoria: the place with the small flourishes of civility – tablecloths, cloth napkins, wine goblets, thoughtful lighting – and a fairly priced menu of food that's more sophisticated than the burrito and the taco but more traditional than nuevo Latino, with its innovative combinations, presentations, sauces. Middle-class Latin American food, you might say, comfortable in its middle-class skin – or tortilla.

The deal at Panchita's No. 3 – which does successfully negotiate this middle passage – is less the tortilla than the pupusa, a Salvadoran specialty of cornmeal patties stuffed with cheese and other ingredients, then folded in half like little omelettes. Lovers of tamales and polenta will find them attractive; so will cheapskates, since the simpler ones – of beans, say, or peppers – cost only $1.50, while the fancier ones, with shrimp, for instance, run to just $2.75.

I am always impressed by restaurants that don't rely on fancy, expensive ingredients to produce excellent dishes. Yucca root, a warm-climate relation of the potato, is one of the plain Janes of the gastronomic world. In Brazilian restaurants you tend to find it dried and ground up into a golden powder. At Panchita's it's cut into thick rectangles and deep-fried to a delicate gold, then topped with shredded cabbage pickled in citrus and accompanied by a few chunks of grilled pork. The result is something like eating home fries with an appealingly tender-stringy texture and a faintly sweet richness reminiscent of yams. You are reminded, in addition, that El Salvador is a tropical country.

The bigger dishes seem, on balance, more familiarly Mexican. There's a combo plate ($14), consisting of an enchilada, a tamale, and a taco. There is an array of enchiladas, including one stuffed with crab ($14). The intrepid person who ordered this item (as he tends to order crustaceans whenever the opportunity, however dubious, presents itself) was well pleased with his choice, but no one else at the table cared for it. The delicate, briny sweetness of crab – even in-season crab – doesn't lend itself to the powerful spicings of Latin American cooking. And this isn't crab season. I found myself wondering if it had been frozen and flown down from Alaska, or worse.

Far better (and, at $9, considerably less expensive) were the more modest enchiladas stuffed with chicken breast stewed to juicy tenderness. An added plus: the tomatillo-based sauce, a welcome variation on the usual blood-red version. And since we couldn't get enough of that sauce, we ordered it up in another dish, chile verde ($9), essentially a kind of spicy pork daube, with the cubed meat braised to the brink of disintegration in the tomatillo sauce.

It tends to be a bit of a challenge to get away from pork in Latin American restaurants. Pork's deep symbolism in Europe as a divider between Christian and Jew (equaled as a sorter only by circumcision) has been amplified in the New World by the tremendous value of pigs – hardy, prolific, and, alas, profoundly tasty – in cultures still more agrarian than industrial. And those dishes that aren't pork tend to feature beef, from rib-eye steaks to tongue.

If I seem to be dropping dire hints in the direction of vegetarians, it's only because I am. But the situation isn't hopeless, because, in addition to the pupusas (and the chips with first-rate, chipotle-tweaked salsa), the menu offers an excellent version of chiles rellenos ($9) – pasilla peppers battered, stuffed with cheese, topped with more cheese and a tomato sauce, then baked. Remarkably satisfying, and meatless, though I fear far indeed from low-fat. But ... just the thing for the cheesehead in your life.

Although the chronicle of Panchita's food is almost entirely a happy one, the best aspect of the restaurant is just the Cheers-y way it feels. Neighborhood people drift in and out, share a beer and a laugh at the bar while, out among the tables, the service staff attend to the small details that add up to elegance. The tablecloths are spotlessly white. The napkins are precisely rolled and fitted into the wine goblets so as to resemble pairs of blanched bread sticks. The sponged-blue walls might remind you of your first glimpse of the sea, or maybe of the summertime sky you lay on your back gazing up into as a kid, out there somewhere in Middle America.