By Paul Reidinger

OUR CITY IS often compared to many others around the world: the usual suspects include Paris (of course), Sydney, and Hong Kong, and I would add Istanbul, with its Golden Gate-like Bosporus and Mt. Tamalpais-looking Asian backdrop. One city I have never heard San Francisco compared to is Athens, a dry, scrubby, smoggy place that bears a far stronger resemblance to L.A., though with ruins L.A. cannot, as yet, match.

If you seek an Athens moment but have no wish to run the color-coded gauntlet of the Transportation Security Administration by flying to the southland or, indeed, to leave the city at all, you are not completely out of luck, for you can hoof it up the rough slopes and trails of Corona Heights – also known as Quarry Hill – and pretend you are working your way up the Acropolis. The grass-seamed trails, steep and rocky, are remarkably similar to their Athenian counterparts, as is the commanding view that opens up as you climb. There is, of course, no ancient marble Beulé Gate to pass as you puffingly ascend, just a dog run, and at the summit you will find no Parthenon, just a clutter of jagged rocks that are geologically part of the Sierra Nevada but somehow got left behind.

You will, moreover, find no restaurants on your upward journey, such as you would find dotting the lower shoulders of the Acropolis – little tavernas serving traditional Greek dishes and offering an interval of respite to foot-weary, hungry tourists. It is a pity, then, in the atmospheric sense, that our own Minerva Café is in the Western Addition, surrounded by hospitals and screeching traffic instead of standing sentinel at the foot of an ethereal climb. Apart from the unromantic location, the place is as authentically Greek (or, as noted globetrotter G.W. Bush would say, Grecian) a Greek restaurant as there is to be found in San Francisco, from the vivacious owner and host, Vasilios – who greets people at the door with ear-filling gusto – to the blue-and-white color scheme and cheerfully mismatched sets of chairs that furnish the boxy dining room.

Minerva is resolutely unyuppified, and I speak as someone who has very much enjoyed such yuppified Greek places as Mezes and Yianni's. The California makeover of old-world cuisines and decors isn't a bad thing so long as it doesn't become the only thing, and on that count Minerva is an insurance policy, a throwback. The feel of the large, open dining room is that of those ethnic halls where people from the old country gather to speak the old language and eat the traditional foods. And Minerva's cooking is traditional in the best sense; it is the stuff of Greek culture festivals – pastitsio, moussaka, lemon-oregano chicken, salads with plenty of olives and feta cheese. It is food that, like classic Italian cooking, has been perfected by time.

Pastitsio ($7.50 at lunch) and moussaka ($11 at dinner) are of course two cousins, or perhaps precursors, of the layered, baked dish Italians call lasagna. In the former, strata of ground spiced beef, cheese, and béchamel sauce alternate with strata of pasta (Minerva uses ziti, short and narrow tubes); in the latter, the pasta is replaced by slices of eggplant. Eggplant would rank near the top of my list of most-disliked vegetables, if I ever compiled such a list; my many experiments with and massagings of it at home have always ended disappointingly. But Minerva handles the difficult eggplant with skill; the slices in the moussaka are soft and mild – well-matched complements to the cheese, the white sauce, the gently seasoned beef.

For a bit more kick there's the lemon-oregano roasted chicken ($12 for a half bird), served with roasted potatoes, zucchini, and tomato quarters. I prefer slightly crisper skin on roasted chicken, but there is no topping the simple, formidable trio of lemon, oregano, and garlic (quite possibly the culinary equivalent of Tinker to Evers to Chance, the old Cubby double-play combo), and the meat could not be more moist.

And for richness (and, as the menu puts it, "a little Italian on the side"), how about osso buco ($12.50), a veal shank braised in a cinnamon-scented tomato sauce – cinnamon being notably un-Italian, except perhaps in half-oriental Venice, westerly terminus of the ancient Silk Road – and served with fat orzo and "Greco-Roman" spinach, which seemed to me to be slightly spicy creamed spinach.

Other well-executed standards include a tangy avgolemono soup ($2.50) – fortified with shredded chicken – and a Greek "village" salad ($7.50) of julienne red peppers, quartered tomatoes, cucumber coins, sliced red onions, black olives, plenty of feta cheese, a lemony vinaigrette, and a few dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) thrown in for color, texture, and weight. The only dish we found wanting was, surprisingly, the lamb souvlaki ($7.50 at lunch), cubes of grilled meat arranged on a round of pita bread with tzatziki (the cucumber-yogurt sauce), onions, and tomatoes. It looked like a burrito someone had forgotten to roll up – a brief fall from the heights, you might say.