By Paul Reidinger

IN THE MATTER of neighborhood restaurants, the neighborhood itself matters – as an element of exterior design, a setter of tone and atmosphere, and of course as a fund of people, or neighbors. It is cliché to say that cities are made up of neighborhoods, so I won't, but I will suggest that there is no more intimate neighborhood in San Francisco than Duboce Triangle. Its leafy coziness (which owes much to the broadened, heavily planted, and flower-potted sidewalks) has always reminded me of Greenwich Village. Just a few steps away is Market Street, a garish parade like a combination of Sheridan Square and the Champs Elysées, but those few steps amount to a kind of boundary between worlds. On Planet Duboce the tone is relaxed, everyone has a dog, and there's no wait for a table at Los Flamingos, a roomy, rectilinear Cuban-Mexican restaurant lined with pink, like a gift box filled with holiday pajamas.

Although the restaurant (which supplants a Thai place I always meant to go to but never did and now never will) opened just a few weeks after Labor Day, it has already established itself as baby stroller-friendly – a not-slight consideration in these neo-Eisenhowerish times in which people's chief preoccupations seem to be replicating themselves as fast as possible and fortifying their homes. Our fearful suckling at the teat of convention deeply depresses me. Still, it is nice to be in a restaurant in which a baby stroller (with baby) is rolled up to a table like another chair, while at a nearby table a lone bruncher – nourished perhaps by a sandwiche Cubano ($7.75) of pork, ham, and cheese, with plenty of pickles and mustard, all presented on a raft of grilled bread, like a huge panino – is plowing through the Sunday Chronicle, an operation that can last as long as 15 minutes if one examines the coupon inserts. There is no sense of pretension or of being rushed.

Los Flamingos offers a menu that divides into Mexican and Cuban sections that are roughly equivalent in scale. But while Mexican food has been well whirred in the blender of American popular culture (and, duly pureed, is now the glop of corporate chain taco shops and witty TV ads that feature laconic Chihuahuas), Cuban food is still associated with a comic-pariah island state and so retains a whiff of the exotic, which tends to enhance its interest when it turns up in restaurants.

The food is actually less about the exotic than about starch. Every Cuban restaurant I've ever eaten in has offered some version of fried plantains (maduros, tostones, mariquitas), beans, rice, beans and rice in a combination known as congri, and perhaps french fries. Often several of these starches will appear on the same plate in great heaps that belie their role as accompaniments to the star of the dish, which is generally meat and often pork. Pork is immensely important in impoverished and Catholic cultures, and Cuba is both, but while one respects pork's place and its value, one also has never quite gotten over Reinaldo Arenas's description (in Before Night Falls, his memoir about growing up in Cuba) of a pig's being slaughtered.

For me, then, ropa vieja ($8.25), shredded beef braised to tenderness in a spicy broth. It reminded me of beef burgundy (minus the pearl onions), and its name – "old clothes" – also reminded me that the dish traditionally is made with tough meat from aged cattle. Hence the long, slow cooking to tenderness. There is no happy ending for farm animals, but at least Arenas didn't describe a cow's slaughter.

Fricasse de pollo ($8.75) was substantially the same dish as the ropa – same slow bath in the same sauce – with chicken pieces on the bone substituted for the shredded beef. More vegetarian-, or at least pesco-vegetarian-, friendly – and Mexican – were camarones al mojo de ajo ($12.75), shelled prawns sautéed in garlic in a fashion similar to what the Spanish call "a la plancha." Prawns also turned up in an excellent, lightly crisped quesadilla ($6.95) we split as a starter but was more than big enough to serve as a main course. Another starter, ceviche de pescado ($7.25), was served family-style, on a large oval platter – quite an unusual spectacle for those of us (presumably most of us) who are accustomed to seeing ceviche served in martini glasses. The ceviche was also heavy with shredded carrot, which brought a counterbalancing sweetness to the tartness of the lime juice and the bite of the onions and garlic.

A little shredded carrot would have been inauthentic in the guacamole ($5), but, as with the ceviche, its sweetness might have helped mute the sourness some. The guac had nice chunks of just-mashed avocado, but there was far too much lime juice, at least for my taste. And we didn't care for the crocks of salsa served with the chips; it was too sweet, though spicy-hot, and overpureed. The star dessert, on the other hand, a flan ($4.25), struck just the right custard consistency (between gelatinous and creamy) and – better – featured a dulce de leche caramel that was quite a bit richer than the usual kind and of an almost chocolatey intensity. It's the kind of thing that leaves you wanting to step outside and light up a Havana, assuming the neighbors wouldn't mind.

Los Flamingos. 151 Noe (at Henry), S.F. (415) 252-7450. Tues.-Thurs., 5-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Beer and wine. American Express, Diners Club, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Not noisy. Wheelchair accessible.