By Paul Reidinger

FIRST IT WAS cows in Berkeley, now it's bohemians in Pacific Heights. All right, not quite Pacific Heights; lower Pacific Heights, or lower lower, or – if we are being completely honest – the Pacific Addition. And not quite bohemians, either, unless I've very much lost my sense of the difference between them and preppies. At Frankie's Bohemian Café, the tune is prep in a major key, and if you ever doubted that, in precincts outside the Mission and the Lower Haight, the city was aswarm with boy-girl couples in their Abercrombie and Fitch get-ups, you will see the Pepsodent-bright light after a single visit, if it's in the evening.

Although the restaurant, after sunset, roars with the cacophonous good cheer of a Theta Delt party cresting on a tide of beer foam, it does have its capital-B Bohemian aspects. These would include, in the department of beer, Pilsner Urquell on tap ($4 bought me a goldfish bowl-sized mug one evening, as a daily special) and, from the kitchen, a wide selection of brambory. Brambory is the Czech word for potato, and the western half of the Czech Republic has long been called Bohemia. (It was a medieval kingdom and a Nazi protectorate.) So brambory are, in a sense, bohemian potatoes – or, at Frankie's, a kind of cross between a latke and a pizza crust. The spuds are shredded, mixed with shredded zucchini (and I suspect egg for cohesion, along with seasonings), pan-fried to a crisp, thin golden disk, then slipped onto a plate to await some toppings.

These are a greatest-hits list of Americanized "ethnic" foods, including carnitas and grilled chicken with bell peppers and a "touch" of garlic pesto. (More on this last presently.) A sausage-and-meatballs brambory ($8.95) could have been lifted straight from one of those Round Table Pizza commercials in which the jolly fat dufus extolls the virtues of the meat-laden pie. The pancake drooped under the tonnage of ground beef and grilled sausage; even chunks of loudmouth Gorgonzola cheese seemed subdued by the presence of so much cooked, spiced flesh.

"Garlic pesto" is the café's euphemism for the pale green heaps of minced garlic the kitchen not only serves with its incredibly good bread (soft and dense like a favorite blanket, with a strikingly tasty crust of just the right chewiness) but sprays about the rest of the menu with an almost Bush-like disregard for consequences. It dripped from a plate of garlic fries like the remnants of some mishap involving a collision of pans; its reek rose from the quesadilla grande ($8.95), a truly immense presentation that included (in addition to cheese melted in a quesadilla; Czech translation?) grilled chicken, salsa, guacamole, and sour cream – the last two appearing not as condiments in decorative little helmets but as reckless slatherings of fat in two tones.

My companion couldn't bear the garlic overload, so we switched plates, and then I couldn't bear it. What was going on in that kitchen? I wondered. Were they fending off vampires? Should the name of the place be changed to Frankie's Transylvanian Café, or maybe Vlad's? It occurred to us, too late, as order after order of burgers with various options flew forth to waiting tables of the young and the hung and their ravishing ladyfriends, that we had ordered the wrong things. You don't go to Frankie's Bohemian Café for big quesadillas; you go for the bacon cheeseburger ($8.95) or maybe the Memphis pulled-pork burger ($8.95). Maybe, maybe a brambory.

The burgers might not be the best in town, but they're not bad. Plenty of juiciness, and if you order the bacon cheeseburger, you'll find the bacon strips well-crisped, which not only makes them taste better but adds a nice note of crunch to the general pillowiness. Warm, snappy fries would have been ideal, but even cooling, rather flaccid fries were better than garlic fries of any temperature and texture. A nice surprise was the pulled-pork burger, the meat slow-cooked to pliancy and full of fragrant smoke.

The main plates are so big, and the introductory basketfuls of bread so good, that starters are not only superfluous but quite possibly injurious. For sheer caloric peril you are unlikely to find anything on the menu to match the Bohemian cheese ($6.95 and "a Prague tradition"), a round of cheese dunked in coarse batter, deep-fried (overkill), and (over-overkill) served with mayonnaise symbolically lightened with some chopped pickle.

The tradition I was most aware of during a visit to Prague a few years ago was not a Homer Simpson-esque fondness for fried cheese but for pizza and tacos and kung pao chicken – the casual food of the West. Traditional Bohemian food, with its emphasis on game, took some looking for, and the restaurants that served it tended to be dark and slightly funereal and not filled with throngs of young people. The young were out in the warm evenings, laughing and galloping in great herds along the narrow cobblestone lanes, their already easy mood made easier by the pint mugs of Budvar that could be had for 30¢ or so at practically any public establishment. Sometimes we joined these crowds, or were swept along by them like white-water rafters; usually we ended up at a pizza parlor, but if we'd ended up at Frankie's Bohemian Café, eating carnitas from a big latke while gazing out at Wenceslas Square, we wouldn't have thought it at all out of place – just as, oddly, we didn't find it out of place here.

Frankie's Bohemian Café. 1862 Divisadero (at Pine), S.F. (415) 921-4725. Daily, 11 a.m.-midnight. Beer and wine. American Express, MasterCard, Visa. Noisy. Wheelchair accessible.