By Paul Reidinger

IN THE CASTRO'S more deliciously sleazy days, now a generation past, the closest thing to a patisserie was the doughnut shop (across the street from Walgreens) at the back of which a mumbling man with a wild, white beard held forth late at night. At the time we thought he resembled – and we called him – Karl Marx (and, being undergraduate wags steeped in 19th-century reading lists, we naturally called his somber sidekick Engels), but in my memory he morphed into John Brown, the wild-eyed abolitionist holy warrior who led an abortive raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859 and was later executed, only to become the subject of a famous painting that became a memorable album jacket: Brown is the crazy prophet, Bible in one hand and rifle in the other, gray beard aflutter in the winds of a prairie storm, at the center of a John Steuart Curry mural in the Kansas statehouse. That mural became the cover of Kansas's 1974 album, Kansas.

Meanwhile. If you wanted pastries other than doughnuts, you were looking at a fairly long hike up 18th Street to Market, where, in 1984, Fran Gage opened her Patisserie Française in a skinny, old bakery building. That place burned down in 1995, but by then the gastronomic transformation of the neighborhood was well under way, and the loss of the patisserie, though grievous, wasn't as heavy as it would have been just a few years earlier. Today, if you are struck by a hankering for pastry while waiting for the light to change at the corner of 18th and Castro, you have a number of choices just a few steps away – though the doughnut shop isn't one of them, having been made over as a Mexican take-out place, with no sign of Marx or Engels.

Among the newest of these options is Le Bon Gâteau, an unforgettably red café and bakery with glass cases full of sweets, high tables near the open front windows for scrutiny of the always fascinating sidewalk traffic, and, at the rear of the public space, a loungey array of couches and low tables for the enactment of social intrigues. The crowd is a Castro crowd, ranging from trannies to business types in suits, and the mood, day and night, is whispery as confidences are exchanged and secrets passed.

In my 20s I had a friend who, in restaurants, would often start asking about dessert before the first basket of bread had arrived. Le Bon Gâteau is made for this sort of inversion; you could drift in, start salivating at the cases full of tarts, cakes, pastries, and cookies, and not even notice the chalkboards, mounted on the wall behind the cashier, which list the savory items. These run mainly along the lines of salads and sandwiches, with a soup or two and some pastas thrown in, and they tend to be very good – if they are available, which, frequently, they are not. And you discover this not by noting that this or that offering has had a line drawn through it or been erased but by ordering it and being told, after a few moments of spluttering exchange between the counterperson and some unseen presence in the kitchen, that no, they don't have that right now.

On one visit we ordered French potato salad, only to be advised some moments later that there was none, but there was Mediterranean pasta salad. Fine, we said, we'll have that – only to be told a moment later that there was no Mediterranean pasta salad either; in fact, there was no salad of any kind. Fine, we said, we will have some hummus ($2.75). This reached our table as a beige blob, lightly touched with olive oil and paprika – but without the benefit of pita bread or a baguette or even lengths of celery to eat it with. We ate it with spoons.

Service is friendly but so languid and chaotic that it's a wonder the food that is available actually reaches its intended targets. But it does, and mostly it's worth the trouble. Although we must have called on no-baguette day ("We're out," the hapless boy behind the counter told us), the panini-style sandwiches (made from good focaccia and pressed in a little squeeze grill) are tasty, cheap, and full of the romance of those Sbarra shops you see all over Europe. "Spiced" tuna ($5.95) was a bit of a mystery, though appealingly spicy – hot paprika? – and ratatouille ($5.95) matched sautéed peppers and eggplant with mozzarella and a smear of tomato sauce. Caesar salad ($8.95 with cold rounds of chicken breast) wasn't quite as garlicky as Zuni's, but the romaine and croutons were crisp and the dressing charged with a creamy tang: a lovely light supper.

As for the pastries: They were more in tune with our image-is-reality times than one might have hoped. We found a pistachio pound cake ($1.95) to be dry, though an appealing springtime green on the inside; better was a cranberry-raisin tart ($4.50), despite a slightly soggy crust. Considerably better than either were a triangular French brownie ($3), basted with white-sugar frosting and filled with ganache, a chewy Florentine ($2.50) under a cap of chocolate as wavy as gelled disco hair, and a confection of hazelnuts embedded in milk chocolate. This was decadent, though not quite sleazy, alas.

Le Bon Gâteau. 476 Castro (at 18th St.), SF. (415) 621-2767. Mon.-Wed., 7 a.m.-10 p.m.; Thurs.-Sat., 7 a.m.-midnight; Sun., 8 a.m.-10 p.m. No alcohol. MasterCard, Visa. Not particularly noisy. Wheelchair accessible.