Adobe Cafe still has unbeatable charms. For starters, the five-year-old Southwestern bar and grill is located off the beaten path of Manayunk's Main Street, where scads of slick, pricey restaurants lie in wait just eight blocks down the hill.

This means that visitors to Adobe Cafe are given an opportunity to discover the many quaint joys of the Manayunk/Roxborough neighborhood, often ignored due to the intimidating steep slope as viewed from Main Street. Underrated as a walking town, Manayunk/Roxborough is a soul-feeder, a peaceful home to winding, narrow streets, cozy houses, amiably barking dogs, tucked-away graveyards, tiny mom-and-pop-owned general stores, and the occasional, small abandoned public library. It's a wonderful place to wander around and smile upon, and doing so will make the backs of your thighs very strong.

Next, Adobe Cafe, nestled in a residential side street just off of Green Lane, is adorably incongruous: The building is strikingly pink, as many cute things are strikingly pink, such as Pepto-Bismol or Babe the pig.

And visitors have quite a bit more than a snowball's chance in hell of finding a parking place there. Unlike the congested, valet-infested, brutal free-for-all that is Main Street "parking," the Adobe Cafe is in possession of its very own lot. And it's free.

Inside, the restaurant is casual and friendly, done in dark aquas and reds. The sit-down bar and smoking section in one room is replete with vinyl tablecloths and two televisions. The non-smoking dining area is more elegant, but still unpretentious. There is a patio with outdoor seating, the perfect place, one imagines, for pitchers of beer and plates of nachos with good friends.

The menu is large and varied, a pleasant read along with the crisp tortilla chips and good salsa which are swiftly placed at your table. Included are separate sections of salads, soups, pizzas, kebobs, meats, enchiladas and burritos, among others. The best thing I ate at Adobe Cafe was the first thing I ate: A cup of the corn and chorizo sausage chowder ($2). This hearty, spicy soup was the sort of unusual flavor delight that makes visiting a restaurant a good idea in the first place. The cup of soup served as a nice start to the rest of my meal, but a bowl of it would serve equally well as an entree, particularly on cooler evenings or during chowder season ($4 a bowl).

But then came the disappointing part: the rest of the food. Despite the abundance of interest-perkers and good ideas as printed on the menu, the flavors lacked complexity. Most dishes could be summed up with one word ("salty," "sweet," "ketchupy"), and some had no flavor at all.

Consider the coconut shrimp ($8). Coconut-breaded and fried, they were sweet, like shrimp macaroons, which was just fine. The equally sugary sweet pepper dipping sauce, however, made the whole thing taste like a premature dessert. A sauce with a bit more of a kick to it would have provided a welcome contrast. The Adobe steamers, a passel of littleneck clams with an Anaheim chili "pesto," also sounded great on paper, but the dominant flavor was salt, and to an unpleasant degree ($9). The yam fries were yummy and yammy, and the best of the appetizers ($5). However, there was a nacho-y aspect to them that was unnecessary: the plate of fries was covered in a tomatillo salsa and a thick blanket of melted Monterey Jack cheese. Unless you really like that sort of thing, I would recommend ordering these yam fries without cheese, and with the salsa on the side.

Likewise, dinner entrees lacked in complexity of flavor what they had gained in interest from description. For example, the BBQ duck burrito ($10). Sounds great, right? It was huge, filled with shredded duck, black beans, and a smoky, dark barbecue sauce. But the ketchup taste could not be ignored. I wanted it to go away, so I could enjoy my duck burrito in peace, but it wouldn't. On the other end of the spectrum, the chicken-fried steak with cream gravy tasted merely bland. The side of very good horseradish mashed potatoes became, by default, the focal point of this entree ($11). The special of the night, the cornmeal crusted soft-shell crabs, was an obvious, irresistible choice for entree. But, again, the crabs or the cornmeal crusted over them lacked a special tweak of flavor that would have made for something remarkable ($17).

Desserts were better. The bowl of banana sopaipillas, though made with cinnamon and sugar-dusted tortilla chips rather than the puffy deep-fried bread, was still commendable as a gloriously soupy combination of chopped banana, scoops of both vanilla and cinnamon ice creams, and a potent brandy-Kahlua sauce ($4.50). The traditional Mexican flan possessed a pleasantly strong, almost bracing, caramel sauce ($3.95).

The Adobe Cafe is a place with a lot going for it. Deserving, I think, of an A for both atmosphere and effort. The restaurant has experienced two chef change-ups in the last two years (Corbin Evans spent a year there before leaving for Lilies in 1997, and was succeeded by present chef Matt Donovan), so perhaps the cuisine is still a work in progress. Once the food lives up to the promise of the surroundings, the restaurant will be truly in the pink.

The Adobe Cafe, 4550 Mitchell St., 483-3947. Open for dinner Monday to Thursday, 4 to 10 p.m.; Friday & Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m.; Sunday 3 to 9:30 p.m. All credit cards but American Express accepted. Reservations accepted. Handicapped accessible. Early bird half-price entree special nightly; call the restaurant for details.

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