Las Colinas is a small neighborhood restaurant I'd love to have in my own part of town. The homey, mostly Cuban cuisine is lovingly prepared in a friendly setting. The food is wonderfully flavorful, portions are generous, the prices incredibly cheap. And it isn't often that a server worries that we've ordered too much food or cautions that a dish is expensive -- at $11.99.

''This little restaurant is a real find!'' raved reader Robert Spencer Knotts. So true. On a lackluster stretch of Andrews Avenue in Wilton Manors, the 52-seater is easily missed.

Maria Park, who owns the restaurant with husband Mike, is Nicaraguan but worked in Miami's Cuban restaurants for 26 years. She and her cooks don't take shortcuts, whether making a superb picadillo or the flaky crust for greaseless empanadas -- savory ground beef, ham and cheese, chicken or guava and cheese at $1.25 each.

There's a long, varied menu plus a list of specials. They must have cast a wide net for their seafood stew, brimming with stone crab claws, blue crab legs, a whole prawn, shrimp, fish, mussels and calamari in a fish stock studded with tomatoes, onions and peppers.

The vaca frita has just the right combination of crispiness on the outside, moist, tender meat on the inside, the skirt steak marinated in mojo. Chicken milanesa is a pleasing, plate-hogging, breaded cutlet topped with tomato sauce and Swiss cheese. Most entrees are served with two sides -- white rice, black beans, sweet or green plantains, fries, yuca with mojo or fried yuca.

We nearly filled up on batidos, dreamy milkshakes, especially the mango, mamey and banana, but saved a spot for their cinnamon-dusted bread pudding and, of course, café con leche -- sweet and satisfying, like Las Colinas.