RESTAURANT REVIEW : With Plates Piled High : Burbank’s cheery Wild Thyme Cafe and Bakery offers dishes that appeal mainly because of their monstrous portions.

It’s getting to be cafe row up here in thoroughly modernized downtown, what with Crocodile Cafe, Market City Caffe and now Wild Thyme Cafe and Bakery, all within shouting distance of one another.

Of the three, the cheery, low-slung place called Wild Thyme is the most resolutely American. The interior is dominated by bright, almost futuristic wallpaper covered with red flowers, which contrast in curiously seasonal fashion with green booths the exact color of a certain popular toothpaste. The narrow tables are covered in butcher paper. A small market and bakery case sit near the front door, selling all-American balsamic vinegar and tiramisu.

Along the same lines as that culture-shock market, the menu is a mix of American-style comfort food entrees, such as a grainy turkey meat loaf, with wood-fired pizzas and complex pastas, plus a few non-controversial Pacific Rim shots. This makes sense--one of the owners here is David Yost, from the family that brought you the Shakers chain and used to run the Bouzy Rouge Cafe, an innovative wine bar/restaurant down in Newport Beach.

Yost is clearly trying hard; he has just put in a new menu that is more intelligent than the old one. But despite the good cheer and intentions, more effort is needed before most of these dishes will appeal on any level but portion size.

For now, that’s what Wild Thyme gets by on. It may serve the very largest portions in the Southland. Salads big enough for four. A monstrous half-pound burger with trimmings galore. Enormous stuffed crepes lined with melted cheese and filled with meat. Carbo-happy side dishes like a corn- and pea-laced pasta salad (accompanying pizza , for goodness’ sake).

Actually, the pizzas are a good starting point, because they’re probably the most reliable items. Their bubbly, well-kneaded crusts have an appealing hint of ash from the wood-fired brick oven. Avoid the gooey, overboard four-cheese pizza and the sticky-sweet Thai pizza, with its jam-like peanut sauce, and you should be happy with what you get.

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One of the stars of the new menu is the goat cheese pizza, which is unusually restrained for this place: a light sprinkling of goat cheese and bacon bits complementing the topping of red onion and Roma tomatoes. Pepperoni lovers can’t go wrong ordering the pepperoni pizza, either, covered with a monster portion of that spicy sausage.

None of the other appetizers or salads I tasted, though, was worth a second bite. The watery, insipid Mediterranean chopped salad is a total loss. Another new item, a romaine and mixed-leaf salad with Gorgonzola cheese and crushed walnuts, comes closer to the mark, but though the concept is good, in the end it’s done in by the overdose of cheese and nuts, plus an obscene amount of balsamic vinaigrette.

The deep-fried Southwest ravioli are no longer on the menu. I will not miss them, nor will I again order the flaccid chicken won tons as a substitute. As for the deep-fried spicy chicken wings, they are purely one-dimensional kid’s food, and the wings themselves are so uniform in size the effect is positively industrial.

The entrees are better. The hamburger is good, though if I order it a second time--it contains a half pound of meat--I’ll have the kitchen leave out the Swiss cheese and Thousand Island dressing (whew!). Even by Wild Thyme’s standards, the restaurant’s imposing and satisfying mixed grill--two huge herbed sausages, a small slab of tender baby back ribs and a half chicken breast--is huge.

I’m quite fond of the way the batter in the restaurant’s fish and chips is herbed. The crunchy batter around flaky fish is one of the best values on the menu.

One more dish I’d order again is called white chili. This mildly seasoned white-bean chili is really a poor man’s cassoulet, rich with pieces of cooked chicken and topped with a dollop of sour cream.

I’m betting you can deduce what a few of the desserts are like. Yep, gigantic things, all long on sugar and flour, short on taste.

You can get a huge, sugary slab of chocolate cake, lots of sweet, gummy cheesecakes or a buttered grilled pound cake with raspberry sauce and vanilla ice cream.

I’d almost like this last one, crazy as it sounds, were it not buried under a snowdrift of heavily aerated whipped cream. But then plain old hand-whipped cream wouldn’t be true to Wild Thyme’s huge-portions concept.

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Where and When

What: Wild Thyme Cafe and Bakery.

Location: 110 N. First St., Burbank.

Suggested dishes: Goat cheese pizza, $7.25; fish and chips, $7.25; barbecued baby back ribs, $9.95; white chili with chicken, $6.95.

Hours: Breakfast 8 a.m. to noon Saturday and Sunday; lunch and dinner 11 a.m. to midnight Monday to Thursday, 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 1 a.m. Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to midnight Sunday.

Price: Dinner for two, $15 to $23. Full bar. Parking in adjacent structure. American Express, MasterCard and Visa.

Call: (818) 845-3433.