Got milk? Got Guittard chocolate, Madera champagne grapes and Pescadero garlic herb bread?

Maybe you need mini pumpkins, freshly ground peanut butter, frozen croissant dough or a selection of over 300 cheeses at very competitive prices, including curds, a favorite among emigres from Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Mountain View's homey Milk Pail has it all, and since the recent remodeling, it also has a little more room for products and a little less jostling for customers. Owner Steve Rasmussen would even say "It flows."

At his business office in the Old Mill Office Center, across California Street and the Safeway parking lot from the Milk Pail, Rasmussen draws a floor plan on the white board, trying to convince a visitor that the bustling 34-year-old market now has a traffic pattern. Customers are supposed to enter at the apple bins and pass between parallel "wet racks" of lettuce and kale, on into the cheese room, out past the potatoes and spices to the expanded checkout counter. He calls this area, originally a drive-through, "the atrium," and plans to add flowers. What else is new?

• A ramp for wheelchair access to the sidewalk

• All refrigerator and freezer cases (Rasmussen: "The doors close!")

• State-of-the-art insulation and computer-controlled refrigeration

• 25 percent more cubic capacity

• Flat concrete floor on the California Street side (Rasmussen: "It used to slope") for increased open market space and roll-down doors that let in air at night.

During nearly nine months of construction ending in mid-September, the Milk Pail stayed true to its dairy roots and never closed. Most of the work was done at night. The idea was to decongest the popular open-air market without losing its personality.

Customers are accustomed to helping each other find stuff, Rasmussen says. He wouldn't want to take that fun away. He does try to maintain decorum, though. When cell phones first came on the scene, Rasmussen thought about banning them, but saw that their use was mostly in keeping with the Milk Pail way. Customers weren't having extended conversations so much as checking their lists with the home office, as in: "Honey, did you say shallots or garlic?"

The Milk Pail has a large Eastern European customer base, hand-made French cheese and produce from independent farmers. Critics wish more produce was organic. Some also take issue with the demeanor at checkout, where clerks do take credit cards but no one is going to hand back my card and say, "Thank you, Mrs. Himmel."

Rasmussen and his father bought the ailing Brentwood Farms store in 1974, when America was still pretty much a Velveeta country. They made nonfat and whole milk, the only milks that were popular at the time, and sold the cream to an ice cream company, Continental Spumoni, in Mountain View.

When the day was done at the drive-through, they would cover the outdoor cases with plywood and go home.

"It was a simpler time," the visitor says. Rasmussen beams at that thought, and writes it on the white board next to the floor plan, amid explaining why the Marianne's ice cream moved from behind the checkout counter to the cheese room. Now he has 32 employees and a Web site (www.milkpail.com), where the cartoon Rasmussen is a little thinner but totally recognizable.

The Milk Pail name was conceived in 1958 by Rasmussen's mother for the family's dairy in Castro Valley. "It was hokey in the '70s," he says, "But now people think it's right on-spot."

It was the Milk Pail Dairy until around 1985, when Rasmussen was asked at a party, "What do you do?" Told the store's name, the other party guest said, "Too bad. I don't drink much milk." It soon became the Milk Pail Market.

Back in the '70s, the intersection of San Antonio Road and El Camino Real was one of the busiest in the county, and the Milk Pail was nestled between two busy shopping centers. Rasmussen recalls the success of his drive-through being attributed to its location. "But we didn't do well in the '80s, and people would say, 'It's the location,'" Rasmussen says.

It's still the location. To avoid the jostling crowds, Rasmussen suggests shopping from 8 to 10 a.m. weekdays and 7 to 8 p.m. weeknights.