If we had been very clever people after our first trip to Pinkberry (a posh fro-yo bar in Manhattan’s Koreatown), we might have devised a business plan that looked something like this:

Completely rip off Pinkberry’s menu. Design a store with the same layout as Pinkberry. Put this store in Palo Alto, where suburban moms have nothing better to do than meet with their interior decorators and/or fellow-toddler-moms over a nice, big (and none-too-fattening) container of slightly tangy frozen yogurt. Give it a pretentious French name.

Voila. Fraiche. If we had invented it, we’d be rich. Instead, we’re writing about it. Although Fraiche ripped off Pinkberry (which in turn ripped off a Korean fro-yo chain called Red Mango), it does have a few innovations to its name. Pinkberry has made money selling two flavors of frozen yogurt — vanilla and green tea. Fraiche Yogurt (“homemade organic fresh and frozen yogurt”) drops the Asian twist and simply offers vanilla, nonfat vanilla and chocolate. In keeping with the less-than-hip-but-super-fit aesthetic of Palo Alto, the store also offers fresh Greek yogurt made on the premises, which, given the capricious nature of dairy products, is something of a comfort.

Other bright innovations adopted by the founders include green, mildly fluffy cushions (which already bear stains of chocolate fro-yo drips), a sign ensuring dieters everywhere that fro-yo and fre-yo help people lose weight and a block of chocolate grated before your very eyes if you ask for chocolate shavings as a topping. Brilliant.

Toppings, which were doled out to us by an aging hipster wearing a guerrilla beanie, are costly but plentiful. The selection includes fresh fruit, nuts, syrups, honey and the aforementioned chocolate shavings, which turn out to be divine in combination with the chocolate fro-yo but “the most disgusting thing that has ever entered my mouth” when placed atop the plain Greek yogurt. And given the things that have entered Ruth’s mouth...

Speaking of Greek yogurt, it’s clearly something that no 30-something mom will be able to resist. It’s just so healthy. Which is why we’d recommend sweetening it up with honey and maybe some fruit, although the mommies who were crowding the place at 11 a.m. were simply shoveling back cups of the stuff, as only women who have experienced the pains of childbirth can.

But even the vanilla fro-yo (certainly more delicious than the Greek variety) is fairly healthy, especially when juxtaposed with run-of-the-mill ice cream. A four-oz cup of the vanilla is a mere 100 calories, which explains why the shop was crowded with lean moms, who in turn were stringing along their blonde kids. Fraiche has an ideal menu for such a crowd, though its interior décor seems unable to hold out much longer against its toddler clientele. The leather cushions in the booths, for example, hardly scream “kid-proof.” Everything is tastefully done, though, and Fraiche’s hours run late enough that the post-soccer-mom hours should be good for emo kids looking for new and exciting dessert places.

But back to the yogurt. It’s all about the yogurt — and not the room-temperature, gloopy Greek stuff. What keeps clients flocking back to Pinkberry and Red Mango isn’t how generous the servers are with the fruit, or how closely the flavor of the syrups resemble the fruits from which they are supposedly made, but the divine, tangy kick of fro-yo that makes you sit up and notice that you’re not in the dining hall anymore.

The vanilla yogurt at Fraiche is on the right track. It’s sweeter than most of the stuff we’ve tasted (one of us is a native of South Korea, where the healthy, tangy fro-yo boom started), but it has a shy kick and some character. The chocolate fro-yo was surprisingly good, too — with a curious smoky undertone — but if you’re going to try what some Hollywood starlets have called “CrackBerry,” go for the vanilla.

Fraiche also offers a basic menu of espresso drinks, as well as an intriguing fridge full of drinks-to-go, including green-tea infused concoctions and boxes of “coconut water.” Perfect entertainment for the Stepford wives.

The disadvantages this new fro-yo parlor faces are all wrapped up in its newness. Fraiche has none of the pre-fab décor found in each Pinkberry. Rather, Fraiche is evidently hand-decorated, thus the leather cushions, the stainable pillows and the iPod speaker in the corner. This homemade quality is refreshing, but we doubt that the décor will survive the wrath of soccer toddlers for much longer. Which is fine. As college kids, we’re no strangers to shabby chic, and maybe this is our long-awaited, inconveniently far-from-campus replacement for the CoHo.

For more about Fraiche, see fraicheyogurt.com