Biting into these crusty sticks of goodness takes some effort, and then when you wrench the first mouthful free, a spray of crumbly dark matter goes flying in all directions to the delight of everyone. Their coffee is good too, dark like crude oil, hot, and infused with a dusky power harnessed towards pleasing your palette, as if the whole cup was colonized. Their muffins by contrast, are often not entirely--how shall we say… baked? They can be quite dense and moist in the center. An apple muffin I once had suffered from this gray indistinct area where the apple slices and the uncooked muffin material sort of merged into one giant glob of interior "substance." Do I blame master Belgian baker Alain Coumont? Oui, but it's probably not his fault entirely and perhaps this is the way of the Belgian muffin men, that once mighty breed of muffin makers now dispersed to the four corners of the world, New York City being one.

Speaking of ancient baking lore, did you know that the croissant and the coffee came together as a result of the Turks trying to invade Austria in the 17th century? Apparently the Turks were scared off by some crafty Poles during their siege of Vienna and as they fled they left their coffee beans behind. To celebrate their ignoble defeat, a Viennese baker created a pastry in the shape of the crescent moon-- the symbol on the Turkish flag. So when you eat a croissant, you are eating the Turkish flag -- the symbolic flesh of the Turks. Legend has it that an Austrian spy took the abandoned coffee beans left by the edgy and nerve-addled Turkish regiments and opened the first ever cafes in Vienna. So when you sit down to eat a croissant and drink coffee, you are drinking and eating the Christian European victory of the Muslim Turks, and symbolically lining the coffers of a spy, and that doesn't bother you in the slightest, does it?

Perhaps the belated vengeance of the Ottoman Empire on your digestive, nervous and glandular systems is victory enough. Imagine for a moment your body is the history of the entire human race encompassed. First, the civilizing influence of the grains and whole wheat nuggets comes and throws you off my awesome macho caveman diet. Hands shaky, nerves dilated, pupils shrunken to microscopic pools of inky blackness, like the night, I reach for "one more cup of coffee before you go / to the valley below." (c. 1972, Bob Dylan.)

Perhaps it is the foreknowledge of the inevitable post-high crash that makes those moneyed Europeans so dour at the communal tables of La Pain Quotidien. Americans react to each new spike of the blood sugar as if it was the first time, each drop comes out of nowhere, but the people from the old country know what's going to happen. They see the awful future, their brains are hardwired into a history ruled by the merciless mood swings of their sugar addict monarchs down through the centuries. They know all the giddy highs are fleeting, and that the anguished crash is as inevitable as the check. In the end, it's Vienna take all, and we are all the lonesome Turks on a forced march retreat from the warm buzzing café back to our silent, grave-like beds.