Orderinny

Something made me happy and a tad heavier on Saturday.
Trying to avoid the weekend masses at Starbucks, I decided to do some work instead at CyberCafe on 49th St instead. Since it's an internet cafe, there is obviously no free wifi to freeload, and there were all but a handful of tourists making use of overpriced internet quietly. No soccer games were showing on the projection screen slung across the backwall either. Peace and quiet finally.
What makes CyberCafe even more perfect for an antisocial reader is its bounty of more than decent coffee and food. While there are no pies on weekends, Madeleine, a sweet old French lady is on board to make some traditional French crepes. I was extremely pleased with my crepe, the simplest of them all, with all but a squirt of lemon, a brush of honey and a fairydust of powdered sugar. The crepe was paper-thin, crispy on the edges and with a little chewy give, not fat, doughy and tasteless like the foodcourt variants. Sweet, sour, buttery. It was delicious.
While I was polishing off my crepe, I felt a tap on the shoulder. There was Madeleine, smiling away with a fat slice of cake in her hands. "Here you go", she said. "You're my first customer today, so this is on the house."
Wow... When did I ever get so lucky? And it wasn't just some day-old cake she was trying to clear too! She had just baked it that day, an unassuming but rich butter-cake, almost dripping with moisture, topped with a compote of fresh plums to celebrate the end of summer and stone fruit season. The plums were sticky, sweet and tart at the same time, and a splash of grand marnier (her secret ingredient, she smiled conspiratorially as she told me) gave the jam a heady scent. The fresh cream that accompanied that cake was the real deal, creamy, milky and fragrant. Definitely not from a can. It took me willpower not to finish the cream. But the cake, I did. After all, it was a gift from a most charming hostess. One that made me heavy, but more importantly happy.

Madeleine the crepe lady
CyberCafe
http://www.cyber-cafe.com/
250 W. 49th St. (btw. B’way & 8th)