Baguette et Chocolate

It's always welcome when experts from other nations bring their skills to America, like the international physicists who moved to Waxahachie for the Superconducting Super Collider...wait, those guys wanted money for that hole in the ground? Bringing masterful French baking skills to fill the tunnel of you, the man behind Baguette et Chocolate

BC is a naturally lit, gauzy yellow-walled, 10-table bakery run by a French immigrant who honed his chops at Rouen's Institut National de la Boulangerie Pâtisserie before falling under the spell of the Hill Country's abundance of wide-open freedom, and relative dearth of Freedom Fries.

Crepes swing both ways, with savories ranging from classic ham & swiss to more elaborate creations like the Campagnarde (eggs, mushrooms, red onion, bacon, sour cream) and the Paysanne (Mornay sauce, chicken, mushrooms, Swiss); sweet varieties include almond cream & pear, and the apple/cinnamon Normande, whose invasion of your britches actually does have precedent.

Traditional baguettes come in epi (nutty aroma, wheat-stalk looking), sunflower, and sesame, and're also used in hunger-busting sandwiches from prosciutto & goat cheese to the chicken/smoked turkey/bacon "L'Américain"; there's also a host of similar paninis, plus Croques Monsieurs and Madames -- because there's nothing more feminine than a woman whose eggs are fried.

To get your daily recommended dose of "no nutritional value", there are pastries like chocolate eclairs and apple almond tarts, plus other fatteners like a crunchy, chocolate almond-glazed black-chocolate mousse called the Round Rock, and the joconde cake, butter cream coffee, and chocolate ganache "Opera" -- whose international practitioners you usually just wish would shut their holes.