"My grandmother was an old-world cook of the first order, and if you think of apprenticeship in the traditional sense of the word I apprenticed with her," reasons the Berkeley High School graduate. "Before the age of Cuisinart, you had to have exquisite food. But to do that back then you had to have technique: how to stand when you want to cut things very fine, how to hold your tools." Such skills, learned at the knees of someone who had never known any other way of baking, made for a sturdy foundation. But "because this is a very Berkeley bakery, because I'm a Berkeley kind of gal," expect the unexpected. A strand of red paper Chinese lanterns plays sly counterpoint to the huge French-style coffee cups, tubular Italian sugar packets, and other continental touches. Only organic milk is used here. And the bakery's name comes from the novel Watership Down, in which it designates a crossroads.

"When we first opened, people used to come in and say, 'What kind of bakery is this? Is it French? Is it American?' At first I was taken aback by these questions," Kloian recalls. "I knew it was a Berkeley bakery, but it was something more." Yet she couldn't put her finger on exactly what until, traveling in Budapest not long ago, the answer suddenly struck her: Austro-Hungarian. "When I walked into the bakeries of Budapest I'd gasp and say, 'That's my visual aesthetic That's my cake.'" Sampling their wares, "I said, 'This is exactly how sweet I like my cakes to be.'"

And yes, Crixa's droll sophistication bespeaks a displaced civilization fogged by war and dreams.

As Tuffy and I tuck into Jamaican rum chocolate mousse cake and chocolate marble coffee cake, the couple sharing a caramel cake at the adjacent table is discussing a forthcoming sally to SFMOMA.

"You don't think I can handle Marc Chagall?" the woman demands.

Tuffy's rum cake is seductive in the same way sangria is -- so agreeably pleasant that you don't realize until halfway through that you're drunk. A "lot of booze," as Kloian puts it, goes into creations like this one, whose bottom cake-layer is its rummiest, with an assertive mousse heart linking it to a lighter top layer. In my generous wedge of coffee cake, its top dusted with paper-thin almond shavings, quiescent yellow clouds mingle with potent bittersweet ones. In contrast to the rum cake's moistness, the coffee cake is almost dry, but not: rather a texture calibrated precisely to complement coffee. Both slices, as is typical here, come with dollops on the side of unsweetened whipped cream, an effective palate-cleanser if an ironic one -- pure cream to dilute the effects of yet richer stuff.

"When you look at the Chagall you won't even know what you're seeing," gibes the man at the adjacent table in a too-loud voice, the classically self-conscious Berkeley voice. "Without me there to explain it, you'd have no idea."