Upper West Siders are the lemmings of New York's consumer base. Broadway from Columbus Circle to 96th Street is gradually metamorphosing into a Jersey strip mall, anchored by the Paramus-style Time Warner Center and littered with Gaps, Barnes & Nobles, and soon, a Bed Bath & Beyond. But we still like to think of ourselves as in touch with the latest trends and privy to best-kept secrets -- we're Manhattanites after all. Little surprise, then, that all the Upper West Side's trendiest, best kept secrets -- particularly Sunday Brunch outfits like Good Enough to Eat and Sarabeth's -- are so well-known that there is often a two-hour wait to get in.

Case in point: Beard Papa's Sweets Café, on Broadway between 76th and 77th Streets. Favorable mentions in the New York Times and New York Magazine prior to its recent opening created a buzz among the young professional set, and now there's a line out the door of a shop that sells nothing but cream puffs. They're decent cream puffs, but they're not earth-shattering, and they're certainly not worth a twenty-minute wait.

Lisa thinks that there's a subtle eroticism at work in this shop, where demure Japanese women impale the puff shells on the nozzle of a hand-pumped machine which then injects them with a runny vanilla cream. (Lisa was an English major with a minor in Women's Studies.) I'm not much of a Freudian; I think this place is really just about the hype. Upper West Siders will believe any cultural advice they read in the Times. Never mind that a cream puff may be the easiest pastry in the world to make yourself, not to mention one of the cheapest; if Beard Papa's got the buzz, it must also have a rare and special product according to the mass-consumerism of the West Seventies. That's why this place is going to make a fortune, as hordes of stroller-pushing thirty-somethings pony up $1.25 apiece for a dime's worth of eggs, butter, flour, sugar, and milk.

Look for a cream puff recipe in this space soon.