I entered the restaurant perhaps a bit too earnestly dressed, and the busy diners all glanced up from their espressos, their laptops, their English language newspapers and their important documents to register who I was. Uninterested, they returned to the European Valhalla of their minds and I ordered a fresh lemon soda.

The fresh lemon soda was cool and spoke of citrus, striking in its lack of pretention. The lemon soda chose not to speak in French, and for this it tasted better. I ordered a club sandwich. I realized that Chez Caroline was like a dress shirt that you paid someone else to iron – pretty enough, but lacking starch.

The club sandwich arrived: a hulking, chaotic temple of a sandwich. What sat on the table before me was not a club sandwich. This was an NGO sandwich, complete with four layers of bread stitched together with a toothpick the size of a small khukuri. This was some sort of dream-sandwich, likely conceived in some secret conference room in the bowels of the World Bank. This was a feat of engineering.

When I finally tried to bite into the sandwich, I found that my mouth simply wouldn’t open wide enough. I tried a number of configurations, to no avail. Perplexed, I returned to my lemon soda.

Defeated, I finally disassembled the club sandwich and resold the parts to the expectant drivers loitering around in the parking lot. While this strategy didn’t recoup my losses, I suppose I knew, from the minute I walked in, that I was bound to pay.