I'm a bit ashamed that I absorbed myself so thoroughly in food news and the discovery of a great new café yesterday that I nearly missed an entire, awful crisis unfolding to our south. (If you want to donate, go here and be sure to earmark your money for Haiti).

And it's sobering. I could go on and on about how even though we New Yorkers are supposedly the unhappiest people in the country we live in the lap of luxury and should be grateful every day, but y'all know that stuff, and this is not that sort of blog. This is a food blog, and it's my job to alert you — against my better judgment — to the birth of the best café in Brooklyn. I'm not even posting the prettiest photos, which is how torn I am about reporting on it. This is the view from the window of Iris Café, and it is where I will be spending all my money this spring if the rest of the neighborhood doesn't take it over.

What's it got? Oh, you know. Stumptown coffee. Sunshine. Stamped silvery tin ceilings. Mottled brick walls. Caputo salami sandwiches. An indie rock soundtrack punctuated with Caetano Veloso and Simon & Garfunkel — so much the songs of my life that I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up at one point.

Sure, the gauzy mosquito netting curtains by the windows are quaint to the point of fey, tied with off-white yarn. Sure, that red holly in a rustic wooden bucket in the window nook is so cute it's absurd. This is Brooklyn exercising its now-notorious sleight of hand: Brooklyn Charm. The food is "as local as possible," a staffer tells me. A hard-boiled Featheridge farm egg set me back $.75. The milk swirled into your coffee hails from Battenkill Creamery (and you can buy eggs and milk to-go). House-made pastries — like a sultry sticky bun and the best biscuit I've had in New York, spiked with fat sticks of Surryano ham and feathery melted cheddar — are so plush you will swoon.

And the customers of both genders are gorgeous, excepting myself. (My hair is doing something weird these days: It is in Crazy Art Teacher Mode. I'm working on it). Anyways, I do believe in these tiny luxuries, and am posting about this place so it doesn't go out of business. Because that would make me crazy.

Speaking of crazy, my food writer buddies Pervaiz Shallwani and Rebecca Marx will be joining yours truly and the brilliant Rachel Wharton for Brooklyn Eats, the Edible Brooklyn radio show hosted by Heritage. We'll be on the air at 5pm debating the putative death of vegetarianism. Give us a shout!

10.03.10 Ed Note: Iris had a wacky computer policy for a while there. I hear it's back to normal now, but I haven't been by in a while, so I can't vouch as strongly for the eats! -AVB