Stamenkovic, who is Serbian and whose nickname is Bane (pronounced Bon-ey), and Fehmiu, whose father is Albanian and whose mother is half Croatian and half Serb, were schoolmates in Belgrade. They met Zurovac, who is Bosnian, in this country.

The three men learned most of what they know about French bread by reading, watching other bakers and experimenting. "The war had the most to do with it," said Stamenkovic, when asked how they all came to America and started baking.

"We had no idea that the only country we had [the former Yugoslavia] was going to disappear from the face of the planet," Stamenkovic said. The three partners share "emotional memories," he said. "We are very similar souls." They preserve their memories, Stamenkovic said, "by staying with each other."

When he and Stamenkovic were boys in Belgrade, Fehmiu recalled, "Belgrade was a safe place to live, even though you were humiliated 15 times a day." For his family, he said, "there was no water, no milk, no electricity."

Pain d'Avignon began in Cape Cod, when a friend of Fehmiu and Stamenkovic's who was working for a baker persuaded them to go into a joint venture. At the time, they knew nothing about baking. That was 10 years ago, and now, besides the original Pain d'Avignon and the Queens bakery, there is a related bakery, Iggy's, in Boston. The local one is in a clean, airy building with skylights, north of Silvercup Studios and the Queensboro Bridge.

For the first hundred days in Long Island City, the men took no salary, "to make sure that we pay every bill," Stamenkovic said. "We lived on bread and olive oil," Fehmiu added.

"And butter," amended Zurovac, the quietest of the three, but the one with a sly sense of humor.

"We were very skinny," Femihu said, as if to justify the butter. "We were thin and pale."

The night before they were due to show their bread at a food show at the Jacob Javits Center, "I was handwriting this catalog," Stamenkovic said, showing me a neatly printed price list that included, besides French baguettes, seven- grain loaves, airy flour-dusted ciabatta, rye with caraway seeds, cranberry-pecan rolls, olive rolls and pane Francese, a moist French sourdough Italian-style, chewy and full of holes - and more.

Although 80 percent of sales are French-style breads, the three partners bake the bread of many countries.

"There is an old Jewish lady who cries when she tastes the rye," Stamenkovic said with a pleased grin.

The owners of Pain d'Avignon are both cosmopolitan and accommodating. On certain days, they deliver extra day-old bread to one restaurant whose chef uses it to make bread pudding.

When customers called to ask if they had something special for Thanksgiving, one of their best-loved rolls, cranberry- pecan, was born.

The three owners are not that fond of the overused word "artisanal" to describe rustic breads made by hand. "You can sprinkle any loaf with a little flour, and it's going to have the country appearance," Fehmiu said.

Pain d'Avignon bakers do use many whole-grain flours, and epi rolls are snipped apart with scissors by hand instead of by machine, 150 dozen of them a day. They have used naturally occurring wild yeast that is present in air and water to make sourdough. They labored to produce rustic breads with big holes, only to find that some customers complained that the jelly falls on the floor, Fehmiu said. (Solution: Buy one of their fine-grained breads.) Workers use rough-woven linen, called couches in French, to gently shape the baguettes. The gleaming, state-of-the-art ovens are not rustic, however.

"We opened a lot of accounts with no business card and no product list," Stamenkovic said. The bread was the product list, and the calling card was favorable word of mouth.

The names written on brown bags at the loading dock bore testimony to this strategy. They were labeled with such names as "2000" for Le Cirque 2000, The Plaza, Metropolitan Museum, Strip House, Ben Benson's, Django, Monkey Bar, Osteria del Circo, Ritz Carlton.

You should know that I got these names by reading the bags; the owners did not want to name some buyers and leave others out. (I happen to know that in a competition with six other bakeries, they just prevailed to bake for Bull & Bear, the restaurant at the Waldorf Astoria.)

When you taste Pain d'Avignon's bread, you will see why top Manhattan hotels and restaurants have chosen them. The day I visited, I ate bread for breakfast and for lunch, with seconds and thirds.

On Long Island, Fairway and Citarella carry Pain d'Avignon breads.

Sometimes, Fehmiu and his wife, Snezana, take home a piece of dough and make pizza. In that spirit, here is an adaptation of what they do. Amounts are variable, depending on how much you want to make.

Smoked Salmon Pizza

Pizza dough

Olive oil

Fresh tomatoes, sliced thin

Mozzarella, sliced

Salt and pepper, to taste

Smoked salmon, sliced thin

1. Preheat oven to 500 degrees and put a shelf on the lowest rung. Roll and pull pizza dough to form the size pizza desired, individual or larger, and place on lightly oiled baking sheet. Drizzle dough with olive oil, arrange tomatoes and mozzarella slices over top, sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper and drizzle on a little more olive oil.

2. Bake on bottom shelf of oven for 10 minutes or until bubbly and edges of crust are brown. Have 2 burners of stove on medium high. Remove pizza from oven and place over burners. Shake baking sheet back and forth for a minute or 2, using potholders, to force any remaining steam out of crust. Add salmon slices on top of pizza.