As any coffee-drinking office drone working in downtown Budapest knows, the streets around St. István tér in District V are overflowing with options. On one small stretch of Nádor utca, for example, you can sit with a delicious nagy latte at Sir Morik or its neighbor Mirez Coffee for around Ft 450 (€1.80). Pricey, but not outrageous. Only one block away, though, intrepid luxury-seekers with limited cash have enjoyed the best-kept coffee secret in the entire Carpathian Basin: the Four Seasons Bar, as in the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace Budapest, as in living so well it really does feel like revenge.

Sitting in the purple-and-green living-room splendor of the hotel's interior arcade, one could have a latte for Ft 800. For that extra Ft 350 you not only got to luxuriate in impeccable surrounding and service. You also got, for no additional charge, a spotless glass of sparkling water - on a cloth coaster! - and two lovely cookies. Throw in a Ft 200 tip, and a single Magyar blue-back bought you an elegant escape from the relentless humiliations of life.

Excited? Well, too bad: you missed it. The Four Seasons has apparently figured out that all those jeans-and-T-shirt-clad Studenten-types sipping coffee for hours while flipping through photocopies were not, in fact, visiting rock stars or Hollywood brat-packers reading through their scripts. On our most recent trip we were presented with our normal coffee, cookies and sparkling water, and a bill for Ft 1,500, almost double what it had been a few days earlier. Throw in that tip, and now you're getting near Ft 2,000 (or $10) for a cup of coffee, which is a bit steep even for the most dedicated cash-poor luxury-hound in need of a quick fix.

Not, of course, that we'll never go back. Next time, however, we're going to make that coffee last for two hours instead of one, and do our best to cadge a second round of cookies. Take that, oppressors!