Almost never is a café visit only about coffee, and that is particularly true at Sofra, a café-deli-restaurant-destination where the foods of Ana Sortun and Maura Kilpatrick are the draw. For preference, I sit on the deck-veranda-porch a few steps above the street and take a deep happy breath, whether I’ve driven, walked or biked. The deep breath is the beginning of indulgence.
Where Cambridge, Belmont and Watertown meet and across the road from Intelligentsia, a favorite coffee location, Sofra commands the space: Its address, after all, is 1 Belmont St., quite distinguished. There are people here who’ve biked the Cambridge-Watertown Greenway, a 12-mile rail trail that served the Boston and Maine Railroad and is a very good alternative to the Minuteman Bikeway for exploring new territory. This trail has an off-ramp and a huge bright mural directly in front of Sofra, very convenient. I look across the road and see the words Cannabis Dispensary and see a piercing parlor nearby as well.
The interior space is small and crowded and invariably cheerful as staff carry plates through the line of people waiting to order and a child darts between their legs. The doors are heavy, tough to push open, but there’s always a person nearby to push with you. There’s a cold cabinet where drinks and prepared foods invite purchase, ready to take home and heat or just scarf down with a cold flavored seltzer. Your order for dine-in comes with a numbered table stick, but don’t worry: They will find you even if you forget to grab it. If by some unusual chance they bring something different from what you remember ordering, eat it anyway. There are no food mistakes here.
On any early morning there are people munching an orange-infused morning bun or a shakshuka, now just about everywhere but Sofra does it better – tomatoes, eggs and spices bubbling hot with bread used to scoop up the goodness. But there’s nothing specific to a time of day here. Early one recent morning I had a set of three mezes, savory dips, stiff puddles of hummus or spicy labneh or beet tzatziki or or or … and a handful of Crick-cracks, buttermilk crackers with an onomatopoetic name that prepares your ear for the percussive sound of chewing as the crisp, sesame-and-nigella-covered crackers parlay the hummus to the teeth. And the baba ghanoush is delightfully different from the smooth, beige paste found elsewhere. Here the eggplant is not pureed, but shredded with onions and peppers, tomatoes and pomegranate molasses, and its texture and color contrast better with the pureed hummus with which it’s often paired.
As this column has focused so much on coffee as the reason to visit an establishment, I’ve not focused on Sofra, so much does the food there grab my imagination and my taste buds. But let’s be sure to consider the coffee.
This food, with a morning cup of coffee, offers a lesson in pairings. I have rarely chosen to have a morning coffee with savory foods, finding sweets more complementary – and I think spicier (“hotter”) or deeply redolent foods might change the coffee’s taste. But these meze were very happy with the coffee.
Karma Coffee is roasted in Sudbury and features Ethiopian beans. Though a bit darker in roast than I prefer, I had a revelation: This works with savory food! I would suggest, whatever your usual practice, to have a black drip coffee for the food, rather like having a solid red wine with a deeply flavored meal. This column, then, normally dedicated to cafés that are coffee-forward, I’m happy to dedicate to complementarity.
Come for the delectable sweets and savories, but don’t forget the coffee. The high you’ll get means the cannabis across the road is completely irrelevant.
Sofra Bakery & Cafe, 1 Belmont St., Cambridge, and 210 North Harvard St., Allston. (8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily)
Corky White, a food anthropologist at Boston University, has lived in Cambridge since 1953 with long sojourns in Japan. She has written articles on coffee for Standart Magazine and books including “Cooking for Crowds” (in its 40th Anniversary edition) “Coffee Life in Japan” and, with her son, Ben Wurgaft, “Ways of Eating.” Corky is grounded in coffee and welcomes suggestions at cwhite@csindie.com.
