When I was much younger, my parents’ piano was stored in an imposing building near MIT, the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse facility. I had reason to visit the newly remodeled building the other day, though not to pick up that piano – that must have left decades ago.
I love the building. Built in 1894 as a fireproof fortress for people’s stuff, it has a crenellated castlelike roof and is on the State Register of Historic Places. It’s now the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, which, while preserving crenellations, has made a big difference. The exterior of the building is, save for some glass paneling, like its old historical self; inside, the light-washed, high-ceilinged bright lobby is spare and literally awesome. It’s furnished with stacks of composite-wood boxes fabricated by students and waiting for other students’ inspirations to place them in artistic configurations.
On one side of the entrance is a room of tables and chairs, looking like library desks, inhabited by laptop users. Next to them is Café + by Pagu. Tracy Chang, chef-owner of Pagu, just up Massachusetts Avenue toward Central Square, opened her small café just about a week before my visit. Her James-Beard-nominated Japanese-inflected restaurant used to have a morning café service, but now we have this. She says she’s still testing ideas, foods, service and timing as classes have started in this building and she learns the flow of students taking breaks for her coffee and rushing past to the next class.
The menu at Cafe+ is assembled from around the world, including a Taiwanese twice-fried doughnut dusted with kinako powder (made of toasted soybean flour), far more interesting and innovative than the usual muffin and scone. This doughnut is destination food made by Jun Chen of Enso, the Taiwanese doughnut company whose existence is something to celebrate. I hear it is launching more delectables.
More items come from a Pagu program in which recently arrived refugees try their culinary ideas at no charge in the restaurant commissary.
Fatima, a cook from Somali, makes sambuusa – an expression of Somali hospitality. These are similar to samosas, dough folded into triangles around spiced beef. The Ukrainian offering is crepes by Nataliia Durnieva, a hairstylist, restaurant cook, baker and participant in the Refugee Food Festival that Chang held in 2025 at her restaurant. Chang hopes that she can help further these women’s food careers. MIT customers have already responded enthusiastically.
Also on the menu is a rice, bean and plantain bento, ingredients chosen by kids at the city’s Moses Youth Center – a product of Pagu community programming organized by its director of operations, Jonathan Zackman.
What about the coffee itself? It’s Gracenote, a favorite local roaster. Gracenote’s first café, near South Station in Boston, was a destination coffee place for me until it started to be served by cafés that are closer, such as Nine Bar Espresso in Davis Square. Its roasts are on target, at least for me: Its medium is my medium, so the coffee is definitionally mine. In a blend, you want balance and interactivity – you want the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. Gracenote’s coffee does it.
You don’t have to be an MIT person to come to Cafe+, of course. Your money is good here. I’ll be back to try the mapo tofu or the latest refugee offering, but also to see what shape the space will take. And to do some very interesting people-watching as the very global MIT students and faculty come for their coffee, lit by the sun through the enormous walls of glass.
Café+ by Pagu, 134 Massachusetts Ave., Area II, Cambridge (9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday)
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.
