In an 80-degree early October day, Burdick’s is icy cold – the right temperature for chocolate, but for us it meant getting our coffees and going next door to the friendly outdoor seating at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, the old Blacksmith House. In time past, Viennese pastries were served there at The Window Shop; later, croissants and excellent coffee at Hi-Rise.
The cakes and cookies at Burdick’s are a match for the delicacies of memory and good for munching under the trees. But the jewel in the crown of its drinks, the hot chocolate, will have to wait for a real fall day. Thick, dark, pouring heavily like Angelina’s chocolat chaud on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, it deserves a ceremonial toast in one of Burdick’s souvenir chocolate cups, indoors, out of seasonal cold.
The hot chocolate – and the vitrines full of beautiful chocolates – are why most go to Burdick’s, but here I have an obligation to try the coffee. That it is a café indicates coffee, in the word itself, but cafés as we know often are not about that brew. Think the traditional British “caff,” known for tea and possibly a full English breakfast, beans, toast, gammon and eggs. I’ve traveled by coffee café to café, but am able to see the myriad uses of the space and the many ways its primary identity is configured. So I give Burdick’s its chocolate identity and still sip its coffee.
The coffees are Colombian, roasted by Devoción of Brooklyn, which as far as I know is not represented in any other local shops. A cappuccino runs to $6 at Burdick’s – a price point higher than most, and, I think, a price driven by the fancy hot chocolate’s price of $6.50 to $8.50, chocolate pulling up the coffee.
But return to the pastries we must. A chocolate mousse cake, a kirsch tea cake with butter cream, a linzer torte (reminiscent of those served at the Window Shop evoking the Austro-Hungarian Empire), a gugelhupf and then those madeleines and canelés: Everything is a celebration and nicely proportioned – you are getting something wonderful but not overwhelming.
The chocolates. These you are more likely to walk out with, to have carefully placed in very special small gift boxes, to give to someone who needs their beauty and luxurious taste. The signature chocolates, the ones that say you went to Burdick’s, are the tiny chocolate mice with satin string tails, or the penguins. These and all the rest are handmade. Imagine using a tiny-tipped piping bag for laying on the dot of chocolate on the nose of one of these beasts.
There are so many. For utter delight, choose a honey caramel truffle or chocolate-covered marzipan or the apricot caramel (apparently really tricky to make; the apricot scorches at the bottom of the pan and regularly dismays the chocolatier in charge). One of the chocolate makers in New Hampshire, Bethany, is quoted as saying, “We don’t make candy; we make food,” which says it all: Chocolate is not an indulgent frippery; it’s a part of our diet, in our repertory of consumption.
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A customer takes in the elegant outfitting of the L.A. Burdick chocolate shop in Cambridge’s Harvard Square. (Photo: Carson Paradise) -
A customer considers a purchase at L.A. Burdick. (Photo: Carson Paradise) -
Coffee at L.A. Burdick is Colombian, roasted by Devoción of Brooklyn. (Photo: Carson Paradise)
The gift boxes survive the chocolates and can be spotted in people’s homes holding paper clips or small clutter. They are love too – well-made wooden crates, hand-tied with red ribbons and stamped with a gold wax seal. The other boxes, brown and beige striped, also take on secondary (and tertiary) functions, demonstrating the previous pleasure of taste.
I’ve been to one of those posh hotel chocolate extravaganzas. I don’t get it. A fountain of chocolate pouring over strawberries or cake cubes. Mounds of mousse and Devil’s Food cakes, fondues and white chocolate cups of cut fruit. Infinite (but not necessarily very good) chocolate. If I were to engage in such an intense experience, I’d prefer it to be at Burdick’s, where, sitting at a discrete small table toward the back, I’d have a small plate of much more refined truffles and fruit chocolates selected by me, and possibly a madeleine for contrast. The curation would be mine, and it would be about distinction rather than excess.
But my drink would be coffee. I’ll wait for my granddaughter to visit on a snowy day for the hot chocolate.
L.A. Burdick, 52 Brattle St., Harvard Square, Cambridge (8 a.m. to 9 p.m.)
