It’s really spring. Does anyone else welcome the first warm days like me, happy for sudden and high heat? I walk and sweat and love it, channeling my deep hatred for the relentless cold of winter. My body is lighter now, freer, no heavy coats, hats, mittens, boots. In midsummer when there have been three consecutive days over 90 degrees, I may remember cold weather longingly, but not now. I have stored up so much desire to be warm. 

I sat this past week by the grassy BU “beach” near my office and wondered at the students who so quickly shed their Canada Goose jackets for bikinis. Rites of spring. And so this week I chose cafés where, like the turtles I saw on a floating log in Fresh Pond recently, I can get nourished by the sun.

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We don’t have a lot of outdoor seating in Cambridge-Somerville, but as a heat-seeking creature, I will take a rickety seat at a rickety table on a narrow patch of sidewalk or a San Francisco-like “parklet” – a parking space turned into an outdoor seating area, only a foot removed from traffic. There’s something cheerful on a warm urban day, even with a large truck so close to my table that I could hand a passenger a sandwich, if I were inclined to share my delicious jambon-beurre. Which I am not.

What is important is coffee outdoors, keeping the mug on your papers so they don’t blow away, swatting yellow jackets who don’t realize your coffee isn’t sugared, feeding sparrows croissant crumbs, smiling at a dog leashed to its companion’s table. The three outdoor places I review here are not like the Parisian café in the Jardin du Luxembourg, nor the Kyoto café next to a mossy temple grounds, and not even the relative peace of a New York City pocket-park café, but they are what we have and we are happy to have them. (I’ve mentioned cafés with outdoor seating in earlier columns – e.g., Three Little Figs, Imagine, Simon’s – and there will be more as the season evolves, but these are among my regulars.)

Intelligentsia

A few feet over the Watertown border but solidly Cambridge in its coffee, clientele and aspiring name is Intelligentsia, an outpost of a significant Chicago roaster. Its downtown Loop shops, as well as those in Silver Lake and Venice, California, and New York City, occupy older buildings that have great character. On the Watertown-Cambridge-Belmont border, Intelligentsia does the same, to great effect, in an old gas station. 

The pleasantness of a café’s outdoor seating depends on its surroundings. Is it on a noisy road (or in this case, two: Belmont Street and Mount Auburn), with inconsiderate drivers illegally idling vehicles? Is construction underway nearby? Are there trees and plants? Are the seats and tables comfortable, or do they barely support a body and its cup? 

The seating inside Intelligentsia is well designed, with benches at individual tables. On the lower level, tables are tucked into corners and alcoves for more privacy, where, as people read or work on laptops, it often has the feeling of a study hall. The liveliest conversations are, on warm days, outdoors, with no need for consideration: the patio is a place for talking with or watching people. 

But we’ve come for the coffee, which is excellent. The espresso drinks are mellow, not bitter except when bitterness is a plus note, especially wanted if the drink includes foam or milk. The drip coffee comes two ways: house, ready immediately; or a hand-poured “pour-over,” which can be made with a choice of bean. Iced drinks, considering the warmer weather to come, are well crafted, but this is secondhand knowledge because I almost always (even in summer) drink hot coffee. Some of the fine pastries here were baked at Forge and La Saison. Which leads me to …

La Saison

At La Saison, opposite an endless and expensive school reconstruction project on Concord Avenue, the noisy outdoors is your only option – there’s no indoor seating. Yet La Saison may be the most exuberant place for coffee in our fair cities. On a sunny day, as dogs, children and neighbors share umbrellaed tables, few hold back from sharing thoughts from the banal “what a great day!” to “But have you read his work on Habermas?” (perhaps that also qualifies as banal in Cambridge).

On a recent warm day, all tables were filled, but sharing was easy: Two young men with backward baseball caps asked to sit with two older men whose cap bills faced forward. A generational divide bridged by limited seating.

The Persian couple who own this bakery-café, Soheil Fathi and Sarah Moridpour, infuse it with wonderful aromas. Their crusty boules are in demand, and most customers who come for coffee leave carrying a bag of bread, croissants or pastries. If there’s a special occasion on the horizon, consider a spectacular fruit-covered cake. La Saison uses Intelligentsia’s coffees while Intelligentsia uses La Saison’s pastries, including the za’atar- and sesame-covered squares and the tiny rectangular cookies scented with rosewater or orange flower water, some with pistachio. The rich buttery-flaky kouign-amann had a moment recently, and here it continues. Brioche Frite is an only-on-Sunday morsel, but the wait is worth it for this Sicilian brioche stuffed with vanilla pastry cream and lightly crumbed and fried. The za’atar bread is lovely, as are several other savory morsels and the occasional pizza. The coffee is superb as well, and you can choose your roast level, which I greatly appreciate because I am not a fan of dark roasts. There’s an extensive list of flavored lattes, cold drinks and teas.

Hi-Rise

Farther along Concord Avenue near the corner of Huron is Hi-Rise, a magnet for neighbors, bike and bus riders, and drivers with Cambridge stickers, as parking for others is scarce. But it is wrong to lead with the problem of car access, because the desire for food and drink here should override parking worries. 

I’ve been frequenting Hi-Rise since it opened more than 20 years ago in the old Blacksmith House on Brattle Street in Harvard Square (which, when Hi-Rise took over, was the Window Shop where Viennese ladies sold European pastries, luncheon sandwiches and dirndls. My mother loved it.) At Hi-Rise then, coffee was king and young, highly skilled baristas ran the espresso machines and managed the pour-over routines. We conversed and commingled around coffee. Later, when Hi-Rise moved to Massachusetts Avenue near the Law School, the sandwich menu developed into a marvel of combinations. Favorites still available include a Nordic bread slice topped with avocado and pico de gallo. The Lil’ Brekkie is still a small brioche filled with a slice of hardboiled egg, greens and tomato – a breakfast mouthful of perfection. Dr. Larry’s roast pork sandwich is stuffed with salami, roast peppers, cornichons and other tasty things that I can’t recall. There are great items to take away: breads, jams, wines. My recent favored bite is the narrow “flute” of a baguette with jambon and beurre, the simple ham and butter combination that, in Paris, is all you need. 

Here, without the Parisian streets to stroll, you may find a seat in the Jersey-barriered narrow parklet. You are a little alarmingly but still charmingly in the middle of traffic. It’s almost a parody of the sidewalk cafés of Europe, but we take what we can get. And here I can get a fine pour-over, a short espresso or an Arnold Palmer (iced tea and lemonade) if the day is warm enough for ice. 

Intelligentsia, 810 Mount Auburn St., Watertown (7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays to Thursdays; 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays)

La Saison, 407 Concord Ave., Neighborhood 9 near Fresh Pond, Cambridge (7 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays; 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays)

Hi-Rise, 208 Concord Ave., Huron Village, West Cambridge (8 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays; 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday; 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays)

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.

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Corky White

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