Highland Avenue in Somerville and its surroundings house several interesting and unique cafés, as I’ve written in recent weeks. Highland is a corridor road, traveling along a high ridge and cutting across Somerville from Davis Square to Route 28. The seven hills of Somerville, commemorated in a park in Davis next to the T, include Highland’s Central Hill, nearby Taylor’s Ledge and Winter, Prospect and Spring hills. In a nod to the wonderful Tartan Army who’ve turned a lot of us into Scots, I call this weeks’ visits to Wicked and the nearby Zaruma Gold a “Highland fling.”
Each café contributes to my understanding of what it means to be local. Some of us become local in cafés simply by being regulars, regardless of where we live, and some just walk down the street from home and show up, known or not. Sometimes being known is fine, with a “Hi!” attached to one’s name, and the required coffee needing no order. Sometimes, though, one wants more anonymity and minimal human contact and so orders ahead. I understand both, though I never order online.
The café itself might be a transplant, brought to Somerville “from away” (as they say in Maine), trying to fit in. We see a bulletin board covered with business cards for massage therapists or gutter cleaners, or a handwritten sign about a missing cat. Or the café could be locally generated: A guy trades a tie for a tee and returns to his old neighborhood to open a shop. Somerville loves the sense of local, and it is easy to fall in with that welcome sensibility. I felt in both of this weeks’ places that I’d sat in those seats often.
Highland cafés have a local, friendly patina. Small talk is important; hellos and how-are-yous and how-about-this-weather signify permeable boundaries between customer and staff. Not particularly deep or meaningful, but as connection quite powerful.
These also give you entry to more, as this anthropologist knows. It’s fieldwork, it’s interviewing. You can ask “Is the empanada a family recipe?” or “Why is a small coffee the same price as a medium?” or “How did you choose the color for the walls?” I often say that my purpose is to tell people about the café, so ask “What would you like people to know about this place?”
Wicked Cafe
The owner’s answer to that question was “I want people to leave in a better mood than they arrived in.” With Wicked’s bright pumpkin-colored walls, cheerful staff and multiple latte flavor shot options, how could you not? Some of the flavors emerge from deconstructing a food item and emulating its elements. For Snickers-flavored coffee, the syrup is made from chocolate, peanut flavoring and caramel – not from chopping the candy bar into coffee, as might be done for an ice cream. What’s a French Kiss? The answer – hazelnut and vanilla – isn’t intuitive, but why not? The candy bar flavors named in their lattes (Reese’s, Milky Way, York Peppermint Patty) sound to me a bit cloying, but for those with a mouthful of sweet teeth …
And then there’s Wicked’s mushroom coffee. With less caffeine and more umami, it sounds interesting, and I’ll be back to try it. My drip coffee was balanced, medium to darkish roast. My companion’s hot chocolate was delicious and, noted with approval, “hyper sweet.” There are mango, peach, raspberry and “tropical” iced teas. Breakfast sandwiches include the ever-popular bacon-egg-cheese and hummus, avocado, spinach and tomato. There are also bagels and muffins.
Wicked is not about the movie or witches but, to express local usage, it is “wicked good.”
Zaruma Gold
Nearby in a residential area on the corner of Woodbine and Lowell streets is a fascinating Ecuadorian café. On a Monday, it was quiet, with a couple inhabiting an indoor table and another customer on the pleasant patio, which is bordered by well-tended flower boxes.
Zaruma’s coffees are its own, and the house blend I had was mellow and balanced. Stars for us were the empanadas, a beef and a ham and cheese. There’s an ice cream cabinet, a variety of sandwiches and more on a menu complete enough for satisfying meals. From blinis, crepes, tiramisu and tres leches cake, the menu is a geography game, and the co-owner, Vlad Sinev, makes a secret-recipe chai – again, for another visit.
Ecuador has at least four ecologically different coffee zones producing strikingly different brews and making the phrase “single origin” much more than a national moniker. The several coffees reflect their regions’ qualities (high altitude, proximity to the Pacific Ocean, the Amazon or the Galapagos).
But back to the space itself. With lots of seating indoors and out and Wi-Fi available, it’s a generally welcoming space, even welcoming to well-behaved dogs. It’s malleable and is what you make it: social for me, work for others. The walls have art and shelves of brightly colored Ecuadorian crafts, baskets and of course bags of eponymous coffee, all for sale. I’m charmed. Zaruma Gold can gild your coffee moment.
Wicked Cafe, 199c Highland Ave., Somerville. (7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday to Saturday; 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday)
Zaruma Gold Coffee, 37 Woodbine St., near Magoun Square, Somerville. (8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Wednesday; 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday; 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday)
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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