Are you in a café now, taking a break from family, work or school? Or there for work itself, with laptop or No. 2 pencil active? Are you there with a friend or conducting an interview? Or are you there for the coffee itself?
Let’s Have Coffee is for all of this and more, for the randomness of social life in a café, escaping from routines or as a routine in itself. Coffee is ordinary, often not really noticed, but in this column, I will make it conscious, shining a light on where we sit and on the beverages themselves.
I became “grounded” and infused in coffee at an early age, and most of my drinking has been in Somerville and Cambridge.
From the age of 2, when my father instructed me to put my nose at the seal of a can of Maxwell House as he broke the vacuum, the nutty or herbaceous chocolate-tinged or caramelized whoosh has mesmerized me. By the time I was 15, it was the coffeehouses of Harvard Square, where the whoosh was a heady mix of burned urn coffee and cigarette smoke. There were so many then: You chose according to your desire for poetry, folk music, Mozart or the politics of the moment. And while there are many now, fewer are independently owned. It is these that I will focus on.
Let’s Have Coffee explores our drinking in and beyond the cup. We do many different things in cafés – take a break, pass time before an appointment or have one right there in the coffeehouse, write in a journal or read, communicate with people in distant places or right at our table. It’s become unusual to see a person simply sitting with a cup of coffee, doing nothing more.
Coffee is, after all, a diverse and democratic commodity – there’s room for all of us in the Coffee Universe. There are many ways to choose where to go on a given day, but in this column I choose ambiance, workability and sociability. There’s overlap, of course: All have “ambiance,” and if “work” implies a pad of paper and a pen, all are “workable”; none is antisocial, although there are moments in a heavily laptopped café when clicking is all one hears.
Sometimes, if you’ve been home for hours and want a change of scenery and a little company, you go to a café that invites conversation or just unspoken companionship from people in comfortable proximity. For that – and a damned good cup of filter coffee or espresso macchiato – I go to Imagine.
Some call it “Iggy’s” because of the bakery-company ownership, some refer to it by Kismet, its former name, but I call it “Matt’s” because my friend Matt Magnusson makes the great macchiato and offers wondrous teas, too. The room has a curved sheepskin-covered bench, and there are tiny tables for coffee and pastries. There are a few chairs – two prized seats face the adobelike fireplace where in cold weather feet and hands are warmed – but mostly you sit in shared physical and auditory space. As croissants come out of the oven, you are pulled back to the counter by the curling tentacles of buttery aroma. The pastries, as alluded to, are Iggy’s, baked on-site.
The company might include a woman “journaling” or a couple passing a baby back and forth to facilitate safe sipping in turn. One day a woman overheard me say “Kyoto” and introduced me to her daughter, who was about to spend her junior year abroad there, and with whom I met again (for coffee, of course!) to offer coffee tips for my favorite city.
Go to Imagine for company, coffee and the conservatory atmosphere provided by vines hanging from high-mounted pots of greenery. Do not go if you want to commune with a computer. Laptops are not permitted.
For coffee in Wi-Fi-enabled work zones, I might go to Forge, which is cavernous and houses a variety of perches. Almost all on a recent visit were inhabited by people with screens up, looking more like an open-plan office in Portland, Oregon, where, as here, Pendleton shirts, facial hair and navy-blue watch caps prevail. The coffee at Forge seems appropriate for people with something else on their minds rather than for finicky coffee mavens (e.g., me). There are faithful regulars and people who seem to have arrived at opening with the intention of staying to the end. There are some excellent baked goods. Note that local cafes support each other: Forge and La Saison sell their pastries at Intelligentsia, and Diesel and La Saison offer Intelligentsia’s coffees. Diesel gets Forge’s ice cream (they are sibling establishments).
Where should you have a first meeting with a new acquaintance? Or a long-lost classmate? I suggest Three Little Figs, especially when it is warm and you can find an outdoor table. Indoors is fine too, but there’s a bit more privacy outside. (Here is a plea for more outdoor seating in our cities, where and when possible.) Three Little Figs has been around a long time, mostly a place for neighbors and known for its Greek-ish pastries, sandwiches and its friendliness. Like Imagine, Three Little Figs has no Wi-Fi and doesn’t permit laptops, so it’s a great place to get to know someone, write poetry or read a book!
Imagine, 358 Huron Ave., Huron Village, Cambridge, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily and some evenings as a wine bar.
Forge, 626 Somerville Ave., Ward 2, Somerville, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Three Little Figs, 278 Highland Ave., Somerville, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
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 aims to cover the coffee grounds and welcomes suggestions at [email protected].