When I was reading about the movie where Zendaya plans a school shooting, I was tickled to find that it is set in Camberville. I was more surprised to see that in an effort to lend authenticity to the film, scenes were shot at a Tatte.
Young professionals on this side of the river don’t talk about it, but none of us really go to Tatte. The idea of going is regarded with derision – why would you go there? Sometimes you wind up there, as maybe the least-bad demilitarized zone to take your Hinge date, but you’d never aspire to it. It’s a bit like going to a Hard Rock Cafe in New York.
My friend had some out-of-town relatives visit. After a brief perusal of Google Maps, they decided that they wanted to go to the Assembly Square Tatte. I could write a book about the Assembly Square vibecession, but moving past that, I realized the premise of my friend’s story was our shared assumptions: Given the choice of where to have brunch, nobody would go there.
What is it about that place? The food is pretty good, and it’s always busy. It’s a chain, but a relatively small one. Is it that there are better options? Sure. But it is more than that.
You enter a lobby with tiled floors and walls and picture windows. The floors are white, the walls are white, and something else is white too, but we will get to that later. Inexplicably, the employees are also wearing white clothing. Is this an operating room? There are two Tardis-like counters, and it’s unclear which you’re supposed to order from. So you pick the closest, find a menu, and ask for an $18 entree. After the iPad is flipped around and you select the lowest tip option because you are too ashamed to select “none,” you are handed a number attached to a metal pole. You’re pretty sure that the last time a cashier gave you a number on a stick, Obama was president.
For a lot of people, this is their jam. With a single AirPod in, they glide between stations with practiced ease after their morning run, filling up on yesterday’s matcha and last week’s eggs. (If you’re one of those people, that’s cool. I just can’t get into it.)
It can be hard to measure the ways things get worse. The way most people here handle this is by deciding that things were perfect the day they moved to Cambridge and have gotten worse since. It’s similar to how our opinion of the economy depends on who is president. Still, food is an easy thing to pick at, because things do suck. High commercial rents mean that only expensive (and/or chain) businesses move in, and the greasy spoons of the world can’t keep up or do so by charging Tatte-level prices. High salaries mean the tastemakers of the world move to Worcester and gentrifiers such as us follow. And now we’re stuck eating hospital food in an operating room.
The cure, I suppose, is already here. We have the local places. We can pretend we’re in Italy every day if we want: Get up tomorrow, walk to Broadsheet and sip on a cappuccino in a lawn chair if you dare and let Tatte-lovers go to Tatte. But the more Tattes there are (and the fewer Broadsheets) the more the fabric of our city deteriorates.
You might think that this piece is over, and you would be wrong. After writing this, I Googled the restaurant, and I realized an addendum was needed. I’d been scoring points against this restaurant for soft reasons, when it turns out I could have been dribbling, dunking and scoring three-pointers from the field! So here is a bonus round:
Tatte founder Tzurit Or stepped back from day-to-day management of the restaurant in 2020 after employees accused her of making repeated “racist and derogatory remarks” and promoting a culture of discrimination. Black employees were allegedly forced to work in the back of the restaurant or not hired at all, reportedly because they aren’t part of the all-white “Tatte aesthetic” When interviewed about this, Or claimed that because she was raised in Israel – a country famously free of racism – she was unaware of racial stereotyping in the way Americans perceive it.
Sometimes endings write themselves.
Nicholas Marchuk is a local author and engineer. His work is available at major retailers and on his website, nicholasmarchuk.com. Comments and questions can be directed to his contact form and may be responded to in this publication.
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