Coffee and student life go together, except perhaps for my own BU students (in a class of 30, only five drink coffee). Even those who don’t drink it frequent coffee shops, and the two universities that dominate Cambridge seem to foster café sitting. There are some stereotypes associated with MIT and Harvard and I wanted to see if they were borne out in the populations of nearby cafés. MIT, whose motto is mens et manus (“mind and hand”), does not always breed clipboard-carrying, lab-coat-wearing science wonks, and Harvard does not always foster veritas (truth)-seeking humanists. But there may be traces of distinction visible in coffeehouses, and I wanted to see who’d show up near campus. For MIT I needed to visit two stops on the MBTA red line, Kendall Square and Central Square. Harvard’s singular hub is above the Harvard Square red line stop, though of course its empire is much more extensive. 

MIT has a wealth of coffee establishments that serve not only students but also all the tech, bio and pharm workers in the (for Cambridge) sky-scraping buildings surrounding the Kendall T stop. Central, on the other side of campus, offers coffee to a diverse population of locals and students. We will follow the rumble of the red line, felt in three coffee seats.

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Area Four

For students (and faculty and tech workers), one reliable house of coffee is Area Four, a couple of blocks from the T. Why “Area Four”? In 1940, the Cambridge Planning Board divided Cambridge into 13 districts. These designations are hardly ever used, except on the residents’ visitor parking permit cards. This area is also called “Tech Square” and “The Port,” though of course that adds to the confusion because Cambridgeport is somewhere else again. But our Area Four is the café connected to the Area Four pizza restaurant (worthy in its own right; I have a friend who swears by its garlic knots).

The café is compact but, with a high, industrial-piped ceiling, it feels large enough. There are two stainless-steel tables seating a dozen or so each and a counter along one side where one can sit and look at the lawn and outdoor tables. Coffee here is from Barrington, in Great Barrington. The menu also offers a category of tea and other drinks called “Not Coffee,” helping to define the place as bean-forward and leaf-following. There is a very good scallion biscuit, warm and ready for butter. An enormous sticky bun also looked good, but I stuck with the less-unhealthy option. 

High on the wall is a screen that occasionally shows old movies, but most morning visitors are either wearing industrial hardhats and waiting for their iced coffees to go (there’s always construction nearby) or are head-down in a laptop. Like listening to conversations, seeing screens over other peoples’ shoulders yields some strange glimpses: One had clinically obscure, lurid pictures of body parts; another had equally obscure equations that trailed off the edge of the screen. Yes, we’re near MIT. There’s the pleasant rumble of a passing subway underneath.

The Smoot Standard

The next subway-rumbled café, still by and for MIT but at its other hub of commerce, is Central Square’s Smoot Standard Café. And therein lies a very MIT story. A “smoot” is 1.86 yards, and that was the length of Oliver Smoot – now 85 years old, but in 1958 a student who lay down to be used as a device to measure the nearby Harvard Bridge. Tourists are instructed by the markings on the bridge that show how Smoot, stretched full length over and over again by his buddies, measured the bridge’s span to be 364.4 smoots “and one ear.” 

Smoot gave the café permission to name it after him. Smoot Standard, part of the four-location Darwin’s Ltd. coffee shop chain until its shutdown in 2022, is capacious, with a high-ceilinged room below and loungelike balcony seating above. There’s a bar by the window and a large disco ball hanging in the middle of the room. Clearly the evenings here are lively. But mornings the place is for coffee and small groups, including stroller-pushing young families. The coffee (as always, for comparison, I get a small drip coffee) is good, and the breakfast and lunch sandwiches look delicious. Tuesday through Saturday there is early dinner. Weekends look brunchy; the music system promises surround sound, and, to promote sociability, no laptops are permitted after noon on Saturdays and Sundays. 

Smoot Standard is in an area of good food. It’s near Ken Oringer’s Verveine, Flour, Mariposa and Toscanini’s, but they discourage the long sit an MIT student needs to push a project to completion. I, heeding the rumble of the red line, push on to Harvard Square.

There are bits of Harvard-MIT lore to cite. Harvard, founded in 1636 (whatever it says on the statue of John Harvard is wrong), is a bit older than MIT, which began classes first in Boston in 1865 and moved to Cambridge in 1916. Harvard has the Lampoon for pranks, but MIT hacks are the stuff of legend and the subject of a whole room in The MIT Museum. 

Faro

Nostalgia alert: Back in the (my) day, the Pamplona, a few steps down from Bow Street in Harvard Square, was the café for cognoscenti. Then too, coffee and student life were synonymous in part because of the bohemian counterculture (even though we’d not yet had much truck with weed), and alcohol was some years away for many college students. We parked ourselves at the same marble-topped tables day after day, reading, writing and arguing. “My” table was in the back right corner, where I wrote several chapters of an undergraduate thesis and a graduate dissertation (it worked the first time, why go to the library?). Mobile phones, computers and the Internet did not exist. Coffee (and a delicious Spanish garlic soup) was there, but it wasn’t about the coffee.

Many mourn the loss of Pamplona, which closed in 2020, but in recent years, Faro, a café reminiscent of it for some of us, opened around the corner on Arrow Street. This I will take for a Harvard-oriented café, not Tatte or Flour or other local chains nor Blue Bottle, admired for its coffees and which I will write about another time.

Faro, Spanish for lighthouse, on a sunny cool spring day encouraged outdoor seating on its triangular patio. There, as on Pamplona’s patio, surrounded by 19th century brick buildings and in the shadow of St. Paul’s church, one could pretend to be in a hidden European piazza. Perching on stools and benches, conversation dominates, though a be-hatted older person sits reading … poetry? Inside are about eight two-person tables and a trestle table seating perhaps six, unless more chairs are dragged to a lively conversation. Like Pamplona, you descend a few steps. The low ceiling does nothing to quiet the conversations, which are often of interest. Laptops are not permitted, but there are plenty of rather handsome journals in use and books in hands. No one used a phone, except for a middle-aged man who looked a bit nervous as his college-age daughter ordered him a coffee.

The coffee is very good, roasted in Connecticut by Ilse in a custom Faro Blend. On weekdays Faro sells pastries by La Saison, on weekends, by Michette. May I commend the staffs’ good humor and style? French chore jackets, a swell-looking jumpsuit and on one, Japanese balloon pants and smart socks. 

I left when the subway rumbled beneath, vowing to dress better next time.

Area Four, One Kendall Square, Kendall Square, Cambridges (7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays; closed Saturdays and Sundays)

The Smoot Standard, 313 Massachusetts Ave., The Port, Cambridge (8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays and Mondays)

Faro, 5 Arrow St., Harvard Square, Cambridge (8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays; 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays)

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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