It’s axiomatic that coffee with food tastes differently from coffee alone, and food with coffee tastes differently from food alone. Sometimes we prioritize the food, sometimes the coffee. (If we are lucky, we find a place that prioritizes both.)
In the Boston area, coffee and doughnuts are the classic morning pairing. In Southern California, the day might start with tacos and coffee, churros and coffee or chilaquiles … and coffee. In Minnesota, it might be heavily frosted cinnamon buns, or a Norwegian almond pastry. Avocado toast, a trend that started in “flat-white” Australia, is almost everywhere now.
When surveying the coffee-food scene in Cambridge and Somerville, do you go for a prized coffee and pair it with a generic muffin, scone or croissant? Or for the destination flaky buttery pastry or housemade bagel and schmear and wash it down with coffee that is not quite up to the munch’s level?
Perhaps you want a fuller meal: a breakfast sandwich or lunch – pizza, a spinach and cheese “snail,” falafel wrap, shakshuka or whipped labneh with zaatar. The offerings at La Saison in Fresh Pond include delectable small Persian cookies with rosewater and pistachio, as well as pizza and some of the best breads around. Forge on Somerville Avenue has what the British call a very “more-ish” (as in “please may I have some more?”) array of pastries and sandwiches. Farther down the avenue, Yafa is my “sweet” home, offering Palestinian pastries, wondrous hummus with bread, and jewellike stuffed dates, some luxuriously topped with edible gold leaf. The hospitality of Yafa is unmatched, but there I forgo coffee and opt for the excellent chai or a lemon-lime drink of delicious astringency.
Are there places that sell high-quality food and destination coffee? The answer is yes, and here are three where no compromise is needed.
Revival in Davis Square has a menu that reads cheerily “normal” with better versions of some predictable items such as toasted cheese sandwiches. It has five small tables in the main building and more seating in a converted light industrial space in the alley next door. In warmer weather, tables fill the alleyway too. The bagel is housemade, and small and chewy as it should be. There is the “millennial toast” with everything in the Davis Square zeitgeist – from arugula to feta to avocado to pickled red onion – piled on. Overnight oats make a satisfying appearance. All the favorites are here in delicious iterations.
Coffee? A solid performance, and many guest roasters are available with signage indicating a range of geographies, roasting levels and flavor profiles. My test beverage is always a drip, black, no sugar. The drip is mellow, a medium-light roast and brewed with water slightly cooled from boiling, better for tasting all the layers a coffee can offer. The frothy, “loaded” espresso beverages are good, less sweet than some and more to my taste.
What I love is the pun-full menu, with “bean me up scotty,” “oh my gourd noodle bowl” and best, in my view, “tahini in wrapsody.” Don’t worry, ingredients are listed under each cute and clever title, down to vg, v, gf, df and n indicators, some of which are more opaque to me than the titles. (A good game to play with your tablemates is find the references for the names – ciabatta bing!)
If you can snag a table in the main building, you’ll enjoy the bonhomie that prevails. The paucity of tables may be one of the reasons for the popularity of takeout, indicated by the many labeled bags on the takeout-pickup shelf.
Luxor, a beautifully decorated and atmospheric shop in Cambridge near Harvard Square, is home to an Egyptian breakfast plate that might just make lunch (and dinner) unnecessary. On a cold Sunday early morning it was almost empty, its dark ceiling shadowing a huge wall of laser-cut hieroglyphics, with Egyptian filigreed lamps emitting a faint colorful light. In the half-light away from the windows, we felt the presence of the ancients.
The menu has a sandwich called the Darwin Mt. Auburn, an homage to the sandwich shop that long occupied the space that Luxor now inhabits. But we came for the Egyptian references, the pita and its accompaniments, the fava bean dishes, the mint-infused tea.
We chose eggs and pasterma, the thin-sliced air-dried beef common to Egypt but also as “bastourma” to Armenian foods. (Bastourma is, linguistically, the original form of “pastrami.”) Pasterma figured too in a melted cheese sandwich, the Harvard Square. Luxor offers an avocado toast and that dish that will fill you for the day, the Egyptian Breakfast, with fava beans, cheese, eggs, mint and bread, and something called shai, which I had to look up: a black tea-based beverage common in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and Ethiopia that is a version of chai. The coffees are good indeed, the roaster being Broadsheet on the other side of Harvard Square.
A sumptuous if exceedingly sweet treat is the Dubai Chocolate French Toast (why is Dubai chocolate on every pastry menu? The answer is, apparently, TikTok). The teas here are from Mem tea, a local purveyor whose name on a menu is an authoritative commendation. Mem has a shop across the street from Revival in Davis Square.
The décor, like the food, rewards close attention. The kitchen and food pickup station is in a second room in which, tucked in a corner near a small window, is a beautiful table whose pedestal was carved from a tree trunk. Near the front is a seldom-used large cold brew apparatus that looks like a glass-balled Victorian laboratory appliance but is Japanese.
At the time of this writing, it was Ramadan, and Luxor was serving an 8 p.m. break-fast menu. There is a pull-down screen in the back of the main room for occasional evening films and World Cup soccer games. We promise to return for one of these community events, when the place will be redolent with spiced coffee and humming with Arabic.
Asaro in Cambridge has an array of creative pastries and savories, and excellent coffee. Entering at lunchtime, you take your chances at finding a table, but there is always a seat at a common table, perhaps next to someone on a laptop or a couple of ardent Instagram food snappers. Asaro is food-forward, and its richly loaded glass cases and heavily burdened platters of fresh-from-the-oven treats are overwhelmingly tantalizing. Choosing from the ever-changing selection is hard. The day I went, it was Purim and a variety of multistuffed hamantaschen were on offer, so I had one of each. The savory treats too – cheese-and-apple pastry, shakshuka Danish, the Palestinian bread twist with six tiny accompanying dips – all appeal. The coffees are from roaster La Colombe, and a small drip is a bargain at $3.75, especially compared with the other beverages. In fact, one explanation for the lack of identifiable high-school-age lunch customers at a restaurant directly across the street from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School may be Asaro’s high prices. Many pastries are in the $8 to $10 range, and delicious though they are, they are not as affordable a treat as a slice of pizza across the school campus at Angelo’s.
What does Asaro mean? According to one inquirer, it is the name one of the founders used to identify his artwork. But what to name the range of delicious foods there? I’d say it’s foods that speak some French, Arabic, Hebrew and Italian. Perhaps “Ottolenghi,” the name of the chef and cookbook writer in London whose foods span those cultures and more, sums it up. Save your dinars, euros and shekels and go!
Revival, 197 Elm St., Davis Square, Somerville (7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.)
Luxor, 149 Mount Auburn St., Harvard Square, Cambridge (8 a.m. to midnight Sunday to Thursday; 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday)
Asaro, 1629 Cambridge St., Mid-Cambridge (7 a.m. to 5 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 is grounded in coffee and welcomes suggestions at cwhite@csindie.com.
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