On the way to Triangle, a café in a newish tech office building surrounded by other sky-mounting modern structures, I passed a sign saying “PingPod” and “learn to play Ping Pong” on ceiling-to-ground glass windows revealing ping-pong tables and a few avid learners.
There’s a message there to me, which went into boldface when I sat in one of the several alcoves and seating areas where you can bring your coffee in the few-months-old Triangle, in an atrium-ceilinged lobby. All work and no play, goes the adage, makes Jack (or Jill, or Mackenzie) a dull person. But the play, scheduled lessons in a shiny steel-and-glass building, looks to be just as competitively serious as the work. Ping-pong is a high intensity sport, after all.
The building itself is high intensity and houses serious companies such as Bayer, and at 9 a.m. the lobby was crisscrossed with striding workers, some ascending in a glass-sided elevator. The residents of the café tables were bent over computers and phones, no one reading the books on the “library” area shelves. This reminded me of Anthony Powell’s wonderful novel, “Books Do Furnish a Room” (1971) in which he skewers middle-class taste by describing the use of books as decoration – walls of Penguin Books arranged by color of binding, for example. Looking at Triangle’s books, as is my wont, I saw a Time-Life volume on the life of Gainsborough and other midcentury humanities-based works, none of which, I’ll wager, would figure in the work of the computer-focused inhabitants of the building or the café’s library.
The décor is, my companion offered, “deliberately anonymous” and yet signals a curated “off-center” sensibility. I was taken with my bagel’s white plate with irregular borders and skewed centering – it was interesting until I saw that all the plates on which pastries were served had exactly the same “irregularities.” A mass-produced singularity.
But you ask, how is the coffee? My brew, from Broadsheet, was just fine, as was my companion’s iced cold brew. Broadsheet makes a “Triangle” blend for this shop and offers it an espresso roast for the La Marzocco machine. The prevalence of Broadsheet in our area is good – balanced blends and medium roasts – while lending the area a kind of aromatic, sensory uniformity. I’m not complaining: It’s good to know you’re going to have a good cup.
Predictable food too has its comforts. My companion’s Umami Breakfast Sandwich with its shaped omelet, ham and bacon topped with “secret sauce” was an unsurprisingly nice bite (no shock of interest in the sauce and its “umami” savory-ness), and my plain bagel with cream cheese was confirmatory, if not special. That’s fine when you come for conversation and not for a culinary experience.
I’ve not visited many chain coffee establishments for this series, but I became interested in our almost-workspace cafés whether or not they belong to a corporate facility or a “chain.” Triangle is a café design business, and while not creating on a coworking space model, seems to go into places where work-away-from-office-or-home might prevail. There are four in our area and more in New York City and Washington, D.C. Observably comfortable and quiet, the rooms at this space were visited by people taking a break from work to do work, at least spatially. I would guess that the use of these rooms depends on the time of day. That the shop is open only on weekdays from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. is a clue to the clientele and neighborhood. It’s not particularly residential, and would not have a lot of foot traffic at weekday leisure times or weekends.
As for me, if I take ping-pong lessons next door, I’ll be sure to come by, sweating mightily, for an iced cold brew and definitely intend to read the biography of Gainsborough.
Triangle, 238 Main St., Kendall Square, Cambridge. (7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday to Friday) Other Triangles are at 10 Wilson Road, The Quad, Cambridge Highlands; 100 Chestnut St., Somerville; and on Galen Street, Watertown.
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.
