Cuban food, burrata, wild edibles and bitter melon have been the subjects of my latest stories in the Globe. See here for links and let me know if you can think up a dish that combines all four subjects:
Mesquite was perhaps the most meaningful thing I ate in AZ, but there were plenty of other terroir-laden delicacies. Like the tepary beans and chiles that my friends Jordan and Autumn grew in their garden.
I left the teparies (above) soaking and am curious to hear how they turned out. I rehydrated a few kinds of their chiles (below), which ended up in a salsa. The liquid they'd plumped in made for some piquant agua fresca.
Much as I love heirloom New England produce, it just doesn't thrill me to the core like the stuff you can grow in places like Tucson. Of course this is probably just the allure of the exotic, and if I lived in the Southwest I'd be pining for native sweet corn or fresh Duxbury oysters. Hmm, now that I write that, I'm already pining.
That's how Jim Verrier of the awesome Desert Survivors plant nursery feels (read that sign if you can). Surrounded by a sea of Sonoran-style Mexican cuisine, he sounded like he'd sell his soul for some New England tomatoes grown in our region's acidic soil. I didn't even know that we had acidic soil. When comparing New England to Arizona, I guess the grass is always more acidic, or less existent, depending on whether you're looking east or west.
In two drip-irrigated raised beds in the backyard, Jordan and Autumn also grow chard, tomatillos and native tobacco. Amaranth pops up on its own volition in the rest of the yard, and the house came with an old, established pomegranate tree and another volunteer just starting to poke up.
Though they live in a neighborhood notorious for its lawns, they ripped up the insatiable grass, mounded the earth to replicate the desert terrain, and reintroduced native plants like ocotillo and wolfberry. The ocotillo was particularly hard to squeeze into the car on the way back to from the nursery.
While sitting in the yard one morning of my recent visit, Autumn presented me with a glowing-green smoothie. I recall that it had almond milk, mango, banana, spinach and mint, and it couldn't have been a more stark yet complimentary contrast to the hot, dry, dusty surroundings. One sip and my temperature plummeted, partly from the frozen fruit, partly from the menthol.
I had entered the garden entranced by the tough, scrubby, desert crops. The beans and hot peppers. But to be perfectly honest, is was the cool, fruity smoothie that really hit the spot. I wonder if, as chili peppers are to Chengdu, the smoothie is to Tucson: a stranger from a faraway land that has found its spiritual home?
While visiting my family in St. Louis I had the opportunity to explore the many bakeries, restaurants and cafes of Little Bosnia. I wrote about that neighborhood's culinary offerings for Smithsonian.com, and you can read the story and see the pics here:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Visiting-Bosnia-via-St-Louis.html
While in Florida this past weekend, I ate the vegetable pictured above. Or rather I should say that I choked down two bites of it, grimacing, and then guilty threw the rest away. I have no idea what it is or why anyone would want to eat it.
It seemed to be some variety of bitter melon, though the ones I've had before were more smooth and less warty. Also I've only had bitter melon cooked, though the vendor my mom bought this vegetable from said that it could be eaten raw, like a cucumber. Right.
Its similarities to a cucumber ended after being an oblong green thing that technically you could bite into. Unlike a cucumber, I didn't want to chew or swallow this, let alone turn it into a cool, creamy soup or de-crusted sandwich filling. A broccoli rabe and garlic mustard-loving nontaster, I was surprised at my lack of tolerance, but my gag reflex spoke for me.
Maybe I'm not giving it a fair shake, though if you did shake it, the little green warts fell off, which did not make it any more alluring.
Maybe if, like the bitter melon I've eaten, this was cooked with complimentary seasonings and salty bits of animal flesh, it would have been more palatable. As is, it was part vegetable, part emetic.
So what on earth was it? A snozzcumber?
When Elise and I had the privilege of visiting our good friends Jon and Layla in Honolulu, we also paid a visit to JJ Bistro and French Pastry. I was surprised to find that there was more than meets the eye at JJ's, and much that meets the eye too, especially in the rainbow-colored pastry case. I wrote about JJ's for the Globe, which you can see in today's paper and online here.
When I go to St. Louis for Thanksgiving I eat things that I never eat during the rest of the year.
That includes the obvious Americana served alongside the turkey, like sweet potatoes topped with toasted marshmallows and "green" bean casserole, but there are other things I eat before and after the holiday that sometimes challenge my conception of food.
Omelettes in a bag, for instance. For the past two years, my makua (Hawaiian for mother-in-law) has laid out a make-your-own omelette in a bag station for the many friends and relatives who gather for the holiday. Making an omelette in a bag is a lot like making an omelette out of a bag up until the part when you put in a bag. You fill a Ziploc with the egg mixture and float it into a simmering pot of water. When the egg and the orange cheddar pull away from the sides, it's done.
Does estrogen leak from the bag during the process? Let's just say I don't own any bras. Yet.
Then there was Lion's Choice, not to be confused with a lion's choice, though if a lion were to ever sample the "seasoned salt" that is the primary condiment at Lion's Choice, a roast beef-centric fast food restaurant native to St. Louis, it would surely enjoy it. (And then kill you.)
I have no idea what makes the seasoned salt so addictive, though I suspect that it's one of those things that make junk food as addictive as hard drugs.
Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy eating all of these things, which is to say that I do. If nothing else, eating like a suburbanite for a few days permits me to demount my high horse, which I only feed local, seasonal Asian greens and which I've named the Black Scallion.
It reminds me that although I wouldn't live as long if I ate like this all the time, I don't die when I do.
Yet.
I just returned from traveling for our first wedding anniversary and then for the anniversary of the apocryphal interracial love-fest we call Thanksgiving, though some Native Americans mark the occasion as a National Day of Mourning.
My travels included several interesting foodsperiences, which is a word that I just made up. I'll start with the anniversary.
First there was an indoor anniversary picnic of pâté (not to be confused with pâte), triple creme, baguette, sliced cucumbers, grapes, wine, and so forth. As I assembled that spread I learned something about myself: as much as I love Sichuan, when it's time to celebrate, all I want is French (or faux-French, as our meal may appear to connoisseurs, though it had the desired effect).
Breakfast the next day was Iggy's bagels and (responsibly farmed) smoked salmon, and thanks to my purchase of a champagne-saving cork, we drank dry mimosas then and throughout the day. In fact, we did little else, though we did walk up a ski run, where my elfin wife mugged for the camera.
An Indian dinner in Williamstown that night was unremarkable, but the moon looked pretty cool, and kind of like a buffalo.
Oddly, there was a John Harvard's Brew House in the hotel complex we were staying in, and on the same date for the second year in a row I found myself drinking their inoffensive, cartoonish beers: we went to the one in Harvard Square the night before our wedding.
We ordered a flight and did blind taste tests until we got them all right. And then, feeling even more celebratory, I guiltily ordered some buffalo tenders. Guess French isn't the only way I like to party.
Next time: culinary adventures in suburban St. Louis.
Seth and Maggie are good at bringing me edible presents from distant lands. Very good.
From their honeymoon in Scandinavia I received dried fish and aquavit. From their tea researching jaunt through India and Pakistan I obtained fermented cauliflower leaves, yeast for making the rice beer known as chang (aka "thoo-n"), coriander honey, dried cubes of yak cheese, saffron, cardamom, and of course tea.
Most of the tea they brought me, like most of the tea in India, was black. Since I haven't found an Indian black tea that I've loved, I found myself pouring most of my gift for guests; guests, as a people, generally want black tea and don't care where it's from. And so I guilty found myself ignoring my last sack of tea. It said "Darjeeling" and the bag was black, so I assumed its contents were as well.
Oops! As luck would have it, my mistake was pointed out by Dave, the one guest who doesn't
want black tea. Turned out I had a white tea, and it was not only Organic Makaibari Silver Tips but Organic Makaibari Silver Tips Imperial. The Imperial is apparently only picked when conditions are right and under "full moon beams."
I haven't toyed with temperature and brewing time enough to fully report on OMSTI, but so far it's been fun. A short brew made with not very hot water (my system: I use the extra water Elise boils for coffee once enough time has passed for me to think "maybe I'll have some tea," at which point it's somewhere between the temperature for oolong and for ice) that I'm drinking right now is predominantly tannic, also grassy, and not quite roasty but... let's call it toasty. Why I have no idea, since white tea is not roasted. This batch must have grown next to a shrub that was struck by lightning.
A longer brew of leaves on their third or fourth steep produced a viscous cup with notes of citrus peel and a sort of off-fruitiness that I can't quite place. Call it resin. Again, I need more time to figure this one out but will keep you posted.
Seth and Maggie: sorry it took so long. But look at it this way -- now you gave me an aged white tea!
When moving, my thoughts usually turn to the thrilling prospect of exploring a new foodshed. But on my most recent move a few days ago, I found myself instead paying more attention to how my food life changed during the move itself.
Let's just say I ate a lot of things I hadn't been willing to eat up until it was time to decide between the compost bin, the garbage, and me.
Like turning one only after you've lived for an entire year, moving can't happen until after you've packed, cleaned, donated, drunk a six pack, and so forth. Since you can't snap your fingers and apparate into your new dwelling, you must experience the awkward phase of living amongst boxes and deciding up until the last moment what items are so crucial as to deserve to stay out. And your desire to get packing over with usually outweighs your desire to have access to a cutting board.
With half of your possessions in boxes and the other half at Goodwill, preparing even a simple snack becomes daunting. We did a lot of cutting directly on the top of a wooden hutch, and several meals were cooked in a single non-stick skillet with a silicon tipped rubber spatula as the only tool. For a few days we shared one plate and reused one cloth napkin.
We drank out of peanut butter jars, and then left them in the recycling bin before driving away. We ate simple meals like noodles and eggs (at top), and extravagant meals made from freezer items that simply had to go.
Since the refrigerator must be left empty, you are forced to take a good hard look at your food supply. Suddenly your Softasilk flour and vodka so cheap as to only be drinkable in jello shot form have nowhere to hide, and like children left on your doorstep, must now be dealt with.
You must throw away the jar of pitted sour cherries in brandy that you bought your girlfriend, now your wife, at the Smokehouse Deli in Cleveland back when you were a touring sketch comedian. As a general rule, if you have food left over from an entirely different career, it's time to let go.
We said goodbye to frozen pieces of our wedding cake, unmarked jars of homemade jam, and corn husks too brittle for making tamales.
On the plus side, I found myself revisiting old friends I'd nearly forgotten. Though we bid farewell to the cake, we defrosted and devoured a container of the sweet potato-peanut-pimenton soup that Amanda made for our wedding, which remains one of the best soups I've ever slurped, even after a half year in the freezer. The taste brought me back; I didn't realize that freezers were also time machines.
Perhaps the best rediscovered food was a frozen cow tongue that we cooked in the Crockpot and then ate in gorditas so good they deserve their own post. (Stay tuned.)
There were also forgotten foods that were precious enough to merit space in the U-Haul. These included jars of dehydrated chicken of the woods, local dried beans, bricks of baking chocolate and the remaining half bottle of Aquavit that Seth and Maggie brought me from somewhere in Scandinavia.
Moving also threw a wrench into gardening, which we basically can't do this season because we'll be moving again in September. But luckily, one strawberry ripened before we left.
The others will have to be a gift to our neighbors or, more likely, birds and squirrels.
What better way to end a series on Hawaiian food than with fruit?
In Hawaii, fruit abounds. You'd have to work not to eat it.
Fruit nearly bursts from the corner market bins that barely contain it. It sprouts out of cracks in the sidewalk. It hypnotizes you, forcing your hand, until you come to holding a limp, empty papaya skin with seeds scattered around your bare feet like buckshot.
"What have I done?" you wonder. It was your third papaya that morning.
Our friends Jon and Layla aren't gardeners or even particularly fruit-crazed, but the apartment they rent just happens to have growing in its modest yard figs, pomelos, and avocados. I happen to have growing in my yard poison ivy.
Their next door neighbors have bananas, and nearly every other house on the street -- and everywhere else in Honolulu -- has at least one enormous papaya tree standing sentinel, its bombs of fructose ready to drop. Coconuts, pineapple and guava are similarly omnipresent.
In Hawaii, fruit just happens. While hanging out in a city park we realized that we were standing under a tamarind tree, and we picked them out of the grass and feasted (wincing). Rogue mango trees grow on vacant lots just daring you to make a dent in their incomparable bounty.
Appropriately, while in Hawaii I was reading Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel. In it he declares the Cavendish, essentially the only banana available to most of us, to also be the worst banana in terms of flavor. He describes other, more desirable bananas that have the texture of apples, and bananas described by the adjective "juicy."
Luckily I could go get bananas anywhere I wanted. And nearly every banana I saw was an apple banana, which are a little shorter, a little fatter, a little more tangy, and a lot better.
And so I stumbled around Hawaii high on fruit most of the time. I thought about government recommendations for fruit servings and laughed. It seemed all I needed to do was open my mouth, and fruit would fall into it, or maybe be placed there by a mongoose.
In Hawaii, Korean barbecue means something different than it does on the mainland. And that difference is price.
My good friend Layla, who we were staying with, grew up in Honolulu and then lived in New York for a number of years. The first time she had Korean barbecue outside of Hawaii was on another island: Manhattan.
She ordered what she always ordered, and when the bill came, she ordered a tranquilizer and a padded van to haul her to the nearest asylum, having gone completely insane at the difference in price. That asylum burned down to the ground, but they say you can still hear Layla's voice calling out over the ashes.... "Why!? Why was the panch'an fifteen dollars?!"
I may have exaggerated about Layla, but despite Honolulu's high cost of living, the city boasts a very low cost of Korean barbecue. The to-go container pictured at top was a massive amount of food, and though it was dominated by a huge hunk of kalbi, most of the weight was comprised of vegetable matter. These veggie sides included spicy, shredded daikon, steamed Chinese (Korean?) broccoli, bean sprouts in sesame oil, and... cuttlefish. Macaroni salad was another option. Each plate cost about eight bucks and felt like it weighed eight pounds.
The beef had that irresistible combination of sugar, soy and charcoal. Most of the sides had a twang of fermentation, and I really can't emphasize enough how much food this was. Four very hungry adults and one kind of hungry 3-year-old could barely polish off three containers. You do the math.
Apparently Korean BBQ is a popular food to pick up en route to the beach. When I was growing up in Florida, we often stopped at KFC (then Kentucky Fried Chicken) on the way to the beach.
That makes me wish that I grew up in Hawaii instead, and not just because of the beach snacks. Well actually, yes, exclusively because of the beach snacks.
When I first heard about butterfish, I assumed it was just a clever name. Never did I imagine that such a supple, butter-like fish actually existed. But of course it exists in Hawaii.
Or does it? Turns out that butterfish is not actually a kind of fish, though there is something called a butterfish in England, which is an eel, which is okay, because an eel is a fish. ( I know because I googled the phrase "is an eel a fish?") Here's what Hawaii Magazine had to say about all this:
"In Hawaii, butterfish is a preparation, not a species of fish. What you are looking for is actually miso-marinated black cod. (This is another confusing fish name, since black cod is actually a North Pacific sablefish, named for its dark black skin.)" 
I ate butterfish -- or whatever kind of fish it was, prepared in the butterfish style -- at the Honolulu farmer's market. The fish was just one of many wonders there, including local coffee and chocolate and of course all of the stunning tropical fruit the islands are so well known for. As you may recall from previous posts, I'm a big fan of coconut juice, and it was nice to not have to drink it out of a can for once.
Another astounding feature of the market were the plants being sold. At Massachusetts farmers markets we can buy plants like rosemary. In Hawaii, you can buy a vanilla vine.
The only downside to the market was that the produce we bought there was not allowed out of the country. The staff at the airport made us take it out of our carry-on's, even though we swore we'd eat it all by the time we reached the mainland. They wouldn't even let us eat it there in the airport.
I just hope that they bent the rules and had themselves a little forbidden fruit feast as soon as we turned and walked away.
When I couldn't remember the name of the Japanese pub we ate at in Honolulu, I knew that there was a single word I could google to have my answer. In seconds I had it: Tokkure-Tei.
That word was "norichos." And what, pray tell, is a noricho? Only the most delicious portmanteau I've ever tasted.
The noricho is a zany marriage between nachos and sushi (where the "nori" comes from). Now that I re-read that description, it kind of makes me want to vomit, but I swear that they're delicious. Who doesn't want to eat deep fried, nacho-shaped wedges of seaweed piled with roe, avocado, daikon sprouts, tomatoes, and American cheese?
Okay, so the American cheese still kind of makes me want to vomit, but after much sake it made me want to do the reverse of vomit (eat it).
The somewhat kitschy, fusion-born noricho is surely the signature dish of this very fun to eat at Japanese pub-style eatery, itself a cross between a sushi bar, a gastropub, and a tapas restaurant. But they also do straight-up sushi very, very well, as in the butter-soft, super fresh, not even remotely fishy tasting mackerel nigiri.
I happen to love mackerel in all forms, even canned, but this was the best I've ever had it. We also ate tender, charcoal grilled slices of tongue....
A sweet, creamy portabello dish that was like slow-cooked mushroom candy...
Baked Alaska rolls....
And the boiled peanuts that start the meal, which are oddly similar to the hot boiled peanuts found throughout the South.
We finished with a perfectly good grilled okra, but at that point in the meal and after that much sake, I think we were all secretly wishing we'd just ordered a second round of norichos.
I'd like to dedicate this installment to what Hawaii might do best, and that is snacks.
Fun, cheap, filling, steamed, slightly sweet, Asian, rice-based snacks, to be more precise. It seemed that everywhere I went, be it fruit stand or convenience store, such snacks were to be had.
Perhaps my favorite was the sticky rice and banana treat wrapped and steamed in a taro -- or was it banana? -- leaf above. The thick, toothsome rice was redolent with banana, at the center a slice of the actual fruit, which seemed to have surrendered most of its substance to the surrounding starch. Though small and delightful, this was a serious dose of sticky rice, and it took both Elise and I to finish it while cruising down Waialae to the beach.
From the same fruit stand (the one across from Town) we purchased little buns which turned out to be stuffed with (surprise) pork as well as hard boiled egg. They were faintly sweet, and I could have eaten a million of them.
Other snacks included a trio of Malaysian handhelds from the food court in Honolulu's Chinatown. Once again, each was either rice-based or contained banana. There was a steamed log of sweet-salty glutinous black rice, a skewer of three sweetened balls of rice flour cooked with milk and with a somewhat caramelized crust, as well as a perfect little banana crepe. Each cost a dollar. (Not pictured: a jackfruit smoothie with tapioca pearls.)
Yesterday I was in Northampton, MA, which is generally a good snacking town. I was hungry. I wanted something fun, cheap, filling, steamed, slightly sweet, Asian, and rice-based. I wanted something like what I'd eaten nearly every day in Hawaii.
I couldn't find it.
If my previous post on poke led you to believe that all Hawaiian food is sunny and light, allow me to introduce you to plate lunch. If Hawaiian foods were Lord of the Rings characters, poke is an elf, plate lunch a cave troll.
Poke says "welcome to Hawaii!," places a lei around your neck and fans an ocean breeze in your direction. Plate lunch slaps you a little too hard on the shoulder so that you fall down in the sand and just take a nap instead of trying to stand back up.
I only ate plate lunch once, so I may not have the most accurate take on it, but as I understand it, a plate lunch is a heavy dose of meat, usually pork, a few scoops of white rice, and a seemingly misplaced side of macaroni salad.
It took three of us and one two year old to finish a plate lunch combo with both Kalua pig and lau lau at a place called Keneke's in Waimanalo. The amount of meat, especially for the price, was either astounding or disconcerting depending on whether you're thinking about your stomach or the rising temperature of the planet. Certainly no one needs that much meat in one sitting, but I certainly loved eating it.
The Kalua pig was a juicy mound of smoked, shredded pork. Exactly what the seasonings were I can't say, though salt figured prominently. The lau lau was pork wrapped in lu'au leaves which where then wrapped in taro leaves and steamed. (Apparently lau lau often contains butterfish as well, and though I didn't see any in there, I will get to butterfish soon.) The pork was about as tender as could be, the lu'au leaves rich and deeply flavorful, like a cross between spinach, calaloo, and pure iron.
My understanding is that these dishes were traditionally cooked in an imu (underground oven) and are now more commonly prepared by steaming on the stove top. Again, refer to Rachel's book if you want to know for sure. All I know is that it was delicious.
I really don't know where to start, so I'll just say this: Hawaii is a culinary wonderland, and I hope you get to go there.
I have lots of dewy observations about Hawaiian cuisine that have probably been made by countless others before me (why, it's East meets West!) so I'll spare you those. If you want the real deal, check out Rachel Laudan's The Food of Paradise. If you just want to know what I ate during my trip there last week, read on. I'll try not to use the words "lush," "exotic," and "better" too often.
I'll start by introducing you to the first Hawaiian food that I was introduced to. Reader, meet poke. Looks amazing, doesn't it?
It is! Poke, pronounced poh-kay, is a raw fish dish that consists of super-fresh seafood and ample seasoning. It's tempting to compare it to ceviche or sashimi, but poke is its own beast, it is absolutely scrumptious, and I miss it dearly. And I can't say that about too many beasts.
Depending on the variety, poke will also contain slivers of raw onion, seaweed, or even kimchi. Though poke is a traditional dish, like most Hawaiian foods its modern incarnation folds in elements that originated with other cultures. But some of my favorite "flavors" included Polynesian ingredients like the kukui nuts you see sprinkled on the ahi poke above.
Elise's favorite was, hands down, the smoked marlin, which in texture was close to jerky. Smoked marlin poke was sweet, salty, spicy, and of course smokey and marliny. It went very well with the baby soft white rice that we always ate with our poke, which usually came from the Tamura's in Honolulu. Not necessarily what you'd expect from a liquor store, but it was probably the best thing you could buy there.
With its high protein content, cool temperature and oceanic flavors, poke is the perfect post-beach food. I ate some after surfing, which I also tried for the first time. Hard to say which I liked better.
I had two excellent eating experiences on a recent trip to Cape Cod. The first was the soup pictured above, made with tons of mushrooms, a few handfuls of wild greens and a splash of goat milk.
In case you can't tell, the soup was entirely the product of necessity. But by just using what we had on hand I managed to produce a vast quantity, and it was a real crowd-pleaser to boot. I started by browning onions and garlic and then sweating all of the stems. With salt and water, these cooked for quite a while longer, yielding a hasty stock. I then added more water, the sliced caps, and some greens and herbs that happened to be growing around the property where we were staying. These included sheep sorrel, garlic mustard, and feral oregano.
It was even vegan until I added a few cups of the goat milk at the end, which made the broth almost bisquey and gave it the slightest twang. We slurped mugful after mugful all day, even once it had gone cold.
The second excellent eating experience occurred when I was asked to pitch some spent lobster shells off the dock. I had arrived too late to actually eat the lobster, but I picked a meal's worth of meat off the carapaces. It was dark, so I couldn't very easily tell coral from tomalley, but it was divine. Someone even left me a claw!
Squatting on a dock in the dark and sucking second hand lobster gook out of shells that were supposed to be thrown away may not be for everyone, but I guess that's what makes me a gourmet.
This past weekend I briefly delved back into the world of the touring performer, a world I used to live in and write about here.
I accompanied one of my former touring partners, MC Mr. Napkins, to a show in which he opened for N.E.R.D., the hip-hop ensemble featuring hit machine Pharrell Williams.
On the way out of the show, I stole a bag of pretzels from Pharrell's dressing room. They tasted so much better than if I'd bought them from a gas station (something else I often did on tour).
Seth, one of my former sketch comedy partners, and Maggie, his life partner, are traveling through tea country, apprenticing at estates in the Darjeeling district and beyond.
See here for their travel updates and to find out where the stuff that's everywhere actually comes from.
Humans are such repulsive creatures, especially foodies. We never want the same thing twice no matter how good it was, always searching for the next thrill, be it the latest obscure grain (farro) or the cheapest tongue mulita (Tacos Lupita).
For instance, how often did I go to the fantastic Hi-Rise bakery during the years in which I lived a few blocks away? Twice.
Now, through the eyes of others, I've seen the error of my ways. This first happened in the Ferry Market in San Fran, pretty much the last place you'd expect to feel good about your own town's food. But when I mentioned that I had come from Cambridge, the cheesemongers at Cowgirl Creamery started gushing about the H.R., and I couldn't help but blush. I felt like a supermodel had told me that I was beautiful.
Then yesterday I took an out of town guest there to secure provisions for his flight back to Ithaca, which of course is the San Francisco of Tompkins County, New York. As soon as we set foot in the door, I saw the expression on my friend's face, the drool seeping from the corners of his gaping mouth, and I realized how numb and ungrateful I had become. I crossed out the existing words in my thought bubble ("Ah, the place with expensive sandwiches") and instead wrote in my highest compliment to any Boston area eatery: "Wow, this is the kind of place you can find in New York!"
I'm eating a slice of their potato bread right now, and its sheer splendor has shaken me out of hunting mode. Why look elsewhere when you've got something this good right in front of you?
Thin, crunchy crust, moist and fluffy interior, deep potato flavor. Those Cowgirls were right: I am beautiful.
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Hi-Rise Bakery
56 Brattle St
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02143
(617) 492 3003
208 Concord Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 876-8766
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