Boston Re-cap: The Eats

If you are anything like me one of the first things you think about when planning a trip somewhere is: where am I going to eat?  Well, that task certainly fell to me when thinking about Boston and I must say, I was ready to take on that challenge!  While I won't say that we ended up eating at all the places I wrote down, or that some of them turned out to seem like quite duds, we did ultimately have a good array of yummy meals.  There wasn't one I truly hated (well, except for lunch at a museum...).

The first dinner was accidentally a restaurant that I had put on my original list.  We were heading for a different place, but saw this restaurant, realized we were all starving and decided to give it a go!  It was The Parish Cafe.  They had a lovely outdoor seating patio/deck, but since it was raining lightly when we arrived, we opted to eat inside, which was perfectly lovely!

I got a mushroom sandwich with white bean salad on mixed greens.  It was all really good, but the white bean salad was my favorite part of the meal!

The next day we went to a simple diner for breakfast.  It was close to our hotel and we all started the day out starving, so it seemed like a good choice!

We ended up having a table with a great view of Newbury Street.  Definitely one of the highlights of the meal!

For breakfast I got an omelette with spinach and mushrooms.  It came with toasted whole wheat bread and home fries. 

Looks quite a bit like the previous meal, no?

After breakfast we headed to Caffe L'Aroma for a quick coffee.  Which I obviously need to start my day.

Again, they had a lovely outdoor seating area, but since it was full, we opted to have our coffees inside.

My mom got a cappuccino (and gave me the schiuma, thanks mom!), my dad got an espresso and I got a cafe au lait.  Or at least, I got one at first.  It tasted like dirty water so I went back and got a latte instead.

It was much MUCH better.

For lunch that day we ate an (unphotographed) lunch from the cafeteria at the Museum of Fine Arts.  I was way unimpressed by the choices and ending up only having a little bit from the salad bar and eating a Clif z bar I brought with me.

Luckily that afternoon they were handing out free peanuts near the harbor.

We rallied for the food department with dinner, however.  We found that Boston has Wagamama!  I was totally thrilled.  Once again, no photos, but I got the Yasai Yaki Soba with yasai gyoza as a starter and a melon juice that I split with my mom.  Wonderful.

The next day for breakfast we opted for the cafe route.  We went to Espresso Royale Cafe on Newbury street.

I got a croissant, my mom got a poppy seed bagel with butter and my dad got an everything bagel with peanut butter.

My croissant was good, but a little on the sweet side; I generally prefer them flaky and buttery.  My dad's peanut butter bagel was definitely the winner out of this lot!

Being from New York, my family is definitely bagel snobs, so to say that these were good is quite the compliment!

Of course, I had to get some coffee, another latte!  I'm usually a cappuccino girl, but this trip I seemed to morph into a latte lover.

For dinner that night we went out to Figs.  I don't have any photos—I was positively ravenous by the time our meal arrived—but if you are ever in Boston go to Figs.  Seriously, it was phenomenal.  My parents and I split a half mushroom half eggplant pizza and loved every bite of it.  Brilliant, truly brilliant.

Overall, we only ended up eating at a couple of the restaurants I listed (Figs, Parish Cafe and L'Aroma), but enjoyed every dining experience, museum excluded.  Still, I would recommend doing some advance research; it will always pay to have a list of places you'd like to try!  My favorite meal was at Figs, followed by my mushroom sandwich on the first night.  Totally brilliant.

Have you ever been to Boston?  What was your favorite meal?  Do you enjoy finding restaurants on vacation?

Handling the Heat

If you haven't heard, New York has been dying from a heat wave for the past couple days.  From Thursday-Sunday there was unbearable, record-breaking heat that caused normal life to come to a near standstill.   I managed to do pretty well during those days, however, escaping the bubble of air-conditioning to live a bit ;)

There were plenty of iced coffees used to chill off!

I managed to get a wee bit of baking in before the heat really set in.  I made chocolate chip cookies that ended up a bit flat, but they were eaten straight from the oven which made the DELICIOUS!

I had my first experience with oats in a jar; they were beyond delicious.

I used the worlds best nut butter ever, PB & co Cinnamon Raisin Swirl.  Words cannot describe my abundant love for this stuff!  I recently got White Chocolate Wonderful, which tastes like the inside the middle of a peanut butter cup to me.  Good, but I prefer this one.

Sunday evening was considerably less hot and I jumped at the chance to bake a bit, meet chocolate mint cookies.  These were absolutely incredible!  They have an extraordinarily rich chocolatey taste with a unique fudge-like texture.  I highly recommend you making them as soon as possible, the minty flavor is absolutely perfect for summer.

Since the hot weather has more/less left these shores for a bit, my mother and I headed out on some errands/fun stuff on Monday.

I've been wanting to try Argo Tea for quite a while (say early April) and finally managed to today!  Yes, much celebration ensued.

Okay, so maybe you cannot actually read the menu from this photo, but the point was to show you all the really cool screen.  Of course, none of the awesome-ness comes across in this photo.  Basically, there was a t.v. screen that displayed all the drinks and changed so you could see the different variations.

After much deliberation I chose...

An Iced Coconut Chai Latte!  It was beyond beyond.  The coconut flavor was nice and subtle, yet pronounced.  That being said, it most definitely did NOT overwhelm the spice-y chai taste that I love oh-so-much.  Perfect way to enjoy a chai latte during the summer :)

The rest of the day was spent running around and doing fun errands.  This involved going to Fishes Eddy and totally not getting the dishes we planned to get, a trip to Lulu Lemon that ended up in shorts and a racerback tank top (so so so excited to go running in these!) and a lovely little jaunt through Whole Foods purely to get Guittard chocolate chips. What can I say, I need the good stuff for baking!  Not to mention (another) trip to the container store and lunch at Pret (avocado and pine nut wrap, go get this now.  you will NOT be sorry!).

While at the container store I looked a bit at all the crazy things they had to pack lunches in.  This year I'm totally committed to bringing lunch with me to uni.  Of course, now that I'm living properly close and will have even less classes than last year, this could end up being a moot point.  Still, salad bowl anyone?  It even has a little top container for your dressing!  Quite brilliant, if I do say so myself.  I didn't get it, but I am definitely thinking about it.  Need to pack myself nutritious lunches ;)

What have you been up to recently?  What is your favorite summer beverage?

Cafe Chronicles: Cafe Regular

Sometimes I'm not in the mood for properly good coffee.  Those are the times I head on over to Starbucks and get, well, whatever.  When I'm in the mood for a good cup of coffee, however, Cafe Regular is one of my favorite stops.  I don't necessarily go there food the atmosphere, food or space, but putting up with all of that is worth it sometimes.

The strongpoint of Cafe Regular is just that, their coffee.  They serve good coffee in nice amounts with a good selection of choices.  If you get a cappuccino, latte or au lait, you can actually taste the difference between all of them.  Sometimes at Starbucks or Le Pain Quotidien there is very little differentiation between these beverages, if there is any at all!  This isn't the place you go when you want a paper cup (which I do, quite often).  When you go to Cafe Regular, you are getting your coffee in a proper mug, with beautiful schiuma art as well; if that is important to you, and it is to me.

While I enjoy the coffee at Cafe Regular, they make amazing soy iced lattes (with unsweetened soy milk), there is very little else I enjoy.  I am not going there to enjoy the atmosphere/ambiance, sit down for a while, get good food or work.  When you go there you go to get coffee, sit for a spell, but preferably leave as soon as possible.

The major problem with the atmosphere of this cafe is the size.  It is just too small to fit in a decent (or really any) people.  You will end up perched on a  stool the size of a dime (or five p coin), sitting in an awkward window seat or sitting in the middle of a cafe, once again on an uncomfortable stool.  I'm okay suffering a little to get good coffee, but there is no way I could spend a sustained period of time there after my left butt-cheek goes numb.

You may think that the lack of comfy seating is excusable, and it most definitely could be if they had something else that made up for it.  Unfortunately, the rest of the cafe experience at Cafe Regular is similarly lackluster.  Since the cafe is so small it feels cramped, uncomfortably so.  Small spaces are no doubt the norm in New York, but it feels as if they are trying to fit something that would work well in a much bigger space into a shoebox.  This raises tensions among people who are already hopped up on caffeine.

Once you get over the small space and the lack of proper seating, you must deal with the poor customer service.  I can deal with a lot.  Short salespeople generally don't annoy me.  It's a long day, they are probably tired, they want to rest!  I get it, it sucks.  But when you are doling out doses of caffeine to people on their way to work, it makes sense to me to use caution.  Please don't get annoyed when I ask you for a single iced soy latte.  I don't mean harm!  I'm giving you nearly four bucks for the thing!  Now, I've seen people in there having surprisingly animated conversations with the counter people.  Yet, I've always found them highly detached.  Maybe they don't like what I'm ordering.  Maybe because I don't look achingly hip.  Maybe because I didn't order something simple.  I don't know, but I definitely don't go here when I want good service.

Now, back to the coffee.  Because it really is very very good.  It keeps me going back, over all of that.  I put up with less than good service, I put up with a cramped cafe and I put up with wacked out seating to get this coffee.  That says something.  Sure, there are times when I don't feel like going, but when I do go, I am never disappointed in the coffee.  Afterall, isn't that the reason we are going to all these different cafes?  To get good coffee?  Plus, they serve Jacques Torres hot chocolate.  The drinks are pretty much ace.

So should you go?  If you are in the neighborhood and want good coffee, this place is ace.  Yet, I wouldn't go out of my way for it.  Part of my affinity for this cafe is the location, which, for me, is extremely convenient.  The service and general lack of ambiance makes this cafe a miss on too many levels to call it a destination cafe.

☀✍☀

Atmosphere: 1 out of 5 coffee cups.  Maybe it's the odd music.  Maybe it's the dark colors.  Most of all it's the cramped space and bad chairs.  Cafe Regular's atmosphere is there, but is lacking in nearly every department that would mark the reason you go to a cafe.

Coffee: 4.5 out of 5 coffee cups.  The coffee is potent, yet cut nicely by a generous amount of frothed milk.  Their variety includes iced lattes, cappuccinos and coffees, extending to hot au laits, cortados and mochas.  You can tell that the owner knows their coffee and wants to share good coffee with people who care to stop by a whole-in-the-wall coffee joint.

Food: n/a.  There really is no food to speak of.  Even if there was, you wouldn't have anywhere to eat it.

Prices: 4 out of 5 coffee cups.  The prices are pretty standard, think Starbucks.  Even though Starbucks tends to veer to the expensive side, you are getting really good coffee here, so it ends up being worth it.  The other day on the way to work I got a soy iced latte for $3.80.  Way better than Starbucks for about the same price.

Location: 3 out of 5 coffee cups.  While the location is great for me, they only have two, which can make it extraordinarily inconvenient for others.  Take your pick.

☀✍☀

Interested in Cafe Regular? Here are some useful links!


Yelp Reviews


Urbanspoon


Un Bacione,

Emilia

Cafe Chronicles: Le Pain Quotidien

If you live in New York, you have no doubt witnessed the boom in the amount of Le Pain Quotidien locations in recent years.  It feels like recently they weren't around, then suddenly they were everywhere.  Well, I'm not complaining.  This is another chain that I can get behind wholeheartedly.  Not just because I have a friend from Belgium and not just because they have an awesome Speculoos doop.  What I love the most about Le Pain is their ingredients and focus on quick healthy foods.

When walking into a Le Pain anywhere in the world, you will be met with the same decor.  Sort of a rustic-modern-french style with a long communal table at the centre of the restaurant.  In bigger locations, they sometimes have two communal tables.  The communal table is, no doubt, a central component to the Le Pain experience, making it a brilliant choice if you choose to dine there alone.  If you have a dining companion or two, there are also small tables where you can sit and have a bit more privacy.  Overall, the communal table helps to bring a lively and personal atmosphere to the impersonal formula of chain restaurant.

Le Pain straddles the line between being a restaurant and being a cafe.  Ultimately, it depends on the time of day you go what kind of experience you will have.  Most locations are open from breakfast until past dinner, so you can choose the type of experience you want.  For breakfast they have an assortment of pastries and some more traditional choices.  Although the breakfast choices are fine, the majority of them fail to truly shine because of the mass-produced feeling of the place.  The croissants are good, as well as the breads and other breakfast choices, but they do not exemplify the types of food that make Le Pain such a delight.

When the restaurant/cafe is at its best is during lunchtime.  There is an assortment of fresh salads, sandwiches and hot dishes to choose from.  Each option is unique and completely delicious.  The prices are more than you are going to find at somewhere like Pret, but when adding table service and the quality of the ingredients, those extra dollars are completely worth it.

My personal favorites are the Six-Vegetable quiche and the Quinoa and Arugula Salad.  They both highlight what makes Le Pain such an excellent choice, hight quality food with good portions and interesting flavors.  In addition, Le Pain offers a wide variety of Vegan and Organic choices.  I'm not a meat eater and definitely welcome the variety!  This is only true, however, for the American branches.  In England, the majority of the menu has meat so it's worth checking online if you are going to a new Le Pain in a different country.

The coffee at Le Pain is good, though not exemplary.  I find the quality perfectly acceptable for getting a coffee with your meal, I usually order an Au Lait, but I'm not going to go out of my way to get coffee from Le Pain.  The only exception is the iced latte.  I'm a huge fan of soy iced lattes and adore getting them from Le Pain.  If I'm in the mood for only a coffee, however, I will usually just get it to go.

A unique, and completely amazing, feature of Le Pain is their variety of sweet spreads for their bread.  With a name like "the daily bread" you expect some good bread!  I'm not going to get a baguette from here to bring home, but thoroughly enjoy when I get a side of bread with my salad.  They have four different spreads to choose from: Noisette (their version of Nutella), Noir (Belgian dark chocolate), Brunette (Speculoos, or hazelnut praline) and Blondie (white chocolate).  I have, of course, tried them all.  My personal favorite is Brunette, it tastes extraordinarily similar to Belgian Speculoos!  Noisette is also good, imagine a more hazelnut-ty and less sweet version of Nutella with a similar consistency.  I don't particularly like Noir of Blondie.  Noir simply tastes lack luster, if I want chocolate, I'll just have some chocolate!  Blondie is too sweet for my personal tastes, it tastes like vanilla frosting.  Perfect for dessert, or if you have a super sweet tooth.

Le Pain can get supremely crowded during lunch hours, resulting in long lines and a crazy impatient wait staff.  There lies my major problem with Le Pain, despite the good food and lovely atmosphere, I rarely feel like I get good customer service.  Sometimes the food is slow, I've gotten undercooked food before and sometimes you just have to wait crazy long times!  Ultimately, I don't believe the problem is huge, it will most definitely not keep me from going.  I do, however, keep that in mind if I am extraordinarily hungry or am having a day that is stressing me out.  Then, I'll go somewhere else.  Most times I thoroughly enjoy the food and the experience.  So much so that I had to get a cup from there.  It keeps my Starbucks iced tea tumbler company. :)

☀✍☀

Atmosphere: 4 out of 5 coffee cups.  I love the decor, no matter how homogenous it is between locations.  Whenever I walk into a Le Pain restaurant, I feel delighted.  There is something about the French Modern Rustic look that makes me feel like I'm about to have a good meal.

Coffee: 2 out of 5 coffee cups.  The general brews are quite lack luster and the Au Lait can sometimes taste watery.  Their iced lattes and cappuccinos makes up for that however.  Get them with soy milk and you are in for a real treat!

Food: 4 out of 5 coffee cups.  One of my favorite parts about Le Pain.  The food is fresh, wholesome and delicious!  There is also an awesome variety that is sure to please your dining companions, even if they have extremely different dietary needs/concerns.  Vegan food?  Check.  Omnivore food?  Check.  Vegetarian food?  Of course.  I've never had anything I didn't like.

Prices: 2 out of 5 coffee cups.  They're expensive, yet you are getting good and quite healthy food.  It's your decision if it's worth it or not, but my vote is for yes.

Location: 5 out of 5 coffee cups.  I'm never far from a Le Pain when I'm in New York.  It makes me happy to know that I can find good food if I'm hungry.

☀✍☀

Interest in Le Pain Quotidien?  Here are some useful links!


Serious Eats


Yelp Reviews


Urban Spoon




Un Bacione,


Emilia

Cafe Chronicles: Almondine

Warning:  This review is extremely biased.

There, okay, got that out of the way.  I love Almondine.  I adore the atmosphere, the plastic plates, the paper bags, the croissant, the cappuccino, the iced coffee, all of it.  Basically, this is my base line for a good cafe.  Every where I go is judged off of what you can get here.  I realize that the coffee may not be the best, the croissant may have a funny taste for some people and the environmentally conscious may not appreciate the paper cups, but I love it.

So, you are probably wondering, why on earth does she love this cafe so much?  What about it makes her go back again and again?  I go for the croissant, the coffee and the atmosphere.  To me, they are simply the best.

Whereas many cafes in New York have a pretentious, ahem "hipster", aura to them, Almondine does not.  Come Saturday morning, you can find a diverse group in either of their locations, parents, kids, young couples, singles, people meeting up for a coffee, people picking up a croissant to go, heck, you can even find people coming in to get some lemonade after a morning jog.  It never feels exclusive.  I've never once felt out of place in this cafe, and I doubt other people would feel alienated.

This croissant gets my vote for the best in New York City.  It has a slightly crunchy shell that, when bitten, yields to delightfully soft and buttery layers of pastry.  Perfection.  While there is a distinct butter flavor to the pastry, it doesn't feel overwhelmingly greasy or soft, like some can.  This is also a far cry from the bready croissants that plague countries like England.  I can tell that it didn't come from a bakery in France, but I can also tell that for an American pastry, it's pretty darn good!

Their other pastries and confections are no less delicious.  They are known for their Almond Croissants (good, but I find them overwhelmingly sugary wherever they come from!) and also make a mean pain au chocolat, with chocolate that doesn't get lost in the croissant.  I've also enjoyed their muffins, which are pleasingly springy and moist.  If you are more in the mood for some dessert, they have a nice selection of macarons, tarts and parisian sweets which all blend high quality flavors into a beautiful and almost effortless product.  I love their desserts so much, that last year my family got a Bouche De Noel here for Christmas.  Which was perfectly rich and chocolatey.

Not to be left out of a discussion on Almondine is the french baguette.  It is near impossible to get a good baguette outside of Paris, but this baguette simply comes the closest I have found to perfection.  The outside is quite crunchy and the inside soft, chewy, but not dense.  If the outer shell had a bit more crunch, you would not be able to convince me that the baguette wasn't imported.

The coffee here may not sway coffee buffs, but people who find high quality coffee shops a bit overwhelming, but have graduated from Starbucks will be pleased.  I usually get either a cappuccino or an iced coffee (in the summer), both of which never fail to please me.  The cappuccino strikes a good balance between foam, espresso and steamed milk.  There isn't so much foam (schiuma) that you feel as if you got a latte, but not so much that you feel you didn't get any espresso.  I'm quite picky about the balance between bitter espresso and sweet milk, it needs to be bitter enough that you can distinctly taste the coffee, yet not so bitter that it's undrinkable.  I've found that Almondine usually gets the ratio right.  If they don't, the cappuccino will stray closer to too much milk, which I find preferrable out of the two extremes.

Iced coffee is iced coffee.  They never sweeten it and I never have to tell them not to, that wins major points in my book (yes Starbucks, I am calling you out!).

Now what I don't like about this place?

...

...

I'm not a fan of the lack of locations or the fact that there is only ever a single person working at the cash register.  Neither of which are problems, just facts that others may find irritating.

So I'm not even going to rate Almondine individually.  I love it.  Figure I give it five out of five coffee cups.  You should go.

Interested?  Of course you are!  Here are some links


Serious Eats


Yelp


Urbanspoon

Un Bacione,


Emilia

We'll Still Have the Summer

I'm totally into this summer thing and I do it quite well, if I do say so myself!  Because, you see, when summer comes around I do things like take silly photos of myself drinking iced coffee.

Of course, it was on the way to Ikea to look for some furniture for my room.  I've had the same bed since I was six or something, I think it's time for something new!  

During summer, you can't spend the entire day inside a super-air conditioned store, though. You have to include some pretty views, not to mention lunch!  Ikea food does NOT do it for me.

This hasn't been the only exciting summer event during the past week.  I like to get my culture on sometimes, so I went to the ballet with my mother.  I was a little nervous that I'd be sitting there slightly bored, but I loved it!  We saw Sleeping Beauty and it was absolutely fantastic!

Afterwards, we got some eats from Whole Foods and sat in Columbus Circle.  I love sitting there, it's so pretty and calming with the fountains, like a little oasis in the centre of the city.

That afternoon we also stopped by Grom and enjoyed a small cup with albicocca and bacio, a brilliant combination!  I absolutely loved it and would definitely get either flavor again.

Friday, I had to work, but managed to squeeze in a cup of coffee before hitting the daily grind, or the scanner.

It was good, but I cannot say that it was the best.  The schiuma art was pretty despite the lack luster flavor.

Another important part of having an awesome summer is going around New York to do random things.  Sounds fun, no?  Yesterday, I went to the container store and paragon with a couple stops along the way.  My mother and I went to Terri Vegetarian to get some lunch.  I've been wanting to try this place for a while and I was definitely not disappointed.

My mom got the grilled vegetable sandwich, which she really liked, though wasn't too keen on the bread.

I go the Thai Chicken wrap, which I thought was fantastic.  I was surprised at how huge this thing was!  At first the prices may seem steep, but for the quality and amount it's definitely worth it.

Now, I'm chilling out, drinking some iced tea and contemplating my week.  Don't you just love summer?

What have you done recently that epitomizes summer to you?  Any summer projects you're working on?

Un Bacione,

Emilia