Clover Food Lab: A Fast-Food Experiment

While I was in college, I subsisted mostly on peanut butter toast. Sometimes I ate bacon, too, when I made it downstairs to the dining hall in time for breakfast. But that’s because Clover Food Lab didn’t open until the year I graduated, 2008.

It was founded by MIT graduate Ayr Muir, who wondered whether “fast food” always had to be greasy and mass-produced. He decided that no, it did not, and now there are Clover Food Lab food trucks and permanent locations all over Boston and Cambridge.

I noticed the Harvard Square location just before heading into nearby Finale for a four-course family dessert excursion, so I called my friend Adam and asked him to meet me at Clover Food Lab for dinner afterward. Like I always say whenever someone gives me a dessert: eat dessert first.

Adam loves Clover Food Lab, so he biked over in a severe thunderstorm to meet up with me. My sister and her friend Claudia joined us, too. We ended up stranded inside the restaurant while the storm passed, but that was fine with all of us, since it was a pretty fun place to be stranded.

At Clover Food Lab, they serve sandwiches, soups, and salads made from all local, mostly organic ingredients; fair-trade, locally roasted coffee; and they just got Allagash Belgian-style beer from Portland, Maine (distance: 111 miles) on tap at their Harvard Square location - for just $3!

The company slogan, “Everything Will Be Different Tomorrow,” is one of those awesome sayings that manage to be physically obvious and philosophically inspiring at the same time.

Their sandwich-style, screen menu supports that slogan: it can update itself at any minute, and then maybe that soy BLT you wanted won’t be available anymore (!).

Next to each menu item on the screen is listed the expected amount of time it will take to prepare it, from the moment the order is entered into the cashier’s iPhone until the moment it is delivered to your hot little hands.

That’s right – the moment it is entered into the cashier’s iPhone. Because the cashier wasn’t really a cashier, strictly speaking. Her name was Laurel, and after she entered our orders into her iPhone and swiped our credit cards (also with her iPhone), the orders were sent to the iPhones of the cooking staff right behind her. She didn’t give us a receipt – they’re basically paperless, except for rolls of recycled paper available for particularly artsy customers to draw on (or perhaps use as a place mat).

I ordered the chickpea and vegetable sandwich, which Laurel recommended as their most popular menu item. It was a huge sandwich for the price, tasted fresh, and looked quite colorful:

My sister just ordered a side of spicy green beans, since she was full of dessert and has a less ambitious stomach than I do:

Spicy asparagus

Claudia ordered their seasonal sandwich of roasted parsnips and spinach:

It took them about eight minutes to call her name – apparently, this was about three minutes too long (according to the preparation time listed on the sandwich-board menu screen), so they gave us free fries!

The French fries are sprinkled with the rosemary growing all around the restaurant. That’s about as local as you can get.

Restaurant Review: Veggie Galaxy in Central Square

Before I went vegan, one of my favorite things in the world (I’m talking right behind bursting into joyful song in inappropriate unusual situations) was brunch. I once told my friend Nadia, over brunch, that I could never be a vegan for the simple reason that bacon... exists. About a week later, I went vegan.

My character inconsistencies aside, brunch is awesome and anyone who says otherwise is not my friend. Unfortunately, that’s probably why I don’t have any vegan friends: brunch is generally not a vegan-friendly meal. Bacon? No. Eggs? Duh, no. Coffee?! You try asking the haggard diner waitress if she could please bring you some soy milk.

But it’s the brunch experience that I really miss – waking up too late to eat a proper breakfast and walking over to a breakfast-all-day diner, drinking bottomless coffees and chatting about any old thing (but probably all the fun you had the night before).

So when my bouncy, recently tattooed friend Amanda suggested we check out a new vegetarian brunch place after our hot yoga class, I jumped at the opportunity. It’s called Veggie Galaxy, it opened a few months ago in Central Square, and I should point out that it’s not only a brunch place. They serve breakfast all day, but they also serve dinner and vegan desserts.

The founder, Adam, had a similar brunch-withdrawal experience to mine when he decided to go vegetarian. As he explains on the Veggie Galaxy website:

“After becoming vegetarian, the menu selections at diners narrowed for me. No more Club sandwich, tuna melt or meatloaf. No Reuben, no BLT, no eggs Benedict with a nice thick slice of Canadian bacon. I still loved going to diners, but always ended up with either an omelet or pancakes.”

So he founded Veggie Galaxy to fill that vegetarian diner gap. I say an omelet or pancakes beats watery oatmeal, which is what vegans have to call a meal at most diners, but I digress. Last week, Amanda and I bopped over to Veggie Galaxy after class. We were all sweaty and yoga-y.

Amanda just loves Veggie Galaxy.

I was ready to gain back the ten pounds of water weight I’d just sweated off, so we started with a “Vanilla Zebra” coconut milk shake:

As we sipped the shake, I looked around the restaurant. Almost everyone who worked there could be described as “biker/hipster.” And by “biker,” I mean bicyclist. They were thin and covered in tattoos, most wore thick-rimmed glasses, and men and women alike had haircuts that involved some variety of spikiness. I am not sure this style even exists in Santa Barbara, but apparently it’s a scene in Cambridge. Amanda sighed and said with admiration, “I bet all those line cooks work as bike messengers during the day.”

The biker/hipster line cooks at work.

I was so enticed by the dinner menu that I didn’t even end up ordering vegan brunch. But it’s nice to know a place exists where I could order vegan brunch, if I felt like it. I went with the vegetable pot pie (roasted seasonal vegetables, house smoked tofu, mushroom gravy, tarragon basil pesto), because I haven’t had pot pie since I’ve been a vegan. It’s just one of those things I never think to make for myself.

This pot pie was served with a side of mashed sweet potatoes, which was to die for. Those biker/hipster line cooks really know what they’re doing when it comes to mashing sweet potatoes:

Amanda got the “Kendall Square” (a vegan burger with roasted red pepper puree, beer battered onion rings, roasted garlic mayo, and baby argula) with red cabbage slaw. She chose this particular burger because it came with huge onion rings on top of it:

 

Although I had been determined to save room for dessert (Veggie Galaxy is also a vegan bakery), the coconut milk shake had made it difficult to even finish the last bites of our delicious entrees. Dessert just wasn’t gonna happen.

But I will be back! And I really want to rediscover Veggie Planet, Veggie Galaxy’s sister restaurant, in Harvard Square, my old flouncing stomping grounds.

Restaurant Review: Life Alive Cafe (Overcoming Redundancy)

The other night, I decided to check out self-described "urban oasis and organic cafe" Life Alive's Cambridge location with my vegetarian friend Amanda. Edible Boston had recommended it in their feature on vegan-friendly restaurants, so I had high expectations. As an academic, I don't believe everything I read... unless it's in one of the Edible Communities magazines. Eat locally, people!

Before I could eat at Life Alive, though, I had to overcome the redundancy of its name. I don't like redundant things. I'm always circling them on my students' papers and writing in huge red letters, REDUNDANT! just to shame them.

But maybe Life Alive wasn't as redundant as it seemed. The restaurant could have been named Life Dead (which sounds like the title of a depressing avant-garde art exhibit) or Death Alive (... zombies). I'll take my life alive over dead any day. Plus, their website told me that I was "entering a world of pleasure. A world of delicious, organic, and therapeutic food, created with love to feed your vitality."

I read those words and was convinced. I wanted to feed my vitality. And if I had to be redundant to do it, well, I would be redundant to do it.

The menu at Life Alive consists of salads, tortilla wraps, soups, smoothies, "jubilant juices," and "fresh fantastic food." Amanda is even more into alliteration than I am, so she felt compelled to order a meal from the "fresh fantastic food" listings. She got The Swami ("Our Sweet Curry Miso Sauce saturating a flavorful mix of tamari almonds, raisins, shredded carrots, broccoli, dark greens, and pearl onions over brown rice with a sprinkle of nutritional yeast").

All the menu items sounds like cards in a Magic: The Gathering game. The Mystic Mountain, The Goddess, The Innocent, The Alchemist... The Hot & Healthy Bachelor (?).

I went for The Sufi Poet because it sounded the most peaceful and because it was hard to resist the menu description: "Delight in our red lentil hummus whirling atop cranberries, cashews, cucumber, granny apples, shredded carrots, and spring greens all infused by our Balsamic Vinaigrette and we promise you'll be ecstatic!"

What a promise! We also got the Spring Alive smoothie to share: blueberry, strawberry, pineapple, mango, spirulina, coconut-milk ice cream, and almond milk. It was kind of weird because it had small chunks of dried mango in it, and they kept getting caught in the straw. It tasted pretty good, though.

When my Sufi Poet arrived, I was, as promised, ecstatic. It was the perfect size and all the ingredients tasted fresh. For dessert, I ordered a package of Liz Lovely snicker doodle vegan cookies. The only way the experience could have been any better would be if we had gone on a Thursday night, when there's (Life A)live music.

Overall, my experience at Life Alive was just wonderfully wonderful. The food was deliciously delicious and the atmosphere was a satisfying blend of earthy and crunchy. After that meal, my life felt more alive than ever (if that's possible).