A sadness: Clover Food Lab RIP

[magid]

I just got an email from Clover: they’re closing their doors after this Thursday, after 17 years in business, and it has me very sad (it’s the current economy, unsurprisingly). They’ve been a wonderful local business, with a focus on locally-sourced vegetarian food (working directly with farmers to use seasonal produce), in addition to hosting CSA pickups for a number of farms. They have Lighthouse Kosher certification (which not everyone accepts), which has made it extra convenient for me, having multiple locations on my side of the river, including one right by work. (Read: if I don’t manage to bring lunch with me, it’s going to be either supermarket food from the place that’s even more expensive than Whole Wallet, or hopping on the T plus a half mile walk to get food from Milk St, or an even longer trip to get food from somewhere in Brookline.)

I’m going to miss the breakfast popover sandwiches (I could eat these every day), sandwiches with mushroom poppers in them, the zucchini sandwich (a fried slab of tofu with slices of zucchini and fresh-off-the-cob corn, plus whatever dressing with shiso), the corn chowder (they make all their soups from scratch, and don’t have any freezers, so I know it’s always fresh), the black lentil salad with hazelnuts and dried cherries, the egg-and-eggplant sandwich (aka sabich), and so many others.

Comments

[cellio]

It sounds like they were providing a lot of important services. I'm sorry you're losing them.

[magid]

Thank you; they’ve been incredibly convenient for me, and with their 11 locations closing (5 of them in Cambridge), my side of the river will have a lot fewer places to get a meal.

I don’t know of any other fast food (they’re not really at fast-casual level) places with such an emphasis on eating locally and seasonally. And I was impressed that when the pandemic started, they were able to pivot to offering meal boxes, which grew to a whole sideline of weekly deliveries (taco Tuesdays included). And they make their own pita, which is fluffy like Israeli pita, not flat like the commercially available USian pita (they imported a pita oven from Israel, and it took ages for it to be certified for use).

I’m realizing that it feels a little like the abrupt loss of a community. Not a main one, but one that I was happy to be on the fringes of. They sent out weekly newsletters. They were responsive to feedback and suggestions, and I even got invited to a complimentary breakfast event a couple of times with other folks who’d also sent theirs in. They chose to have a mix of seating, some booths/little tables, but in many locations, also a big irregular slab-of-wood table so random folks could potentially meet each other and have a social meal instead of a solitary one. They’re also where I bought my first pawpaws.

[magid]

Also, they paid their workers $15/hr before that was the MA minimum, and raised it over time, so the workers were never at minimum. When I chatted with folks, they seemed genuinely happy to be working there, and there were multiple times I’d end up in a conversation with them while I waited for my order (especially at the previous KEN location and the current HSQ one, perhaps because I was often there at odd hours, including farm share pickups where I was transferring from the box things came in to my backpack and bags for easier transport).

[julian]

Oh noooooo.

(They have (had, I suppose) an outpost at the Weston Whole Foods, and a restricted menu there, but I will so miss their chickpea thing.)

[magid]

Have, for the next 36 hours or so at this point. I never made it to that location; sounds like it worked pretty well.

I like their ‘chickpea fritter’ sandwich (though I was very confused the first time I got it, expecting for some reason fritters with Indian seasonings, because if it was felafel, why didn’t they just call it felafel?!), though not as much as some of the seasonal ones.

I wonder what’s going to happen to the pita oven they imported from Israel, at the CloverHUB location (for a while, they had a whole ‘Chutes & Ladders’ sort of board painted on the whole wall of that location about getting the oven and getting it certified for use here, which was amazing to see, and must have been incredibly frustrating for them, since it took > 1 year….).