Let us do a close analysis of the big menu that describes our weekend Breakfast menu.
First the concept was labeled Breakfast@TheBigTable and then as the weeks passed we began to play with that name. The Big Table is always present.

Right now it is Adam’sPoeticBreakfast@TheBigTable because of the return of Adam Tessier, Boston’s Stakhonovite jack of all trades. Adam, like the Hardest Working Haitian from Living Color has several -many- jobs. He manages the art gallery at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He goes to poetry school in Vermont. And he works at Toscanini’s. On weekends he can be found in the kitchen and in the front of the house, our very own Cary Grant. Doing both these things at once is a DC Comic trick that involves Adam changing and rechanging his clothes several times a second.

The idea was to create a breakfast that we ourselves would like to eat and that we hope others would also like. This is not one of those $50 apiece hotel brunches where your grandfather disinherits you while you eat funny eggs and drink bloody mary’s. Nor is this one of those relatively low-priced carbo loads where you get a muffin and toast and a scone with anything you order. It is not intended to be so filling that you go back to sleep

Adam’sPoeticBreakfast@TheBigTable

We do Breakfast almost every Saturday and Sunday. We don’t do it on national holiday weekends since everyone in Cambridge chooses those days to return to New Jersey and visit their parents. A few orphans visit us on those holidays and look around the empty store. They always ask if we’re doing breakfast, and when we say “no” they ask “why not?” England has “bank holidays.” I think it is a long time before we will have another “breakfast holiday.”

Every Saturday and Sunday from 10AM to 2PM

We cook everything to order and deliver the food as it is ready.This means you may get your food before your friend and we encourage you to start eating. We make every dish to order. Some things take longer to cook or come from different parts of the kitchen. Don’t hesitate. Offer to share and dig in.

During this time of change: NO COMPUTERS and NO STUDYING – out of consideration of others. We don’t have that many seats. If people are treating our small number of tables as study carrels then others cannot get to eat. We know that you can do anything with an iPhone or your 2-70 robot that normal people can do with a computer, but please indulge us.

Sour Cream Pancakes with sour-cream maple syrup 8.25
Fluffy Scrambled Eggs with lamb sausage,
grilled pita and rosemary 8.25
Brioche French Toast with whipped butter
and Vermont maple syrup 5.50
Creamy Egg Sandwich on toasted ciabatta 5.75
add bacon 2.00
New Hampshire Bacon Sandwich with sliced granny smith apple, roquefort dressing and bibb lettuce 6.25
Fried Egg Sandwich with carmelized onions,
French feta and spinach pesto 5.75
Grilled Blueberry Muffin 2.95
Side o’ bacon 3.
Sophie’s of Belmont Greek yogurt with honey
and granola 3.25
French Press Coffee from George Howell
and Batdorf & Bronson 3.75

This week the menu is largely divided between egg dishes and “bready” dishes. The New Hampshire Bacon Sandwich is named after the region’s least favorite state. Rhode Island has johnnycakes and Maine has lobster rolls. Vermont gets chocolate, ice cream and maple syrup. We thought the stoic people living near Interstate 93 deserved to be immortalized. Everything used in this sandwich MIGHT have come from New Hampshire.

(editor’s note: discovered scrawled on a napkin)

Some days the best things happen and they have nothing to do with ice cream. Today we helped Kevin Brown move a beautiful custom speaker installation from his mad scientist’s lair in South Boston to Wellesley College’s Davis Museum. Kevin and his team had patiently bent carefully selected pieces of laminate to create a new shape that would hover above six seats and enable people to hear new sound art, perfectly and without the use of headphones.

We used Tommy’s big white freezer van because it was large enough to lay flat the delicate structure. The speaker was wrapped with plastic, and corrugated cardboard sheets, and cushioned with towels and carpets. I drove slowly and uneventfully to Wellesley College where we were met by the museum’s coordinator of technology, James J. Olson. Olson and Kevin’s team from Brown Innovations installed and positioned the speaker while I watched and wandered away to look at the very good art collection.

The museum is housed in a building by Rafael Moneo. The exterior of the building is uninviting. It looks like a hulking midcentury movie theatrre that has been abandoned in the midst of the school’s campus. But the building’s interior is a marvel, with surprising interior spaces that remind me of Kahn’s British Arts Center. The Museum, as an institution is in the midst of a reconceptualization as to how to display its art and is beginning to utilize themes rather than more traditional groupings.

The new installation will be open to the public on Wednesday, February 11, 2009. Kevin’s sound system for Toscanini’s will be available to the public from 8AM, when we open, until 11PM, when we close. His speakers can be seen and heard throughout the world, including the Victoria and Albert in London, the Christian Science Center in Boston, and other places that value the art of sound.

Today, at a friend’s house I had delicious tomato marmalade. It was sweet, had saffron and a lot of orange. I think I may try to do something with this sooner or later. If we succeed in making this into a sorbet we can sell it to adventurous eaters and sophisticated restaurants. Vegetable sorbets are available in France and Italy. Our Spring Sorbet is made with cucumbers, although it is much more popular since we changed the name to Spring Sorbet.

Years ago I worried about running out of ideas for new flavors. Now I don’t, but I am amazed that new flavors continue to appear, or at least flavors that are new to me.

This weekend a customer suggested Hydrox Cookie with pieces of Cookie Dough. It sounds like a DQ Blizzard but maybe it will work.

A flavor can work for a few customers or a restaurant or a situation, or the flavor can become popular or broadly popular. Sometimes the flavor just works for me.

We made Mango Habanero for East Coast Grill. They occasionally have Hotter than Hell nights, when everything is scary hot. To make the Mango Habanero we wore safety goggles and gloves. The steam from cookies the peppers would aggravate your eyes and any of the hot stuff that got on your hands was a menace to life and limb.

Occasionally we make a flavor for a restaurant that I think is perfect. But only perfect for a restaurant. Quentin is the pastry chef of Restaurant La Voile on Newbury Street. Critics and informed eaters think it is the best French restaurant in Boston. Quentin asked for an oatmeal ice cream. At first I didn’t understand what he wanted. Eventually we made an oatmeal infusion with Scottish oatmeal, and then we sieved out all the oatmeal. Before sieving we had a very good breakfast cereal and after sieving we had a wonderful suggestion of oatmeal and oats. The ice cream was served with a tart. Most of our most unusual flavors are made for restaurants and these flavors are served as elements of complicated desserts.

Very people want an Oatmeal ice cream cone, or a Ginger Rose Petal sundae. But the sophisticated flavors work in appropriate settings.

A Harvard professor helped us to begin making Indian ice cream flavors. Over the years as Indian foods have become more popular, ice cream flavors like Saffron, Cardamom and Khulfee have developed “crossover appeal”. They are popular with all kinds of people. Mango ice cream and sorbet appeals to so many small groups that the group ends up being one of our biggest sellers and most popular subsets. South Americans, South Asians and East Asians all enjoy mangos. This winter we made a new variation: Mango Coconut Sorbet. The flavor was a little complex with several kinds of coconut and lime juice.

Black Bottom Pie is from America’s Deep South. Usually it has a ginger snap crust, and a chocolate rum filling. Sometimes it contains fruit. We make a chocolate rum ice cream and add ginger snap cookies. Ginger Snaps are very New England but the entire effect is unexpected and appealing.

Coffee Ice Cream Sandwich came about after a discussion of reduplication in Italian food. Italians will serve starches with starches, so you might have pasta with potatoes or a pizza that is topped with potatoes. I wanted to make ice cream that contained ice cream. Anyone who has gone to an American grade school is familiar with the taste and texture of ice cream sandwiches. We switched from using vanilla ice cream as the background flavor to Strawberry and Coffee ice creams because we wanted people to be able to see the distinctive chocolate wafers and the very simple vanilla ice cream contained between those wafers.

During our first year of business we made Carob ice cream for a single, wonderful and persistent customer. Carob was never a popular flavor, but even Haagen Dazs made a version of it. It was favored by health food eaters. When this cusomer finished her studies at MIT we stopped making the flavor. It had few other fans and none of the ice cream makers enjoyed making it or eating it.

Let us do a close analysis of the big menu that describes our weekend Breakfast menu.
First the concept was labeled Breakfast@TheBigTable and then as the weeks passed we began to play with that name. The Big Table is always present.
Right now it is Adam’sPoeticBreakfast@TheBigTable because of the return of Adam Tessier, Boston’s Stakhonovite jack of all trades. Adam, like the Hardest Working Haitian from Living Color has several -many- jobs. He manages the art gallery at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He goes to poetry school in Vermont. And he works at Toscanini’s. On weekends he can be found in the kitchen and in the front of the house, our very own Cary Grant. Doing both these things at once is a DC Comic trick that involves Adam changing and rechanging his clothes several times a second.

The idea was to create a breakfast that we ourselves would like to eat and that we hope others would also like. This is not one of those $50 apiece hotel brunches where your grandfather disinherits you while you eat funny eggs and drink bloody mary’s. Nor is this one of those relatively low-priced carbo loads where you get a muffin and toast and a scone with anything you order. It is not intended to be so filling that you go back to sleep

Adam’sPoeticBreakfast@TheBigTable

We do Breakfast almost every Saturday and Sunday. We don’t do it on national holiday weekends since everyone in Cambridge chooses those days to return to New Jersey and visit their parents. A few orphans visit us on those holidays and look around the empty store. They always ask if we’re doing breakfast, and when we say “no” they ask “why not?” England has “bank holidays.” I think it is a long time before we will have another “breakfast holiday.”

Every Saturday and Sunday from 10AM to 2PM
We cook everything to order and
deliver the food as it is ready.
This means you may get your food before your friend and we encourage you to start eating. We make every dish to order. Some things take longer to cook or come from different parts of the kitchen. Don’t hesitate. Offer to share and dig in.

During this time of change: NO COMPUTERS and
NO STUDYING – out of consideration of others.
We don’t have that many seats. If people are treating our small number of tables as study carrels then others cannot get to eat. We know that you can do anything with an iPhone or your 2-70 robot that normal people can do with a computer, but please indulge us.

Sour Cream Pancakes with sour-cream maple syrup 8.25
Fluffy Scrambled Eggs with lamb sausage,
grilled pita and rosemary 8.25
Brioche French Toast with whipped butter
and Vermont maple syrup 5.50
Creamy Egg Sandwich on toasted ciabatta 5.75
add bacon 2.00
New Hampshire Bacon Sandwich with sliced granny smith apple, roquefort dressing and bibb lettuce 6.25
Fried Egg Sandwich with carmelized onions,
French feta and spinach pesto 5.75
Grilled Blueberry Muffin 2.95
Side o’ bacon 3.
Sophie’s of Belmont Greek yogurt with honey
and granola 3.25
French Press Coffee from George Howell
and Batdorf & Bronson 3.75
This week the menu is largely divided between egg dishes and “bready” dishes. The New Hampshire Bacon Sandwich is named after the region’s least favorite state. Rhode Island has johnnycakes and Maine has lobster rolls. Vermont gets chocolate, ice cream and maple syrup. We thought the stoic people living near Interstate 93 deserved to be immortalized. Everything used in this sandwich MIGHT have come from New Hampshire.