14 May, 2018: You all have your favorite Clover items, but did you know that chickens have their own favorites too? Michael, a customer at CloverHSC, noticed that we composted. He wrote to us asking if he could bring some vegetable scraps home to his ladies in Somerville. Lynn and the team filled up a 22-quart bucket of raw scraps.… Read More
4 May, 2018: The Maine Winter Tomato Sandwich is one of my favorite of the year. Not to be confused with the Heirloom Tomato Sandwich that we feature in September (also one of my favorites, do you sense a theme?). This sandwich features tomatoes from a greenhouse in Maine called Backyard Farms, we pair it with sustainably harvested Maine seaweed… Read More
4 May, 2018: Clover is a better company today than it has ever been. We’re breaking records daily right now. Our food has never been better. We’ve never had access to the type of ingredients we’re using right now. Everyday there is something fantastic around the corner, a happy report in my inbox, a beautiful video about the Maine Tomato… Read More
14 July, 2010: Hot weather + long days + lots of new hires = short term memory loss. Let me explain. Some of you may have met Mary. She’s one of the folks we hired in the last couple of weeks at the MIT truck. She’s a really hard worker, and she’s adapted to the truck really well. In the… Read More
2 May, 2018: Little Wolf is a roastery in Ipswich, MA. Megan first discovered Little Wolf, and since then we’ve had fun getting to know the owners, Chris and Melissa. They got started a few years ago, after falling in love with wine, and then coffee, while Melissa was working on the West Coast. We’re bringing on Little Wolf as… Read More
30 April, 2018: We’ve been having conversations for the past month or so about prices at Clover. A group of HBS students did a school project and told us we’re low. Raising prices is something we have to do periodically to keep our business healthy. And we’re a bit overdue. Last price increases were February 2017. And while I know… Read More
25 April, 2018: Tomatoes come into season once a year in August. When we first started Clover we weren’t even sure we’d have tomatoes on the menu at all outside of August. Then we heard about Backyard Farms. They use hydroponics to grow year-round in a giant greenhouse. A few days ago we got the chance to go up to… Read More
20 April, 2018: Meet the Farmers growing your Summer Farmshares at CloverLMA this Thursday Night (4/26/2018)! We’re hosting a Meet the Farmer Night Thursday evening at our Longwood Medical Area location. You’ll be able to meet Julie, Ray, Meryl, Moira, Ari, Tim, Chris, and all the rest of the heroic farmers growing food for our Farmshare program this year. Your… Read More
4 December, 2008: Some of you have been asking about the music. Here I’m posting the current playlist. The goal is to get to the point where we’re playing all local music. For now we’re going a different route. I’ve always thought the absence of country/ bluegrass/ folk music in retail is conspicuous. We decided to start with the Black… Read More
20 April, 2018: I snapped this picture 5 years ago on our opening day in Brookline Village. I remember feeling such love and excitement from the community there. People were coming up to us and just saying thank you. And while that feeling hasn’t subsided at all, today’s the last day of our restaurant in Brookline. Our lease came up… Read More
3 April, 2018: This may just look like Ayr photographing a paper bag, but it really represents a whole journey into menu photography. A couple months ago, when we were in the middling stages of readying our order-ahead app for public release, we knew we needed to do something drastic to upgrade the look of the whole app. Menu photos!!… Read More
26 March, 2018: The first sign of spring in New England isn’t asparagus, or strawberries. It’s Parsnips. But not just any parsnip. These are Spring Dug. This time of year, Michael Docter and his crew at Winter Moon Roots brave the cold to harvest a special crop. Michael knows that something magical happens when you leave parsnips underground all winter in… Read More
21 March, 2018: We made a video sharing our recipe for fresh soup stock. I love fresh stock. I first learned how to make it from our chef Rolando who learned how to make it from Thomas Keller at the French Laundry. It’s the building block for every soup we make here at Clover. Stock only takes 1 hour (and most… Read More
3 November, 2008: Today’s menu before we ran out/ low. It was a good, if short, day. Again, we doubled our traffic. We also showed up at the latest hour yet (12:20pm first service) and left earlier than ever (1:45pm). I’d love to say this is because we ran out of everything, but really we just needed to get down… Read More
9 March, 2018: Back in August 2016 Vincenzo told me he could shape up a labor budget that was out of whack much more quickly than we had expected. I told him that if he could do it in 2 weeks I’d take him to a Japanese Whiskey Distillery. He delivered. And it took me a bit of time to… Read More