It’s sweet, it’s funky, it’s savory, it’s only here this time of year. And some of you have been known to buy 5 at a time. Yep, the Japanese Sweet Potato Sandwich has returned for the fall! What’s inside? Shoyu mayo, roasted-then-fried sweet potatoes, cabbage-green-onion-slaw, and tempura-fried sesame seeds that resemble a many-eyed sea monster. Enzo came up with this one 9 years ago and…
If you’ve seen a Clover truck out of the corner of your eye, your eyes are not deceiving you. We’ve been popping up at select events around the city.
This photo is of an event at a farm, The Food Project in Lincoln. We served crudités with fancy hummus, and French fries with rosemary. There was a fair amount of excitement, involving Joe and Mary from Clover teaming up with a farmer to help un-stuck the truck from some mud.
If you want the Clover truck to pull up at your event, email us at catering@cloverfoodlab.com. And if you’re a Clover staff member reading and want to inject a dose of excitement and fresh air into your day, get in touch about working a truck event or two!
Clover is now on DoorDash and Uber Eats. Pre-pandemic we were really wary of these platforms – they take big fees from restaurants and can cause a lot of harm to smaller operators, and we were worried about people first encountering us on a third party platform, rather than in-person (we love to talk to you!)
But then we talked to a few industry friends and we found out…
Bowls are now in-testing at two locations: LMA (360 Longwood Ave) and NTV (825 Washington in Newtonville). This is a big change – requiring lots of new containers, prep lists, training. We’ve been seeing people coming in over and over to eat them. We’ve been learning a lot from your feedback and have already made tweaks (more farro in the Romesco Bowl, the addition of a Beet Poke Bowl).
Stop in and let us know what you think of these when you try them.
For those of you who know, you are probably already clicking into this post to see exactly when you will need to get to Clover. For those who are new to Clover, the Nashville Hot Mushroom is a big deal. It’s an homage to the hot chicken at Prince’s in Nashville, which has its own dramatic origin story. Our version gives you a LITTLE relief from the spice with…
We’ve been playing around with getting one in-season veggie and threading it throughout the meal boxes for that week. Last week we had green garlic from Red Fire Farm so we decided to have a little Green Garlic Fest. If you had a box last week you may have seen green garlic in a bunch of different ways: roasted for tacos, sliced and baked as a pizza topping, and folded into pancake batter for pancake day. Just kidding – we have not yet broken our internal rule of “sweet pancakes” – the pancakes had a green garlic hash alongside : ) Next up: Garlic Scapes. Have you ever had these?
Joe (SCL, customer service rep, and our resident coffee fiend) just messaged me that the new Little Wolf coffee was blowing his mind. So I figured I would let all of you know too so you can try it! The coffee is called Laayoo – it’s named after a tree indigenous to the region of Ethiopia where it’s grown by smallholder farmers. Joe tasted notes of Earl Gray tea and funky/smoky/pu-erh tea. Little Wolf folks said it reminded them of rosè wine. So that makes me curious – what do you taste?
I recently learned that garlic has 4 stages that it goes through on its journey to become the cured stuff you’re probably used to seeing. This year I learned about Green Garlic. It’s the mild, sweet, un-cured bulb, plus the fresh green shoots. We got our hands on a super limited crop from Red Fire out in Granby, and so we decided to see if we could incorporate it into every single different type of box we make next week…
We’ve intentionally steered clear of bowls for a long time. If you see Ayr tomorrow, ask him why : ) Tomorrow (5/24) we’re starting a 2-week test of bowls at CloverNTV, our restaurant in Newtonville. If it goes well, this could represent the beginning of one of the bigger changes our menu has EVER seen. We’re hoping we’ve cracked the code to bowls that are seasonal, carefully-composed, easy to carry, and craveable – all the things we love about bowls, and none of the things we don’t.
I used to eat Cheesy Grits almost every morning, and if you were eating with us around 2017, I bet you did too. We took our Plimoth-ground-grits off the menu for a little while, but now they’re back at all locations (except for the HUB for the time being). Stop in for breakfast during the next 2 weeks – we’re aiming for these to be hot and ready at 8am and we’ll be selling them til they’re out. The staff has been waking up extra early and adding a lot of extra whisking to their mornings, so we’d love to hear what you think. If you’ve never had our Cheesy Grits before, here are some things you should know….
