This weekend: Meet Okinawa Boba Co., Boston’s newest bubble tea concept
Plus: the food news you may have missed this week.
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We’re all eating a little differently these days: Cooking at home more. Ordering takeout. Buying beans in bulk. And that’s the way it’s going to be for a while, at least until the Massachusetts dine-in ban lifts and it’s safe to start eating at our favorite restaurants again. In the meantime, here’s what’s been going on in Boston’s restaurant world recently, plus a few ways to enjoy some of our region’s best restaurants and bars from the comfort of your own home.
Here’s what you may have missed this week:
A line outside the Trader Joe’s in Edgewater, New Jersey, on April 10, 2020.
Trader Joe’s won’t offer online ordering, grocery delivery, or curbside pickup. Here’s why.
An Italian restaurant in Dedham makes a wildly popular spaghetti carbonara. The husband-and-wife owners just shared their family recipe for the decadent dish.
Delivery apps charge sky-high commission fees. Toast’s new service aims to provide an alternative, while Boston officials are looking at limiting commission rates across the city.
Cinco de Mayo is coming up, and you can still celebrate from the comfort of your home. Here are six ways to make it happen.
Netflix & Swill:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B_nieouALUA/
I’m looking to laugh this weekend — hard. So I’m turning to Mindy Kaling’s teen comedy series, “Never Have I Ever,” which dropped on Netflix this week. Newcomer Maitreyi Ramakrishnan plays Devi Vishwakumar, a high school sophomore hoping to rebrand herself while navigating the general abyss that is 10th grade. It looks smart, funny, and something that I can lose myself in for a couple of hours. If you’ve already binged the series, let me know what you thought in the comments below.
“Excuse our no-frills label,” Aeronaut Brewing Co. said in reference to its latest brew, Double Citra Galaxy. Good thing “no-frills” is exactly what I need right now. The New England IPA has hints of tangerine, peach, and passionfruit, which sounds perfect for the 60-plus degree weather we have in store on Saturday and Sunday, and it’s available both in stores and via pickup and delivery at the brewery. What are you drinking this weekend?
Eating and cooking alone, together:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B_iaxFXgAYw/
Until COVID-19 became part of our everyday vernacular, the Love Art Brand, founded by Jessica Chiep and Ronald Liu, was on a roll. In addition to its popular Love Art Sushi location, it opened Love Art Udon in Packard’s Corner last year, debuted Poke by Love Art near North Station in January, and had plans to open another poke restaurant, Love Art Poke, in downtown Boston. Chiep and Liu also had dreams of opening a brick-and-mortar boba shop in 2021, but the coronavirus changed that trajectory: the project, dubbed Okinawa Boba Co., launched in mid-March instead, and has since sold roughly 5,000 cups of boba from the three Love Art locations. There are currently four flavors — kinako brown sugar milk, cafe matcha milk, satoimo ube milk, and Thai milk — plus a one gallon boba drink meant for sharing and dorayaki desserts made with adzuki, matcha cheesecake, and brown sugar boba. And there’s more in the works, too: This month, the concept will start offering boba kits, featuring loose leaf teas, matcha powders, bubble varieties, and detailed instructions on how to throw your own boba party at home. And I’m all in for a boba party.
I get it, I get it: We’re all bakers now. I’ve baked more banana bread than I care to admit, I made chocolate lava cake last weekend, and I’ve got a rum cake on deck for this weekend (it’s my mom’s recipe, and it’s perfect). But if you still have some kneading, folding, and flouring in you, there are a couple baking classes happening over the next few days. Third Cliff Bakery owner Meg Crowley will host a virtual croissant class on Sunday at 9 a.m. — though be warned that this is a two-day venture, in which Crowley will share a video on Saturday that guides you through making the dough, which needs to be prepped eight to 24 hours ahead of Sunday’s class. Looking for something a little less time intensive to do with the kiddos? Join Bad Doughnut‘s Tess Wood on Saturday at 10 a.m. for a “youngster edition” of #bakingathome, where Wood will teach a class on how to make a classic chocolate sheet cake. It’s something to hold us all over until Bad Doughnut opens at High Street Place … sometime this year.
We recently published a guide on how to celebrate Cinco de Mayo from the comfort of your own home, from finding margarita kits to celebrating with strangers at a virtual party. But if you’re in need of a few more options, here are some bonus picks: Stillwater‘s chef Sarah Wade has put together a Cinco de Mayo box, complete with chips and queso, pork carnitas tacos, street corn salad, Spanish rice, black beans, and a cucumber margarita mix. Yellow Door Taqueria has also crafted a festive kit, called a Quarantaco Box, that features chips and salsa, supplies to assemble eight to 16 tacos, and a margarita mix; the kit is available for pickup and orders must be placed by Sunday at 9 p.m. What about the nachos, you might be asking (I was). At Harvard Gardens on Beacon Hill, you can order a make-your-own-nachos kit, along with margarita mixers and make-your-own-tacos for two or four people. In short: Don’t let sheltering in place stop you from safely consuming tacos, margs, and queso inside.
Check out this illuminating talk with Elle Simone, executive editor, food stylist, and TV talent at America’s Test Kitchen. She and Katherine Miller, vice president of impact at the James Beard Foundation, spoke about how restaurants might come back from the COVID-19 crisis, and what that new landscape will eventually look like.
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