Category: Food

New coffee scene lifts a traditional cafe

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

If your restaurant is already considered a hidden gem, how do you go about adding something new without messing with a winning formula?

For more than 30 years Janie’s Uncommon Cafe has had a quiet reputation as a dependably excellent mom-and-pop breakfast and lunch joint in a shopping center in Londonderry.

“This is a place where families have been coming for two or three generations,” longtime employee Nathanial Finn said. There has been a conscious effort, he said, not to change anything very much. Which, he said, has put a lot of pressure on him as he has taken on adding an upscale coffee program to such a traditional café.

“Customers have been coming here for 20 or 30 years,” Finn said. “For [owners Johnny and Carly] to put me in charge of launching something new here, they really had to put a lot of thought into whether or not it was going to be beneficial for everybody, including those longtime customers. And so really, personally, I’m feeling some pressure just to make sure that they feel like the investment into launching this was worth it.”

Finn has taken the approach of viewing high-end coffee drinks as an added value to the Janie’s vibe, rather than a change of direction. Part of that approach, he said, has been using local resources.

“We get our beans from a company out of Manchester called Hometown Coffee Roasters that roasts all the beans and has provided the espresso for us,” he said. “We’re making a point of building good relationships in the local scene. Hopefully, by doing that, we can really lift the coffee scene of Londonderry and the surrounding areas. All the recipes are being made by me and the other employees here and we’ve been trying to get feedback from the community to make products that they’ll love. We’re planning on building a menu around the feedback that we get from customers.”

In addition to espresso-based coffee drinks, like lattes and cappuccino, Finn’s goal is to offer coffee- and tea-based beverages that stand out from other coffee places.

“We want to do things differently,” he said. “If everybody else is making a peppermint mocha around the holidays, we’re going to do something else. We’re really going to use different flavors that you might not hear about. So, instead of doing a raspberry mocha, I can do a strawberry mocha and then make the drink special with other things, like grinding up dehydrated strawberries and using those on top of the drink. The syrups that we use come from France. We’re the only ones in the area that I know that are using 1883 products. With spring around the corner, we want to be looking into matcha and other [drinks] that other people enjoy. Right now we’re serving chai lattes, but because our clientele is older generally, we’ve also added things like tea lattes. So we have a London Fog drink and things like that, so that hopefully we can draw in people that might not want strong espresso, and to take care of those people. It’s a menu that’s evolving and revolving.”

Changing the drinks menu regularly will provide an opportunity to highlight foods that Janie’s is already known for, Finn said.

“Every time our menu changes,” he said, “there’s going to be a special treat with each of them. So right now we have a gingerbread latte, and we have a couple of the women here that run the front, they’re baking all the time, and so right now if you get a gingerbread latte you’ll also get a home-baked gingerbread cookie with it.”

“We love that people come here and they know exactly what they want to get every time they come here,” Finn said, “because they’ve been coming here for so long. If you want a regular hot coffee, that’s not going to change. But if you want something special, this is going to also be the place to do it.”

Janie’s Uncommon Cafe
Where: Crossroads Mall, 123 Nashua Road, Londonderry
Hours: open daily from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.
More: 432-3100, janiescafe.com; order online from the Café’s website

Hellenic Pizzeria emerges on Elm Street

Walking down Elm Street in Manchester, you notice a new pizzeria next to Cat Alley, and you stop short. Wait a second, wasn’t that the new—?

Yes, owner Dionysius Lemos said, it was the Statesman Diner.

“We had an occupancy permit for 21 days. Out of 21 days, we only opened for nine days.” This problem, he explained, was with the Statesman’s kitchen’s exhaust system. “We kept triggering off the fire alarm in here. What was happening, the exhaust was going up the ductwork, but it was bellowing out because we have an open concept kitchen into the dining room, and it was affecting the patrons, and then the fire alarms would go off.”

This led to a quick redesign of the restaurant, one not built around an exhaust system. Lemos installed ventless pizza ovens and changed his restaurant’s focus to traditional Greek pizza. “We use a Greek recipe,” Lemos said. “It’s a Peloponnesian recipe for pizza. It comes from southern Greece. It’s been around for hundreds of years. Greeks’ public position [is] they recognize the influence that the Italians have had with pizza, but they’ve also played a major role with pizza since the 1600s. So this recipe is well over 300 years old. It’s a recipe that nobody uses anywhere around us.”

What makes Hellenic’s pizza special, Lemos said, is the dough.

“It’s a thick crust,” he said. “But the difference is in our fermentation process. We sit on the dough for two days. The longer you sit on that dough, the tastier it is.” The dough is cold-proofed, which means it is left to rise in the refrigerator, so the yeast in the dough has time to develop flavor.

“So we specialize in 10-inch Greek pies. Everything’s fresh. Our own dough, our own sauce, our own cheese, which we shred ourselves,” Lemos said. “We use a blend of cheddar and mozzarella.” The pizzas are baked for a short time at a high temperature. “We’re running at about 800 degrees, and we’re running seven-minute pies.”

While the Statesman had a long and ambitious menu, Lemos said, the change in concept has led to a smaller, pizza-focused range of dishes. But that leaves a question hanging in the air: What about the french fries?

Hellenic Pizzeria is next to Cat Alley, an alley covered on one side with murals of cats made by area artists, which has become a cultural landmark in Manchester. During renovations to the restaurant in its diner iteration, Lemos installed a walk-up french fry window on the non-mural side of the alley. The goal was to make top-quality fries available to late-night customers leaving concerts or downtown bars. There has been a lot of excitement about the french fry window among late-night foodies.

“The french fries are gone,” Lemos said sadly. “But the window is being repurposed. It will still be open, but it will serve rotisserie hot dogs. In deference to the cat people, it’s going to be called Cat Alley Landmark Dawgs. There will be a hot dog [available], a cheese dog, a chili dog, or a chili cheese dog. I’m really sad to see the fry station going — on weekends we’re selling 50 pounds an hour, some days — and that was when we were only open for nine days.”

Hellenic Pizzeria
Where: 836 Elm St., Manchester, 932-2751
Hours: Open seven days a week 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Hours of operation for the walk-up hot dog window are still being determined.