Category: Food

Nashua event celebrates the San Sebastian Festival

If we were in Puerto Rico right now, the holiday festivities would not be over yet.

“The San Sebastian Festival is a street festival that started in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the 1950s as a celebration at the end of the holidays,” Brandon Caron said. Caron is the chief operating officer of Spectacle Live, the management company of the Nashua Center for the Arts. La Sanse, as it is more commonly known, “is a big street festival with lots of arts and music and food,” Caron said. “We’ve had the opportunity with some various people in the community to try to bring that inspiration back to the community in Nashua.”

To that end the Nashua Center will host a La Sanse celebration Saturday, Jan. 17, featuring Puerto Rican food, music and dance.

“We’re some of the first people in the Northeast to do this,” Caron said. We’re [holding] it the weekend that Puerto Rico celebrates. And one of the big components of that is trying to be as authentic as we could with the music and the food. You know, that is such a key part of the culture. And so we are working with Tony Elias and Rice and Beans 603, which is a Nashua-based restaurant catering business. They’re going to [make] authentic Puerto Rican plates for people. And then we’re also going to work with Empanellie’s and a few of the other restaurants in town to feature various street bites. So that way we can have a full, well-rounded, authentic Puerto Rican food offering.”

In addition to Puerto Rican food, La Sanse will feature music, dancing and visual arts.

“There’s going to be a few different forms of entertainment,” Caron said. “We’re going to have El Grupo Chevere, a Massachusetts-based salsa band. They’ll be coming to do authentic Puerto Rican music, as well as some DJs from Latino Vibe 94.9. And we have some authentic dance troupes as well to do some cultural dance displays. We’re still working with some various partners within the community to try to highlight various forms of art as well, within the theater. We’re just really excited to be a part of this event. Just to be able to really celebrate this culture and really feel the energy and vibrancy of the Puerto Rican culture is really special. And I also think, in a quieter time in the winter, having a big event like this that can draw people from a wider radius; that will help not only our business, but hopefully, you know, be able to spur some economic development within the community at other restaurants and establishments nearby as well.”

La Sanse Nashua
When: Saturday, Jan. 17, at 4 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, 800-657-8774, nashuacenterforthearts.com)
Tickets: $25 through the Nashua Center’s website; kids under 12 free with purchase of an adult ticket.

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