My first impression was that you couldn’t get more essentially New England than this. My second was that I didn’t know anyone in New England could make this cup of coffee.
I first came to Pleasant and Main in Housatonic on a winter evening after a snowfall. It was tea-time and dusk, and the café door held a paper sign: Am splitting wood in the garden out back …
Out back holds a cabin just large enough for a stove, bookshelves and a chair. When I called in December, looking for real, thick hot chocolate, the owner, Craig Pero, told me he had just heated a cup on his wood stove while late oak leaves were falling and blowing past. Now I knew where he sat to drink it.
When I came back (coincidentally) on a morning soon after, he recommended a caffe latte. It came in a glass cup with steamed milk as rich as cream, and it tasted like dark chocolate, rich and warm. It reminded me of the South of France on a trip long ago, sitting at an outdoor table in the sun and stirring an oblong sugar cube into a palm-sized cup.
But here I sat at a table by a window, waiting for a friend. Inside, the place is half restaurant and half antique shop — one large, open room with long wooden tables, shelves of old glass behind the bar and a canoe in the rafters. With the coffee I sampled a croissant, soft and buttery and, most memorably, spread with a golden marmalade, lightly sweet and intensely flavored.
When breakfast came, the two of us began to laugh spontaneously at the generosity of it. Eggs Florentine with spinach and a deep yellow cheese sauce. Pancakes with cherries — heated to a deep red, not too sweet, gently thickened — and real maple syrup. Friends of mine have joked about carrying a hip flask to bring maple syrup to restaurants that only serve that flavored table syrup at brunch, and the real thing always warms me.
We tried a sweet crepe with lemon curd, a thick, tangy custard filling, and I asked for a second cup of coffee, something I almost never do. But this morning had become a festival without my noticing. An ordinary meeting over coffee had become sparkling clear, as though the sun had come out.
