Part 2: Watertown & Somerville
On a grey Wednesday afternoon, Carol-Anne and I, Ana, took the bus down Mt Auburn St into Watertown, to visit Tabrizi Bakery owned by Mohammad Tabrizi. Watertown has a history of being welcoming to immigrants, and has evolved into an enclave for migrants from Middle Eastern countries such as Iran, like Mohammad. Nearby to this Persian bakery are various Iranian restaurants and markets, and you can hear the local foreign language, Farsi, spoken on the streets.
I’d never been to Watertown before, but Mohammad has been in this spot for the past thirty years. Before this space was a bakery, it was a shoe repair shop; Mohammad painted 5 layers of paint on the walls to cover the dark color that was there before, he put up the wall that divides the shop from the kitchen, and he placed the pink-checkered tile that we stood and chatted on.
Tabrizi Bakery photo collage. Images by authors.
The shop itself is quite small, like a shoe box. It is about 12 feet wide and 24 feet deep, with maybe 70 square feet of walking space – every other inch of the shop is packed with Persian goodies. The store is famous for its Persian cookies – people travel from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and beyond for Mr. Tabrizi’s delicacies, and he ships as far as the Mid-West. His cookies are far from the only thing he sells. A non-exhaustive list includes cookies, cream pastries, cakes (even wedding cakes), Iranian ice cream, macarons, spices, many homemade, morab (homemade jams), torshi (homemade pickles), homemade syrups, beans and legumes, nuts, candies, teas, coffee, glass and crystal ware, honey, tea kettles, coffee makers, rice cookers, and other small appliances and foods. Atop the display case on the right is a sign that says, “Life is short. Have the cake.” Signs hang from the ceiling in pairs, one in English and one in Farsi.
Mohammad takes pride in having the best Persian baked goods around. Sure, they might be a little more expensive than the competitors’, but his customers are willing to pay for the authentic, homemade, and carefully prepared delicacies.
Mohammad learned how to make cookies from his father. His father had high standards, and was a tough teacher. If Mohammad didn’t do all the steps properly and the cookies didn’t turn out just perfectly, that batch was deemed unacceptable. This carries true today in Tabrizi Bakery, where every morning all the baked goods are prepared with the utmost care, the highest quality ingredients, and a standard of perfection. Many people don’t know what Persian cookies are, and Mr. Tabrizi feels the responsible for introducing newcomers to the absolute best possible tastes of his home.
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Five miles east in Somerville is The Neighborhood Restaurant. Similar to Watertown, Somerville is also characterized by strong ethnic trends. Portuguese immigrants began arriving to Somerville in the late 1800s, and in the 1960s a strong wave of Portuguese immigration made it the largest Portuguese-American community in the greater Boston area.[1]
Manuel Borges moved to the US from Portugal during this 1960s wave. In his thirties, he had been immersed in the restaurant industry from a young age and continued to pursue this line of work in a new context, sharing the customs and cuisine from his home country.
Today, Sheila Borges, the youngest daughter of Manuel, carries forward their legacy through the restaurant. Although she may not have any memory of life Portugal, her family’s cultural identity courses strongly through her veins. Her desire to share it shows in the dedication she has to the restaurant and serving to her local community her “tastes of home.”
The Neighborhood Restaurant photo collage. Images by authors.
On a sunny summer afternoon, I sat down in the vine-covered outdoor patio that defines the restaurant’s dining experience. Before even sitting down with me, Sheila served me a bowl of The Neighborhood’s famous cream of wheat. It’s a warm, sweet and creamy porridge with a rich taste of cinnamon. Her father would prepare this for her and her siblings every morning growing up, with cinnamon powder streaked across in the shape of a hashtag. The table I sat down at was one of the 3 colorful small round tables left. It was painted lilac purple and you could see through the chipped areas at all the other layers of different colored paint. The tables were originally found by her brother Mario, and Sheila repaints them every year. Slowly she has had to replace them with “ugly brown” tables, but she has made the effort to elongate the lifespans of her brother’s found tables by doing repairs such as reinforcing the table legs for extra support.
The vines that cover the patio are grape vines, which at that time of the year were dense with fruit. Sheila’s favorite time of the year is the early spring, when the leaves are beginning to grow and produce a dappled light along the ground. She told me that during harvest season in Portugal, families would host parties to get help harvesting the fruit and share a meal at the end. So, they adopted this tradition and hosted a gape-picking party of their own, with the traditional hats and all.
The restaurant is called “The Neighborhood” because it was the only one in the surrounding area at the time of its inception 40 years ago. It served the local Portuguese community, which was so prevalent that her parents did not need to learn English. Today, The Neighborhood is no longer the only restaurant on the block, but it still serves many of the same locals it did in the 80s. Some of the teenagers Sheila sees frequent the restaurant now are children of couples she has been serving since before they were married. “The best thing about this job is the people,” Sheila says. It is a job that brings people together.
Sheila sent me home with a bag of homemade white bread, perfect for sandwiches, a sweet, moist and dense turnover with powdered sugar on top, and an assortment of fried savory patties – a cod cake, a meat cake, and a shrimp cake (all of which were delectable). From Tabrizi Bakery, Mohammad sent us home with a box of cookies which included nazok, papion, zaban, and rice flour cookies. They all have a subtle, soft sweetness with hints of cardamon. He also gave us some bamieh (small doughnut soaked in rose syrup), and a slice of cake, which my roommates and I enjoyed very much. Both Sheila and Mohammad were overly generous, but that is who they are. They do what they do because they like serving people, making people happy, and offering people a taste of their home.
[1] “Portuguese.” Global Boston. Boston College. Accessed October 7, 2021. https://globalboston.bc.edu/index.php/home/ethnic-groups/portuguese-2/.