Coffee at Andina Cafe is an Awesome Way to Start a Date in Little Rock.

Little Rock’s River Market District isn't just a great destination for tourists - it's Date Night City. Whether you're meeting someone new or want to explore with an old beau, there’s a whole lot going on. Andina Cafe is the best place to commence your morning, lunch or early evening adventures.

Chef Andre, Johnny Carson and Chocolate Croissants - or, A Quick Bite at Boulevard in the Heights.

Andre Simon made the first chocolate croissant I ever tasted.

It was May 1992.  I had come home from my first year at Arkansas Tech to spend one more summer in Little Rock, running the carousel at University Mall to put cash in my pocket and spending time with my sometimes best friend, sometimes boyfriend Jerry.  His summer job was at Andre's on Rodney Parham, working in the kitchen.

Jerry would sometimes bring by some of the benefits of working with Andre... usually the corners of round cakes cut from rectangular or square pans.  The exotic things that came from that kitchen... like a cheddar and apple cake, dark chocolate ganache gateau... and chocolate croissants.

The croissants came the night of the 22nd.  It was Johnny Carson's last night on The Tonight Show, and Jerry had just gotten off work and come by my mom's house.  I believe he'd mentioned to Andre how I was digging the bits of pastry and so the pair of croissants had been given to be delivered. Jerry had to go home, so I sat on the couch alone, watching the end of an era with wet eyes.

That croissant was like nothing in my experience.  I didn't understand the terms so much then, but I do now - how translucent, cottony sheets of slightly salty, slightly sweet dough could come together around a dark, deceptively lightweight and crumbly barely sweet center of the most delicate chocolate I had ever encountered.  By this point in my life I'd taken three years of French and dreamed of going to France for something like this some day.  The golden crescent, a closed spiral of butter-soft wool around that almost pasty center, represented something I had dreamed about but never been able to travel and encounter.

I would go back to Arkansas Tech that August, and make Russellville my home for the next few years.  Before I graduated, Andre would be gone, the victim of a ridiculous, unwarranted shooting at his Hillcrest bistro.  I would be on my way to a future in broadcast - in television, not radio like I had suspected - and I was firmly entrenched in the world of cheap eats.

Today, if I want a chocolate croissant, I have many choices.  I can venture up to Mylo Coffee Company, or at Cafe Brunelle.  I can find a pretty dang good one at any of the Fayetteville-area Arsaga joints.  I've had them at the Paris Casino in Las Vegas and the Leonid Chocolate Cafe in Chicago.  I am drawn to them thanks to that one encounter, so many years ago.

However, it has taken almost 23 years to have that memory fully stirred again.  And why it took this long, I'm not quite certain.

I literally, yes literally, stumbled into Boulevard Bread Company... wait, no, that wasn't it.  Or that is it... I am so confused.  I stumbled through the doors this morning of what was once a tiny little bakery where once Paul Bash spent three hours telling me the story of Jacques and Suzanne's, handing me a pen when I ran out of ink more than an hour in... but this was not that place, was it?

I was confused.

I had come in on a Monday morning after getting little sleep thanks to a hairy run of storm ridges that passed through the state over the course of ten hours or better the night before, after managing to get up and wake my daughter and get her to school somehow on time after spending an hour and a half in traffic returning to Little Rock in the last line of that same storm system, she munching most of the way on pancakes and bacon left over from our trip to the Frontier Diner in Cabot the day before... I knew I would not be able to condense my thoughts into coherent discourses (or cohesive decorative stickers, who knew, I was that far out of it) without the benefit of bean-borne caffeine, and so I rolled on after dropping her off at school into the Heights and into the soggy parking lot of what had been Boulevard Bread.

My confusion came from the space to my right, which, without the benefit of caffeine, I could not process.  There were gents of different ages and clothes I could make out at the three tables I remembered to the left, but whatever to the right was all gray and I couldn't get my head around any of it anyway.  All I knew was that there was this lovely lady who said it was okay to be overwhelmed, that she saw that a lot, and would I like some coffee? She even turned me to the pastry case and opened it for me, picking up with a wax paper sheet an item that brought to mind the architecture of the Disney Center in LA... I think, because there had been no coffee administered yet and I was still groggy.

Once the pastry and coffee had been purchased and acquired, I turned for a seat and encountered the gray again... and a table that reminded me very much of the long table in ZaZa... but that couldn't be right, ZaZa was a couple blocks away and hey, tables have

legs but cannot walk, right?

But there was more beyond that, more rooms, more tables, a bar... a bar? and a perfect little vignette that on a day where I wasn't walking comatose I'd have sat for hours and watched the rain fall on Kavanaugh...

but someone's stuff was there and I settled instead for a small fourtop across the room, around a corner, suddenly self-aware that I wasn't wearing a necklace or scarf and possibly wasn't in makeup.  I was pretty sure I'd at least brushed my hair.

I was at least conscious enough to take my photos.  These days, that's almost automatic.

Even then, I sorta stared at what I'd gotten, trying to let my brain process it all.  I'd been alert in the car, I knew.  Maybe the driving in rain and heavy traffic had taxed my mental resources, I didn't know.  I just knew hey, there's a pastry and oh gawd, I got a frou frou coffee instead of straight up black, I must have been off.

I stopped, did my best to snap myself out of it, and had a drink.  That was a good call -- okay, real whipped cream, real foam, crushed ice, espresso, no sugar.  I could deal with the Anti-Frappuccino (no, really, that's what it's called) and that made me happy.  Now, onto this... chocolate croissant?

It didn't look like the average chocolate

croissant.   It wasn't crescent-shapped, which is what gives the croissant its name.  But most those I'd had in recent times were either tubular like at Arsaga or almost round puffs like at Mylo... so, whatever.  No, this one swept up into tiny affixed golden waves.

And then I bit into it, and I was once again sitting on that sofa, eating a rolled croissant from a little Styrofoam tray and watching Carson sitting on a stool.

I thought maybe I'd fallen back asleep for a moment.  Another slug of frou frou coffee beverage fixed that.

No... it couldn't be.

But yeah, it was.  The light, translucent layers.  The dark, barely sweet chocolate filling.  It may not have been the same shape, but it was the closest thing I had ever had to that first time.  And you always remember that first time, right?

I looked around at this new, clean, beautiful interior of this... bar?  Bistro?  Cavern?  This really great space with such a great design, so comfortable... I looked around, and I thought about Chef Andre. And I wondered for a moment what he might have thought of all of this.  And I wondered if somehow Boulevard had the exact same chocolate, or a similar recipe, to Andre's croissants.

And I regretted all the work I had to accomplish the rest of the day, and the fact I wouldn't be able to savor for much longer the essence of that moment.  Because for a while there, I've been trying to reconcile a new, changed food landscape in this town I grew up in, a landscape being molded before my eyes and faster than I can hope to document it, while I'm busy trying to recapture and document the history of how it all came to be.

I haven't been as good as I should be about keeping up with everyone else's food blogs lately, but I do know there's a lot of buzz for this place.  It's certainly justified, just as it has been for a myriad of recently opened works of art that are elevating Little Rock to a new Southern capital of cuisine.  It's hard to get my head around, as grateful as I am that it's happening.  After all, the year Chef Andre left us, Little Rock had just really discovered the bagel (that's a story for another time)... we really have come a long way in a short time.

Where was I going with this?  Ah yes, chocolate croissants.  Get one at Boulevard, whatever it's called these days.  And be thankful, food lovers, for this place and Andre's place and all the ones that came before it, that have delivered our city from being overrun with chains and franchises, that have defined what it tastes like to come from here.

* The photos that accompany this piece aren't all croissant photos.  But there's too much pretty food at Boulevard to ignore, so you have pretty pictures to look at.  You are very welcome.

Boulevard Bread Company/Boulevard Bistro and Bar
1920 North Grant Street
Little Rock, AR 72207
(501) 663-5951
Website
Facebook

A Chatty Place: Mylo Coffee Company

They say you can't go home again.  I suppose whoever "they" are understands that better than I do.  I still think you can.  However, in the case of Guillermo's, my local coffee shop -- I found the doors closed and the lights off on a Sunday afternoon. Though the website says they're open 9am to 6pm on Sundays, at 12:30 in the afternoon there was not a soul in sight.

My former places to enjoy a good cuppa and write a bit have evaporated these past two and a half years. Sufficient Grounds, which became The House, is now The Pantry and no longer a coffee shop -- and Gellattes has just evaporated. Guillermo's, where I wrote most of my work in 2011, had been steady but with Hans Oliver no longer running the show I suspected things have changed.

So that one particular Sunday I headed to Hillcrest to spend a little time at River City Coffee Company -- only to find its dark wood interiors were whitewashed. Moreso, that place isn't there now -- it's been replaced by Mylo Coffee Company.

If I were the sort not to try new things, I would have been quite disappointed and maybe have made my way back home, since most the other local places where I might consume coffee would be closed on a Sunday. But I was undaunted -- and moreso, I was looking for a place to write.

So I walked through the door and into a business with dark stained floors, whitewashed ceilings, exposed brick and white tile... and waited for a smattering of hipster smarm. After all, this place has been a major magnet for the uppity foodie types, right?

Then I saw the sign saying that War Eagle Mill flour was used in baked goods, and let my mind be persuaded. After all, if I'm trying something new, I should expect some new ideas, too.

The first really big new idea came in the coffee itself. I'm a black coffee drinker. I might drop in a cube or two of natural sugar if it's available, but if I am seriously working I want it black and strong. And yes, there are espressos and cappuccinos and mochas available -- but what entranced me was the idea of pour-over coffee. I mean, what does that mean?

It means, dear friends, that instead of brewing a whole pot at a time, percolating an entire eight servings of hot coffee that can go bitter before the last cup is served, that each cup is made right then. That's not to say other places get it wrong -- my friends at Guillermo's would almost always have a fresh cup in my hand before I wrote my first word of the day -- but it does make for a very individualized experience.

The barista working offered me choices -- a house blend, a medium roast and the option to have either made stronger. He also grinned when I asked for my black coffee. Other places people have smirked when I ordered -- thinking I might load it up on the other end with add-ins. I don't think that was the case here.

Speaking of cases -- there was a case below the coffee area full of bottles of Loblolly strawberry lemonade. Now, what rock have I been under that I haven't known about such a thing? Don't answer that -- it's for another post.

But to the right of the register (is that what it is? It looks like a tablet on a chopping block!) there were all sorts of pastries, and I spotted a chocolate croissant and had to have it. It was huge. It was bigger than my fist and fluffy and crispy looking and I had to have it. So I did.

Mind you, it wasn't cheap. Though pour-over coffee's $3, the pastry was $3.50, and all I had planned to do was plant myself in a comfy chair and write away the afternoon. And after I finished, that was the other thing.

There are no couches, no easy chairs at Mylo. Just reclaimed wood tables, benches and outdoor seating, which was disappointing. There were also few outlets -- which told me that there was little concern for my sort of coffeeshop patron. See, for me, the coffeeshop is the ideal engine to get my mind going for writing. Caffeine in the air, others working, good lighting, outlets and understanding baristas do a good coffeehouse make.

I watched my coffee being made -- filter being placed in a ceramic filter cup, a tablespoon of fresh grounds dropped in, a young woman slowly pouring water over the grounds and watching the water flow through to the cup below. It was very modern and fresh and clean and bright, almost like a commercial. This was certainly not my usual coffee experience.

Briefly I considered consuming the edibles I had procured and heading downtown to Andina's, if they were open, or heading next doorish to Rosalia's -- but I stayed instead. I found an out-of-the-way spot at a long table next to the wall and got to writing.

And... people watching. Yes, there were a lot of people coming through. Families with small children. Older folks with books, younger folks with computers, couples digging their way through newspapers.

And... eating. I pulled apart the impossibly fluffy chocolate croissant and ate it with my fingers, wiping them on a napkin before each time I tackled the keyboard. It was so very light, and the chocolate inside suitably dark and scrumptious -- oh golly, did I really just use that word? What is wrong with me? -- sipping on my sufficiently bold and robust blend with just the right amount of roundness to the flavor like a slowly roasting fire's heat,

And I felt like some weird pretender. Indeed, when I looked away from my wide laptop I noticed there were just as many eyes on me in my old tie dye blouse with my hair swept back as there were people for me to quietly ponder. These folks seem so urban, so hip... I'm just not in that class, am I?

Still, no one hurried me along or encouraged me to finish my beverage. They left me to write, and write I did, sitting in a patio chair with my back to an exposed brick wall, pretty much unable to concentrate on stitching together tales of the Arkansas Delta thanks to the pure modern-ness of it all.

Don't get me wrong... it's a very nice, very clean coffeehouse with good products. But it may be too much -- I mean, it's perfect for someone wanting to meet another someone for quiet conversation or to go through the paper, but it's about as far away as gumbo soil and highway miles as I could get.

That's not a problem. If I were writing a novella about life in a coffeeshop, it has potential. Those rustic-bread paninis also have potential. LOTS of potential. In fact, enough that I almost considered getting one. But by that point my back was achy and my resolve to write about barbecue joints and hot summer afternoons had faded, and I had to go get it back. So I fled.

Well, sorta. I planned to flee. And then I wrote this piece instead. And then I stayed -- despite the gradually frustrating patio chair and all the eyes. I stayed, because though it might not be what I'm used to in a coffeeshop, it did offer fabulous coffee and a really remarkable chocolate croissant.

See, a lot of my personal choices for a coffeeshop are about comfort -- physical comfort. When I can find a good pairing of coffee, available electricity, a place where I can sit where I won't be bothered and a nice selection of edibles, I've hit the jackpot. Mylo is a little short on those electrical outlets and comfy chairs... but it does have a comfortable vibe -- which I witnesses as individuals kept coming through the door, sitting and talking with each other.

Frankly, Mylo is a crossroads. And if you're looking for a good place for a conversation and a great cuppa, give it a shot. Also, the pastries are wonderful.

Even this end-of-day oatmeal raisin cookie... which was delivered to me... close to closing time. Yeah.

Mylo Coffee Company is located at 2715 Kavanaugh in the Heights in Little Rock.  You can call them if you wish at (501) 747-1880 or check out the Facebook page.

Pieday: Sweet Potato at Java Primo.

RICH: The sweet potato pie at Java Primo's has an
almond streussel topping. (Grav Weldon)

You’d be harder pressed to find a heartier pie than this slab of nutty condensed sweetness. This salty-crusted densely packed wedge is two layers of compressed flavor — on top, an almond streussel and syrup-infused crust; on bottom an extraordinarily compacted custard of highly spiced sweet potato. The whole thing has been tied together with a fitfully thick caramel reduction strong on notes of butterscotch and salt.

The perfect accompaniment offered at Java Primo Coffee House in Hot Springs? The Iced Chai Latte. The complexity of notes of cardamom, cinnamon and nutmeg against a background of beautifully iced and milked black tea is the light sweet Ying to the pie’s Yang. It’s almost backwards from the usual trend of light pie, black coffee. Give it a shot yourself and see.

Java Primo also offers a large selection of other items, including breakfast bagels and wraps, a killer Philly Cheese Steak, plenty of wraps and salads and a plethora of handmade desserts — including a chocolate Panini and Gelato Brownie Sundae. Pies are $3.50 a slice or $14.99 for a whole one. Other winners are Molasses Pecan and the Chocolate Cream Pie.

You’ll find Java Primo on the south side of Highway 7 about a mile south of the MLK Bypass in Hot Springs. It’s open Monday-Thursday 6:30 a.m.-10 p.m., Friday 6:30 a.m.- 11 p.m., Saturday 7:30 a.m-11 p.m. and is closed on Sunday. Call (501) 762-7730 or check out the website.

Caffeine in the air at Guillermo's Gourmet Grounds.

• KAT ROBINSON
• MASSIVE BROWNIE: Goes well with Guillermo's

On a rainy day, I enjoy indulging myself in guilty pleasures — an open window when the weather is warmer, or a hot cup of coffee and sugar biscuits.

If I really want to indulge myself, though, I could do much worse than spend a few hours inGuillermo’s Gourmet Grounds, savoring a latte and listening to the pop and sizzle of the coffee roaster.

• KAT ROBINSON

At Guillermo’s, it’s out in the middle of the place. Well, it is now. A group of my friends would gather at Guillermo’s over several months last year on Friday nights, taking over the lone couch and sharing gossip over little craft projects. The tiny little coffeeshop was the perfect place to chill out and do so. The coffee roaster in the corner was usually silent on those Friday nights.

Eventually live musical acts started coming in and so did customers, and we modified our Friday girl nights elsewhere. So it has been some time since I’ve darkened the door.

• KAT ROBINSON

I decided today was the perfect day to find a latte and something sweet while getting some work done. The first thing I noticed was the fact that the place is about three times as large now. It’s spacious now, with a lengthy bar and plenty of tables and a fireplace and couches and…

Ah.

Anyway, I wanted some wintery flavor, so I ordered up a Brown Sugar Cinnamon Latte and pulled a mammoth brownie out of the jar and paid up. I found a nice corner in which to work, plugged in and wired up.

I was interrupted by the clatter of coffee beans. Hans Oliver is in today, and he was getting the beans together for roasting. I knew who he was because of John Tarpley’s excellent article from a few months ago.

• KAT ROBINSON

Typing away to the sounds of roasting was pleasant. There’s no music overhead here, just the quiet din of conversation and the rattle and pop of beanery. And though I was writing about pizza and brooms (you’ll see), the thought of coffee never left my head thanks to the roasting soundtrack.

At one point during the roasting there was a sizzle and pop that continued for nearly 30 seconds. I can only imagine this was a change in the state of the beans themselves.

The scent of the coffee changes as it’s roasted. About 30 minutes after I observed the beans going in there was a heavy salty scent in the air, sort of like popcorn but more robust. The scent spread through the room and perked me right up, even more than the coffee. At this point another amount of beans was dropped into the giant funnel on top of the coffee roaster. The rattling sounded like a big wave in the machine that grew quieter and quieter.

The machine itself sounds like a dishwasher going, not too loud. At times the beans sound like popping corn; at others like pennies in a piggy bank being rolled over and over again.

• KAT ROBINSON

It went on most of the afternooon — the constant hum, the occasional rattle. It was fine music for my writing and for the consumption of the excellent brownie I had acquired. A full inch and a half thick and three inches square, the slightly moist chocolate confection was sufficiently dense, studded with semi-sweet chocolate chips and graced with that lovely crusty end on two sides. The top had that perfect brownie crisp. It was rich, almost painfully so, and I nibbled on it for over an hour.

• KAT ROBINSON

There’s no rush to get you out the door… Guillermo’s is excellent in that regard. In fact, no one pestered me all afternoon after I picked my order up at the counter. I had my little corner table to myself, and while I could envelop myself in the coffee-and-a-show aspects of the coffee roasting, I could also divorce myself from the scene with my earbuds, typing out more about salads and drum sets and all the things that have consumed my day.

You notice I’ve said nothing about the coffee. I shouldn’t have to. But in case you just haven’t had the experience, Guillermo’s does the classic coffee designer beverages well. If I hadn’t been craving sweets so strongly, I’d likely have gone for my favorite of their roasts, the Monk’s Blend. Smooth yet hearty and nicely bold, a shake-you-by-the-shoulders wake-up cuppa with excellent body. Well, there you go.

Guillermo’s is also offering sandwiches and such for more substantial fare. I guess I’m gonna have to try that at some point or another. Watch this space.

Guillermo’s is north off Rodney Parham at I-430 next door to Chili’s. It’s open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday-Friday and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday. Get your grounds on. (501) 228-4448 or check out the website.

Cheap eats by the lake: JJ's Cafe in Lake Village.

Saturday morning before heading over to Lakeport Plantation, Grav and I headed to JJ’s Lakeside Café for breakfast. The smart little restaurant sits on the east side of US 65/82 on the south side of Lake Village over by the Visitors Center.