Spoon & Stable - November 29, 2015

2015 could be the year that FoMO - Fear of Missing Out - became a well known, recognized, and derided occurrence. Not being a parent, but having been a child, I’m guessing that most parents got a little chuckle when it was given a name. “Everybody else is doing it! Why can’t I?” If the preceding isn’t the very distillation of the phenomenon, what is? 

Combine FoMO with impulse buying, mobility, and favorite restaurants’ pushing images of their new wares to their social media streams it’s a dangerous proposition.

I’d just finished up brunch at Surly’s Brewer’s Table Funk N’ Brunch, but Spoon and Stable posted a tweet and subsequent Instagram post about a new fruit tart. Since we’d actually only ate a bite or two of each of the pastries and took the leftovers home, I decided to head to Spoon and Stable on the way home to try the pastry. I only planned on eating half of it anyway and giving the rest to my friend Kat, since she has a comparable sweet tooth.

Unfortunately (yeah right) when I got there, there were two new pastries. 

Chocolate Caramel Éclair: This was the other new (to me) item. It was really solid. Nice and soft, an almost toffee butteriness. The caramel cream was well balanced and not overly sweet.

Passion Fruit Lingonberry Tart: The aforementioned Twitter and Instagram siren, and new favorite pastry, that caused me to wreck upon Spoon and Stable this fine morning. In my notes I wrote that this conjured in me a “memory of spring.” Where I was going with this is that while the flavors aren’t the same, the sensation was very reminiscent of that first slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie, a green sweetness from the passion fruit, the tartness from the lingonberries. The crust is rich and buttery, held together by some strange physics that are violated when the tart enters your mouth and it begins to dissolve. The meringue comes from the same strange physical realm, evaporating into a sweet airiness once alighting your tongue.