CANTON — Just in time for the return of college people to Canton, a new café has opened in the heart of downtown.
The Blackbird Café has all the components of a coffeehouse without the live music: imaginative panini, hip soups, creative salads and fresh baked goods. Plus specialty drinks including organic fair trade coffees, hot or iced chai, assorted teas and natural and organic drinks from Blue Sky, Eden, Tazo and Perrier.
The setting is lovely. It's a historically restored space with stained glass over the entryway, dual-colored plank floors, high ceilings and lots of bookshelves left over from the previous law firm occupants.
You can peer into the kitchen right behind the counter and see the panini grills poised for action. They look like a cross between a waffle maker and a George Foreman grill.
A huge blackboard listing the entire menu hangs high above the stylish concrete counter. You're gonna want one of these in your house. Not the blackboard, the counter.
Helpful paper menus are piled on the counter for those not wanting a stiff neck. The dessert display case is right there too, tempting you from the very start with goodies like Godiva chocolate cake, baklava, poppy seed bread, almond cookies and peanut butter buckeyes.
The vegetarian member of the WDT Reviewing Team with a voracious appetite scanned the menu and quickly observed, "This place is vegetarian-friendly." And after checking out the desserts said, "I could get started right here."
Literally translated, panini means "sandwiches" in Italy, but here in the United States it refers to hot, pressed sandwiches that can be filled with glorious ingredient combinations.
Percolating up from relative obscurity 10 years ago, panini have become a favorite lunch or light dinner staple with their unique taste and textural contrast — the crunch of the thin, toasted bread against the warm, somewhat gooey fillings.
The heat intensifies the flavors of the meats, veggies and cheeses as they meld together into a delicious and carefully planned mess of taste.
The friendly counter lady told us you order your food, coffee or tea from her, she punches it into the computerized touch-screen "cash register" and you grab your own bottled drink from the cooler behind you (or complimentary tap water). One of the kitchen staff members delivers your order to your table; you bus your table when you're done.
The Blackbird offers 10 panini choices. You can order a half or whole, served with your choice of side of two-bean salad or orzo (a small pasta often mistaken for rice) salad. A whole panini runs $6.50 to $6.95; halves are $3.95. The half option is a great idea, because it allows you to explore more tastes.
Here are the panini we tried:
Toboggan: turkey, bacon, guacamole, mozzarella, sprouts, tomato. An ideal combination and example of texture and taste — the familiar turkey and mozzarella cheese, a bit of pizzazz from the guacamole and the healthiness of sprouts and tomato.
Santa Fe: black beans, pepper jack cheese, tomato, herb mayo. This one surprised us with its spiciness. Similar textures of the ingredients didn't cut it, resulting in too much of a mush for the inside of a sandwich. But if I put myself in a vegetarian's shoes (which I don't plan on doing) I'd eat it with a smile and figure it was better than eating a burger.
Reuben: corned beef, Swiss, sauerkraut, brown mustard, served on marbled rye bread. This was good, but don't expect it to be like the piled-high Reuben you have to unhinge your jaws to eat. The flavors are there but the mass isn't, which is typical of most panini.
Someone once described a panini as eating a piece of gourmet bologna between two pieces of dry toast. I don't think he understood.
French Dip Classic: roast beef and provolone served with au jus. Simple and to the point. We asked for rare roast beef and got it. The jus was rather bouillonlike, obviously because the beef was deli meat and not made "from scratch," so neither was the jus.
The Bird: veggie sub, Muenster, roasted red peppers, sun-dried tomato mayo.
Our vegetarian translator told us veggie "sub" is a vegetarian "substitute" for meat, like a veggie burger.
He was disappointed that the veggie stuff wasn't homemade. He asked the person who delivered it (and also made it) what was in it. "Onions, peppers and some other veggies" was the reply.
The question I would have asked is why is a vegetarian panini called The Bird?
The Luci: chicken-style vegetarian stir-fry with pepper jack cheese, herbed mayo. The "stir-fry" wasn't the mix of veggies we were expecting, just more of the same burgerlike veggie sub material chopped into small chunks. We couldn't figure what "chicken-style" referred to; maybe because it was diced like chicken in a chicken salad?
The Bird and The Luci have similar flavors and ingredients with just a variation in cheese and presentation of the fake meat, but they offer a tasty and inventive diversion from the usual plain veggie choices.
The side salads were a nice plus, but a bit intense on the taste scale. The two-bean (garbanzo and fava) was overpowered by the red onion in it; the orzo was pretty garlicky. We figured we wouldn't be able to talk to anyone for a week for fear of murder by garlic breath.
Soups change on a regular basis and are priced at $3.50 a cup. The seasonal favorite, chilled gazpacho, wasn't soupy enough for me. It was a pile of food-processed tomato and onion that somehow came out dry, as though it was thickened with bread crumbs — so thick you could stand a spoon up in it. It wasn't my favorite. Mr. Vegetarian loved it.
Butternut squash and apple didn't taste like either to me. If you closed your eyes, it tasted like thick cream of chicken. We did find out it was made with vegetable base, not chicken base. Mr. Veggie liked that too.
And he devoured the Greek garden salad: iceberg lettuce, tomato, sweet peppers, kalamata olives, red onion, feta, dried oregano, olive oil and vinegar. I was surprised that the kalamatas weren't pitted — could be a broken tooth waiting to happen. Mr. Veg had no opinion, probably because he's a dentist by day.
Salads are $5.25. Other choices include "Mista," made with local mixed greens, primavera made with bow tie pasta and veggies, and "Cusabi," mixed greens and veggies with a special cucumber-wasabi dressing.
Almost all the desserts are made by one of the owners. Baklava ($2) was sinfully sweet, delicate phyllo dough with walnut/almond filling, drenched in honey syrup. Peanut butter buckeyes (60 cents each) were like an inside-out version of a Reese's peanut butter cup.
Lemon/poppy seed bread ($2.50) was moist and buttery and awesomely rich. Homemade chocolate cake ($2.75) was moist, too, but the frosting was a bit too runny and tasted of almond extract, as did the poppy seed cake. And wouldn't you know it, the cookie of the day (75 cents) was almond.
Specialty coffee drinks include cappuccino, latte, frappe and latte granita.
We had a chilled frappe ($2.50), the foam-topped "Mediterranean favorite," served on the rocks.
Four of us ate for $67, but we had enough food for six, thanks to the insatiable Mr. Vegetarian. Actually, we all went overboard so we could report on as many items as possible in this review.
For being open only three weeks, Blackbird Café has it pretty much together.
The food came out in a timely fashion shortly after we arrived at 6:30. About an hour later, the two-person staff barely managed to keep up when curiosity seekers inundated the place for coffee and something sweet.
There are no alcoholic beverages at this time, but we overheard that they plan to serve beer and wine sometime this fall when their liquor license arrives. Live music is in the works, too.
They'll soon be offering premade traditional sandwiches to go in their cooler alongside three wraps currently offered for takeout.
Mallory J. Reed of Potsdam contributed to this review. Ms. Reed is a sophomore at Hamilton College, Clinton, where she is the food reviewer for the college newspaper, The Spectator.
You can contact Walter E. Siebel via e-mail: wsiebel@wdt.net.
Blackbird Café
107 Main St.
Canton
386-8104
A new "vegetarian friendly" coffee and sandwich shop specializing in panini and homemade desserts.
Summer hours: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday
10 a.m. to "'round midnight" Friday and Saturday
Rating: 3 and one-half forks
