Clover's Back, Alright!

Get ready for the best news (and if this doesn’t qualify as the best news of your week, we can’t be friends) of this week, folks: the new Clover opened its doors for lunch today! That’s right, the beloved Clover that used to be on Holyoke Street moved about 60 feet to Mass Ave (where Yenching used to be) in anticipation of Smith Campus Center construction. As a die-hard Clover fan, I felt as if it was my civic duty to be there for its opening– in fact, I am not ashamed to admit that I was on line to order a Shiitake Mushroom sandwich by 1:05 p.m. for their 1 p.m. opening.

I am here to tell you that you will fall in love with the new Clover. Believe me, I’ve spent a lot of time (and consequently money, sorry Mom and Dad) at the Clover on Holyoke Street. The sterile white walls, the laboratory aesthetic, the two floors of seating, and the all-encompassing smell of chickpea fritters are all things I’ve grown to love about the Clover at 7 Holyoke. The new Clover is really different, except for the all-encompassing smell of chickpea fritters, that is.

Awesome restored tiling from 1913! By Hyemi Park

For starters, the new Clover is much smaller than the old one. It’s more like a wide hallway and doesn’t have a second floor, but it’s really quaint. It also offers a lot of seating options: you can sit at the wooden communal table in the middle, in individual seats looking out at Mass Ave, cute little booths with no view, or booths at the back with a view of Holyoke Street. The new Clover also has immensely cool historical walls featuring pennants of different schools and a lot of Crimson H’s. Upon doing some further research into this, I found on Clover’s blog that their contractor discovered these walls while doing demolition work. They date back to 1913 and belonged to a place called Waldorf Lunch, an iconic place to get food in the past.

Despite the new look, the friendliness of the staff and the amazingly yummy vegetarian food of Clover still remain. I had an A+ Shiitake Mushroom sandwich that kept me happy and full for the rest of my long Tuesday. All in all, coming from an unashamedly biased perspective, the new Clover is great. Perhaps the only problem is that with its new location on Mass Ave making it that much closer to my classes, I will never eat HUDS lunch again and thus will be eternally broke.