Autumn is here, and with it comes all the signs of the change of season. The leaves are a bright blaze orange, there’s a nip in the air, the days are getting shorter and shorter and restaurants are changing their names! Go-to summertime eatery Summer Freeze has been rebranded for the autumn months as Fall Freeze, and the menu has been revamped to reflect that transition. Gone is the standard fried fare; in its place you’ll find fresh fall doughnuts, cider and a variety of hearty soups and sandwiches to battle the growing chill.
We decided that this counts as a new restaurant, so we hopped in the Snobmobile and got over to Fall Freeze to try the new fare.
If you want to guarantee yourself a crack at Fall Freeze’s fresh-made doughnuts, you’ll want to get there before lunchtime, not at 12:30 p.m. as we did. Luckily for us, the staff enjoys the doughnuts as much as the customers do, so we were able to try a few from their personal stash. They were hot and crisp, fresh from the frier and positively bristling with chunky grains of sugar. We tried a classic circular sugared doughnut and a handful of doughnut balls smaller than the traditional doughnut hole, (these were about the size of a marble) and they were all delicious!
For our main course, we ordered that year-round Portugese tradition, Portugese kale soup. This is a very popular dish in New England – in some places every bit as omnipresent as the cider and doughnuts combo – so we figured it was a safe choice. We were not disappointed! The soup came in a bread bowl, which was a nice treat. The soup itself was perfect; tasty ribbons of kale, spicy buttons of chorizo, garlic, onions and all the rest of the secret spices that make Portugese kale soup so special. We loved it, and it was all we could do to not devour the bread bowl when we were through!
Since nothing is quite as alliterative as soup and sandwich, we opted for a chicken salad sandwich as accompaniment. The sandwich was also served in a bread bowl, if you call one piece of bread on top and one on the bottom a bowl. Either way, the bread was soft and light, which was important given that we’d already had donuts and soup.
There was nothing shocking or surprising about the sandwich, but it was a solid entry – the mildly seasoned chicken was tasty and fresh, and the mayonnaise wasn’t overwhelming. We went without onions, but the addition probably would have made for some much-appreciated zest.
With the aforementioned caveat that morning is probably the best time to take advantage of the star of the show here, the fresh, warm doughnuts, it was a satisfying maiden voyage to the Fall Freeze. Not many restaurants can seamlessly switch up their entire menu with the seasons, which is part of what separates the Summer/Fall Freeze from the pack – a willingness to experiment and think outside the box. If you’ve got a hankering for some hot cider and fresh doughnuts, make it your first stop after the morning paper.
