Good choices: Marin County sandwich of hummussp in a tortilla; meathead sandwich of roast beef with caramelized onions; tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat; roast turkey breast in a sub roll; chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies.
Credit cards: Cash only.
Access: Fully accessible (no restrooms).
Other establishments listed in this review:
SWEET TOMATOES
47 Langeley Road, Newton Centre
617-558-0222
Hours: Mon.-Sun. 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m.
Good choices: Good choices Sweet tomatoes pie, plain, pepperoni, white shrimp and capers; ricotta calzone; eggplant calzone; Greek and Caesar salads.
Credit cards: MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Diners Club.
Hedy Jarras, 23, of Sweet Tomatoes in Newton, can tell you plenty about the vertical curve of learning on the job. So can Paul Sullivan, 31, of Sully's Sandwich Shoppe in Cambridge.
They're part of a new generation of fast-food restaurateurs who are young, energetic, and not afraid of hard work. Their enthusiasm is infectious.
The work is harder than it looks, they've found out, and the service business is demanding. But there are plenty of shoulders to lean on: both entrepreneurs live close to where they were born.
Sullivan grew up three blocks from his shop. "Hey Sully," his friends call out, "get me a cappuccino." Sullivan says that pals from his Cambridge Rindge and Latin School days stop by all the time. Before this venture, he was a waiter at Mistral and worked at a half-dozen other restaurants, always front-of-the-house.
Sullivan opened Sully's Sandwich Shoppe last November in the premises where Big T's Sub Shop, owned by Tom Guarino Jr (and his father, Tom) sat for 38 years. All the partitions and the false ceiling are gone so the place looks several times its size, and it's light and cheerful. One day last week, two Cambridge police officers, drinking coffee at the counter, were telling the woman making sandwiches about a bank robbery. "We have everyone from construction workers and police officers to Harvard professors," says Sullivan. "I want that kind of place."
The shop, which has eight stools, is open for breakfast and lunch, and everything is much nicer than you would expect. The Meathead sandwich ($5.75) contains thick slices of rare roast beef on a soft roll spread with horseradish mayonnaise and heaped with caramelized onions. The Marin County sandwich ($4.50) is a leaky but delicious affair - a flour tortilla rolled up with hummus, cucumbers, lettuce, and tomatoes.
Cooking facilities are limited here, so Sullivan brings in soups ($3 and $4), rotating the daily special (minestrone or leek and potato, for instance) and keeping a New England clam chowder on the board every day. The chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies are wonderful (50 cents each).
Even with so few seats, there is plenty of counter space to hang on, and Sully's will become a local hangout for grown-ups. As it happens, Sullivan is just the guy to host the party.
A couple of weeks ago, Hedy Jarras was in the middle of a jam-packed Sunday night at her pizza shop, Sweet Tomatoes, when an elderly man asked who owned the place. Jarras stepped forward to announce herself. When he saw her, he said, "But you're too young!"
Sweet Tomatoes is a partnership between Jarras and Christopher Owens, 32, who also owns shops on Route 6A in Sandwich and on Main Street in Osterville.
Jarras, who was raised in Boston and graduated from Beaver Country Day School and Roanoke College, went to work at one of the shops on the Cape after college.
"My parents said, `You can take a month off, but then you've got to get a summer job,'" she says. So she applied to Sweet Tomatoes and immediately got bigger ideas. She and Owens formed their partnership last year.
The Newton shop sits where Bond & Burkhart once did, which was followed by several other coffee and lunch places, all of which failed. Sweet Tomatoes has a better formula than any of its predecessors: The product is terrific.
With only nine seats, most of the business is carry-out. The pizza is nothing like ordinary pizza. The dough has no oil in it and it's rolled very, very thinly, European-style. Instead of a tomato sauce, the crust is spread with chopped canned tomatoes made into an uncooked sauce, which gives the pies a fresh taste.
To my mind, the plain sweet tomato pie ($8.95 for a 12-inch and $12.95 for 18-inch) is a perfect pizza. It's light, the cheese is sparingly scattered, and the uncooked tomato sauce tastes like summertime. White shrimp pizza with capers and garlic ($11.95 and $16.95) is another gem.
The teenage boys I feed, who compliment nothing, liked the pepperoni enormously. Calzones ($5.95, then plus 95 cents per ingredient) are made in long rectangles, then cut into squares. They're not as good as the pizzas - too doughy, too cheesy. They need a little more work. But the Greek and Caesar salads ($4.95) contain very fresh greens in immense portions. Two could easily split one.
"Nothing's ever worked in this location," a customer told Jarras one day, soon after Sweet Tomatoes' late December opening. She didn't know what to say. "Well, we're trying," she answered.
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