A Berliner is filled with loose pastry cream, dusted with sugar and blowtorched, creating the caramelized patina by which generic custard becomes an $8 mainstay of the middlebrow dessert menu. Rise did not invent this delectable morsel but executes it impressively. The crème brûlée doughnut, on the other hand, will trouble one’s sleep. This piece of pop art epitomizes Rise’s high spirits, but also its loose commitment to edibility. One visit brought me face to face with a 5X chocolate-glazed doughnut resembling an emergency flotation device. Uninterested in their own autumnal ground-notes, the apple fritter and maple-bacon bar (a long john topped with a bacon slice) are supersized sugar barges. The vanilla-frosted doughnut tiled with M&M’s is clearly meant to placate those with battery-operated sneakers, but even the classicsglazed, chocolate and jelly filledtend to be sweet, requiring a 16-ounce chaser of black coffee. They are fresh, soft and gooey, beating Krispy Kreme at its own game, but they also replicate the Winston-Salem giant’s penchant for cloying sweetness. At the other end of the spectrum is the fried bologna with Velveeta, which emerges from its paper wrapping as a glowing orange goo-ball.Īs a devotée of Guglhupf’s Berlinera masterpiece of stern Mitteleuropean methodI am ambivalent about the exuberant, playful excess of Rise’s doughnuts. This is a sophisticated sandwich by any standard. An ingenious garnish of Brussels sprout petals lends this sandwich a slightly bitter note that complements the mild pork and nicely counterpoises the otherwise sugary menu. Nevertheless, my preferred sandwich is the apple-braised pork. Eggs, breakfast meats, jam and honey are unobtrusive and sensible, but the more ambitious constructionsapple-braised pork, eggplant parmesan, fried bologna, fried chicken, beef tenderloinseem needlessly involved. The shifting sandwich menu faces the challenge of honoring such sound simplicity. They have a bit of chew, crunch and crumb structure, achieving the degree of textural personality we usually associate with a decent baguette. Evading all the usual pitfalls, they are moist but not dense, soft but not cakey, rich but not greasy. These are plausibly the best biscuits in the Triangle, outdoingI wince at my own heresyeven the biscuits at Chapel Hill’s famed Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen. The biscuit received my sincerest compliment (the f-word followed by the first-person accusative pronoun, pronounced in wonderment).
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