Savor the Moment

Located at 274 Eastchester Drive in High Point, Savor the Moment Dessert Café offers cheesecake treats and coffee drinks from noon to 8 p.m. Thursday-Sunday. There is limited seating inside and out. Online ordering and catering are available as are premium memberships with monthly discounts.

 

Operated by the same folks who own Savor the Moment Bakery in Greensboro, the High Point branch offers a somewhat different concept. The focus here is on customizable stuffed cheesecakes, so don’t come looking for cakes or cookies. It’s a premise that may have a more limited appeal, but it also offers something different.

 

The stuffed cheesecakes are essentially cheesecake slices covered in a crispy shell and topped with whatever fruits, sauces, and crunchy things you desire. A la Coldstone, you can customize to your heart’s content or choose from more than a dozen preset options. There are also minis and cake sundaes/parfaits as well as hot coffee.

 

At $8.95 for most of the offerings, the stuffed cheesecakes aren’t cheap, but if you have the calories to spare, they are worth it. I went with a cherry pie (graham cracker shell topped with cherry pie filling) touched up with white chocolate and Oreo pieces. The cream cheese cheesecake base is dense and a bit tangy, but the toppings provided plenty of sweetness. There was also a very satisfying textural balance between creamy and crunchy.

 

Savor the Moment offers a clean, well-appointed, open space, and the folks who work here are kind. If and when the business grows, it could do with more seating (and more days open), but for now, it’s a welcome weekend treat destination. 

The World and All That It Holds

 

Rafael Pinto, a young Bosnian Sephardic Jewish doctor, steps away from his father’s pharmacy to see Archduke Franz Ferdinand shot and the world irrevocably altered. Plunged headfirst into the horrors of war, Pinto ends up finding the love of his life in a fellow soldier, Osman. Though enemy soldiers and political intrigue threatens them at every turn, together they fight for survival and a shared future.

 

Aleksandar Hemon’s latest novel is among his most ambitious, spanning not only decades and continents but languages as well. Though written primarily in English, The World and All That It Holds mixes in untranslated Bosnian, German, and even Ladino (“Spanjol”). To further complicate matters, Pinto is also a habitual opium user, and the line between the story’s reality and fever dream/hallucination can be tenuous.

 

All of this makes for a challenging read, but for the patient, there are rewards: the tenderness of Pinto and Osman’s relationship (and, later, that of Pinto and his adopted daughter Rahela’s) amid the savagery of their circumstances, their striking contrasts (Pinto is introspective, soulful, and sensitive but also downbeat while Osman is brave and bold, and whether in the flesh or in imagined memory, constantly an encouraging presence), richly rendered settings (from the Sarajevo of a century ago to Shanghai on the cusp of a Japanese invasion), and Hemon’s distinctively lyrical prose.

 

There are, however, frustrations as well, the biggest one of which is the intrusion of an author-narrator commenting on the historicity of Pinto’s tale. Granted, The World and All That It Holds is steeped in the telling of folktales, and so adding a meta layer makes sense, but it also makes for a somewhat incongruous presence, especially in the epilogue. A further disruption comes courtesy of a British spy who crosses paths with Pinto and seems imported from a Graham Greene novel, an amusingly larger-than-life character who nevertheless seems tonally out-of-place here.

 

The World and All That It Holds is far from an ideal entry point to Hemon’s work, and those well versed in it may miss some of his more constrained earlier efforts, but there is still plenty to appreciate in the spectacle he’s created here.

Damn Good Dogs

 

Located at 275 Elm Street in the Stock and Grain Food Hall in Downtown High Point, Damn Good Dogs offers hot dogs, burgers, and fries. It is open from 11-8 Monday-Thursday, 11-9 Friday and Saturday, and 11-6 on Sunday.

 

On food alone, Damn Good Dogs lives up to its name. It offers five gourmet dogs (in New York, Philly, or Carolina styles, topped with bacon, or topped with chili and cheese), single and double burgers, and a few vegan options as well. I went with a New Yorker: sweet onions, kraut, and spicy brown mustard. It was well-dressed (any dog that doesn't have you reaching for napkins is sad), the bun was soft, and the dog had a nice slightly smoky flavor.

 

Pointing out that Stock and Grain prices run high is beating a dead horse at this point, but even by those standards, $6 for a not-very-large hot dog was a reach.

 

If you have a craving and don’t mind the overpay, Damn Good Dogs won’t let you down in the flavor department. Chances are, however, that you can get your hot dog fix more cheaply elsewhere.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

 

Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) is struggling to keep her identity as Spider-Woman hidden from her police captain father George (Shea Whigham) when they encounter a villain displaced from another universe. Gwen is recruited by Miguel O’Hara/Spiderman 2099 (Oscar Isaac) and Jessica Drew/Spider-Woman, themselves from alternate universes, to help them track down such anomalies. Meanwhile, in yet another universe, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) finds that his activities as Spider-Man have made him appear secretive and distant to his concerned parents. His problems are compounded when Dr. Jonathan Ohm/The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), a scientist whose body became infused with spot-like portals following a lab accident, blames Spider-Man for his disfigurement and vows to make him suffer.

 

The follow-up to 2018’s successful Into the Spiderverse, Across the Spiderverse is nothing if not ambitious. It’s the longest American animated feature, and it’s packed to the gills with alternate versions of Spider-Man from the British anarchist Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya) to Spider-Man India (Karan Soni) to the classic Peter Parker (Jake Johnson, playing him as a middle-aged dad). Each universe explored has its own distinctive art style, and the film is a treasure trove of easter eggs and references to comic book lore. As such, Across the Spiderverse walks a thin line between being a labor of love for Spider-fans and a study in excess.

 

The central idea here is one of fatedness: would the Spider-heroes be the heroes they are if they were not shaped by tragedy? Miles seems determined to find out, but for Miguel, privy to deeper losses than the average Uncle Ben, it’s too dangerous a possibility to ponder. This is both mature turf for an animated comic book adaptation and a conceit on the verge of becoming hackneyed (The upcoming Flash movie is the latest of several properties to play around with the consequences of disrupting fate to prevent tragedy).

 

This weightiness and Isaac’s intense voice performance aside, Across the Spiderverse still manages to be solidly entertaining. The animation is varied and kinetic, taking us everywhere from a Lego dimension to a teeming Mumbattan of Spider-Man India’s realm. The early Spot sequences are pure slapstick as Ohm is a bungler who has no idea how his powers work, but a later escape sequence is full of tension-pumping adrenaline.

 

Across the Spiderverse is the middle film in a planned trilogy, and it ends on a shamelessly blatant cliffhanger, a frustrating lack off payoff for the 140-minute run-time. And yet, it offers hope that the next installment can be entertaining and visually daring just the same.