<em>The Atlantic</em>’s May Cover: Caity Weaver Finds the Best Free Restaurant Bread in America
· The Atlantic
“Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.”
In The Atlantic’s May cover story, staff writer Caity Weaver takes readers on a delightful and poignant journalistic quest––and takes no prisoners along the way––to reveal to America the truly perfect free restaurant loaf within its midst. This was a question that dogged Weaver on dinners out with her husband, enjoying what she considered at the time to be the best free bread: “It seemed incredible, but also possible, that this really could be the best free restaurant bread in America. What if it was? Even more dizzyingly, what if it wasn’t? What if—unfathomable—someone else was giving away an even better bread for free? The thought drove me crazy. I begged for the opportunity to investigate.”
Over the course of many months, Weaver pursued this mission: “How would I determine the best free restaurant bread in America? Simple: I would ask every single person I encountered, ‘What is the best free restaurant bread in America?’; travel to the most likely candidates; and try the bread myself.” She writes about the highs (ordering all 16 loaves offered as part of a $525 tasting meal at Joël Robuchon in the MGM Grand Las Vegas) and the accessible (her family’s eternal favorite, Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits). Weaver grouped those she asked into three categories: the truly happy in life who can immediately rattle off their favorite bread; those who can’t or won’t be bothered to think of a single free bread they’ve enjoyed; and those who feel too much pressure to answer the question. She writes: “I am astonished that only a minority of people can summon an answer quickly. My mental filing cabinet devoted to cataloging free restaurant breads is one of the largest and most scrupulously maintained in my neocortex; I’ve discarded the contents of other filing cabinets (‘Visuospatial Reasoning,’ ‘First Aid’) to make room for it. What occupies the free-bread space in others’ minds?”
Weaver ultimately declares that the best free restaurant bread is baked in her hometown: a cranberry-walnut loaf at Parc, a French bistro by a Philadelphia restaurateur, Stephen Starr. (This bread is also served at Starr’s D.C. spot, Le Diplomate.) After visiting Parc and interviewing Starr, she writes: “The kitchen turns out about 1,500 loaves a day, of which 200 are the cranberry-walnut. The brief that Starr gave his chef and baker when the restaurant opened was: ‘Just come up with the greatest bread basket ever.’ The goal, he tells me, was to create a breadbasket so satisfying that ‘you didn’t have to spend any money. You could just come in here, order the breadbasket, a glass of wine, and you’re good for the next five, six hours. We just wanted it to be joyful.’”
“‘From a financial standpoint, it was the dumbest move we ever made,’ he says. ‘It costs so much and people eat so much of it.’ He’s come close to charging for it, he says. But ‘the moment I think I’m going to do it, I go, I can’t do it.’”
“There’s no recipe for the best bread,” the scholar and author William Rubel tells Weaver. “The best bread is written in each person’s heart.” Weaver writes: “I disagree. The best bread—at least the best free restaurant bread in America— is the aforementioned cranberry-walnut loaf.”
Caity Weaver’s “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.
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