Friday Bread Basket 10/10/25

I see bread people

10 Oct 2025 — 6 min read

What no one prepared us for, though, was that the logic that we followed—we want the business to succeed; we need our jobs to make money—didn’t apply to ownership. After we announced the closure on Instagram, someone commented, asking, “Respectfully, how did a union not win any of their demands? Was there no threat of striking?” This is my response: it is exceptionally difficult to leverage worker power when the owners of the restaurant care more about dominating their staff than they do about making their business profitable. We tried to explain to the owners that their decisions ostracized their customers and hurt their staff; but any action we could have taken to affect their bottom line would only have expedited the place’s descent. And we did, truly, want the restaurant to survive. We loved it there; we knew it was special. The sad and frustrating truth is that in this and many cases, the people who needed the business to succeed the most were the workers, who were given three weeks to find new jobs in one of the more hostile and turbulent economies in recent history. What we risked when we threatened a work stoppage wasn’t our employers’ wealth; they had wealth before us, and they still have wealth now that the restaurant is gone. What we risked was the livelihoods of forty working class people.

One of the wildest details here is that instead of listening to their staff about how their own actions were affecting the restaurant's business, they chose to institute a "five dollar upcharge if you asked for Parmesan to sprinkle on top."

His favorite flavor is plain

My friend Kenji Lopez-Alt recently wrote a ~~screed~~ post about the proper language to use when ordering a slice of pizza topped with nothing more than sauce and cheese in the Five Boroughs:

I may live in Seattle now, but I’m a New Yorker through and through, and this type of transgression will not fly. I grew up eating multiple slices a week—sometimes multiple slices a day. A Sicilian and garlic knots from the old Pizza Town II up on Broadway. Whole pies from V&T or Patsy’s in Harlem. A pepperoni slice from Joe’s on Bleecker (flat pepperoni—there was no cuppy pepperoni in New York in those days). A Palermo from Ben’s in Soho. And—perhaps the food I’ve consumed more than any other in the world—a plain slice from Sacco in Hell’s Kitchen.

My DNA stretches like strands of aged mozzarella. My blood runs thick with canned roma tomato sauce. The image of a slice of pizza dusted with pepper flakes on a greasy paper plate held above the grimy New York City sidewalk is burned into my retina as clearly as the imprint of a 30-year-old MetroCard in my old high school wallet.

So when I see people butchering the language of pizza—my language of pizza—from 2,800 miles away, the rage that rises could boil the Hudson River in January.

For a brief moment, I considered letting this one slide. But things are looking stormy in the Big Apple, and those clouds aren’t gonna yell at themselves.

Pizza Rant: It's called a PLAIN SLICE.

Char culture

Traveling slightly further south, I'm now very keen to get to Philly to try the pies at Viraj Thomas' Char, after reading this Inquirer review from Craig LaBan:

Thomas’ mushroom pizza has more finesse than its cliché name, Fun Guy, with a blend of multiple mozzarellas with various moisture levels to lay a springy base, a touch of garlic, and mushrooms with enough character — maitakes, blue oysters and sometimes chanterelles — to retain their snappy, woodsy flavor.

Thomas shows he can play minimalist, too, with essential basics like the Marinara, whose naturally sweet sauce of Bianco di Napoli California tomatoes is kissed with sea salt and oregano, then lashed with peppery drizzles of Tuscan olive oil while still hot from the oven. The Margherita showcases the melting flow and lactic sweetness of fresh mozzarella from Caputo Bros. Creamery in York County (Thomas’ favorite mozz to date).

Char’s specials always keep it seasonal and interesting, including a summer pie with smokey speck, fontina, and sweet peaches, and another that blended four kinds of alliums (caramelized Tropea onions, scallions, spring onions, and crispy shallots) over a white cheese base. I was bummed to miss the short window for his corn and crème fraîche pie drizzled with chili oil from Little Fish — but the 90-minute wait that evening was too much for my hungry crew.

If there is one pizza you must try at Char, it is Thomas’ signature New School Tomato Pie. This creation builds on the marinara base with shaved garlic and two kinds of Datterini mini-plum tomatoes — the reds semi-dried; the yellows left whole — so they burst with juicy sweetness beneath a pungently smoky lace of shaved Fiore Sardo cheese and a dusting of breadcrumbs, whose snap above the crust brings an almost stereophonic crunch. It’s complex. It’s showy. It’s bold. It’s easy to crush.

Any Philly folks been there yet?