Friday Bread Basket 4/24/26

24 Apr 2026 — 5 min read

Jo Ann Callis, Dish Trick (2025).

Just a heads up, but the Friday Bread Basket will be taking a brief hiatus after this week, since I'll be off in CA to teach at the West Coast Bread Fest and attend the annual small grains field day at UC Davis for an upcoming story on triticale. Maybe I'll see some of you at one or both of those events? (Let me know!)

Vegitalian-American

My friends Sean and Rebecca own Provincetown's Pop + Dutch, the best little sandwich, salad, and lube shop on Cape Cod, a place we try to go to often while down there. Sean trained as a sandwich slinger at Brooklyn's Court Street Grocers and his and Rebecca's sandwiches are on point, so it came as no surprise when Helen Rosner declared one of Court Street's offerings New York's finest sandwich. What was surprising was that her favorite is vegetarian:

Few sandwiches in the pantheon of great sandwiches have attained the status of the Italian combo. This hero of heroes goes by many names—the Italian sub, the Godfather, the surname of any number of Italian American icons—but it is, in its Platonic form, a long roll stuffed with cured Italian meats, plus cheese, shredded iceberg lettuce, thinly sliced onion, oil, and red-wine vinegar. When well executed, it is one of the few sandwiches that achieve what I can only call completeness: a sandwich that wants for nothing, that is, in every sense, enough. I have eaten more Italian combos than I can count, and more than most people I know; if I am not one-tenth soppressata by body weight, it’s not for lack of trying. And yet my favorite Italian sandwich in New York City—maybe my favorite sandwich, period—contains no meat whatsoever.

That sandwich is the Vegitalian combo, from Court Street Grocers, the unbearably charming Carroll Gardens sandwich shop that opened in 2010 and now has additional locations in Williamsburg and Manhattan. Its owners, Eric Finkelstein and Matt Ross, are sandwich freaks in the best possible way; on the shop’s vast menu, not a single sandwich is a dud. This achievement can only be the product of an obsessive, near-philosophical approach to the sandwich as a composition, to the gestalt of the bite. On its face, the Vegitalian is a provocation: a meatless Italian sub, a contradiction in terms, a thing that should not work and yet absolutely does. Court Street makes a traditional meat-filled Italian combo as well, which is fine, but only the Vegitalian is my favorite.

Can't wait to get back to NYC for the first time since leaving the flour mines and getting over there for one of these, but in the meantime, I might just have to recreate one at home.

More free restaurant bread

Acorn bread at Honeysuckle in Philadelphia © Haamza Edwards

Nothing will top Caity Weaver's best free restaurant bread story from last week, but this piece from the Financial Times last month surveyed some very tasty- and creative-looking restaurant breads on offer in London (and beyond) these days, including the "acorn bread" pictured above from Omar Tate's Honeysuckle in Philly:

“Plenty of Michelin-starred restaurants don’t serve bread at all,” says Stuart Ralston of Lyla in Edinburgh. “Traditionally, bread tends to appear early and is rarely thought of as a course in its own right. What’s changed is chefs are choosing to give bread more intention, serving it later or treating it with the same level of thought as other dishes.” His bread course of laminated brioche with koji and wild garlic butter lands halfway through his tasting menu when “guests are relaxed and attentive, and the bread becomes something restorative rather than a filler”.

Bread can also be a means of telling the chef’s story. Angelo Sato’s Humble Chicken in Soho serves a “Picnic” bread course inspired by childhood picnics with his German mother. It’s composed of shokupan milk bread (a nod to his Japanese heritage), pickled cucumber, braised pig’s head salad and roasted apple mustard. “We put it later in the meal – eighth out of 16 courses – as people tend not to know if they should eat all the bread or not, since they have no idea how much food is left to come,” he says.

Kneading Conference 2026

The lineup for this summer's Kneading Conference has been announced, and (as always) it is a banger. The keynote speaker will be Farm and Sparrow's Dave Bauer, and there will be workshops from Rose Wilde, Kerry Hanney, Jim Franks, and Danny and Johnny Dubbaneh from Z&Z Manoushe. Maine Grains invited me to teach this year, but told them I needed the summer off after working on the book, which I am now regretting. (Though I might just attend as a civilian instead for a change.)

The Kneading Conference | Maine Grain Alliance