Friday (Restaurant) Bread Basket 4/17/26

We did it!

17 Apr 2026 — 7 min read

Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain.

On Monday, I handed in my "second pass pages" for Breaducation, another milestone along the road to being done done with the thing. For those who have not made a book before, once a manuscript is submitted, it goes through a series of back and forth rounds of editing, both to finish shaping it and make sure there are no errors. If you are lucky, it gets three of these: first, second, and final pass. During first pass you can make significant additions and changes, but after that it's really just an opportunity to make sure everything is in proper place. It's painstaking work and not much fun—did I mention the book is 384 pages long?— beyond getting to see the work in something very close to its final form. Final pass is due on 5/12, after which the book will actually be done done.

Speaking of which, want to see the finalized cover?

The best free restaurant bread in America article in America

Hey, remember back in November when I shared Atlantic writer Caity Weaver's survey looking for the best free restaurant bread in America? Well, undoubtedly thanks mainly to me and those of you who heeded my call, the piece is now out, and it is wonderful. In fact, it so wonderful and so worth your time—and lots of it, given that it pushes 12,000 words—that it is the only item I am going to feature this week.

Here's how Caity's quest begins:

Here is where the notion for the undertaking came from: Tucked within the viscera of the continental United States is a restaurant that gives away superb free bread. Every time I have eaten it (before this past year, three times total), I have said aloud (to my husband, who did not care), “This is the best free restaurant bread in America.” The thought made me feel the way you do when you realize you were just a half a moment away from being plowed by a car, and were spared only by a chance nanosecond of dawdling before stepping into the street: giddy and flabbergasted and grateful to be alive. 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.

Naturally, I told my superiors, this investigation would bring me into contact with the entire arc of human history. People have been eating bread—in many places, eating mostly bread—for millennia. We can’t say for certain that the individuals who fled their burning homes on the shore of the Sea of Galilee 23,000 years ago (leaving behind baskets they’d woven, tools they’d carved from bones, and sleeping areas they’d turned snug and cozy) ate bread, but we know from microscopic barley and oat remnants embedded in a grindstone abandoned to the flames that they were, at least, processing flour. (To situate these folks in time: Cats would not be domesticated for another 14,000 years or so.)

Her bready travels take her early on to Las Vegas, where she samples all 16 breads from Joël Robuchon's degustation menu, which can be had for free for a mere $525, before tax and tip:

The saffron roll tastes of nothing. The pale-green basil focaccia looks like bread from the morgue. Some of the pickings are quite tasty, but the sheer number of rolls dilutes the impact of each. When the headwaiter asks if I have a favorite “so far,” I humiliate myself by describing a square bread covered in cheese that does not exist. He instantly identifies the two rolls I have conflated—an ethereal marshmallow-size cube made with milk instead of water, and a sphere crowned with crunchy, oven-toasted Gruyère that tastes like cheese-flavored air—and brings out more of these for me to confirm. I accept; I could eat 60 to 600 more!

Another mistake. I had meant to merely sample the breads; instead I am consuming each in toto. The remaining 13 courses are whisked out to me at a relentless pace. There are triangles of many colors; foam; a leaf that is a cake; a ladybug that is candy; gold foil distributed with such apparent abandon—festooning a truffle; smeared on the rim of a glass—that it may simply be drifting through the kitchen’s HVAC system like ash from a phoenix’s nest. “I’m eating so much gold,” read my notes.

Soon afterward, she consults with William Rubel, scholar of bread and skeptic of her project:

“What’s the point of the article?”

This is the question an exasperated William Rubel, the author of Bread: A Global History, demands of me. Rubel is an American who was made a Chevalier of the Ordre National du Mérite Agricole by France’s minister of agriculture for contributions to agricultural knowledge. He is a scholar affiliated with no university. His objective is the total comprehension of a small portion of culinary history—aptly, because, with his untamed thatch of shoulder-length white hair and woolly-caterpillar brows, he looks like someone who could have been alive at any point in the era of man. He also founded a children’s literary magazine.

“Fun article for people to read,” I tell him glumly.

Rubel’s knowledge of bread is so comprehensive—and mine so nonexistent—that he is quickly, if cantankerously, becoming my own hlāfweard : the curmudgeonly warden of all loaf understanding. I came to him originally with a question to which I could find no answer: Why did restaurants start giving away bread for free?

“It’s the opposite of what you asked,” Rubel says. “It’s not ‘When did they begin giving away bread for free?’ Because no one could have imagined sitting down at the meal and not eating bread. It was not possible.”

Covering her bases, she attempts to solicit best free restaurant bread advice from celebrities, but—aside from Stephen King, "the only good...celebrity in this world"—she is rebuffed:

Publicists demand to know which other celebrities are telling me their favorite free restaurant bread before they will even consider passing along this question. LeBron James cannot devote one minute to contemplating the best free restaurant bread in America, a representative confides in October, because the totality of his “focus” is “on preparing for the upcoming season”—a frightening and lonely thought. (A few weeks later, James will shatter the tempered-glass backboard of his concentration at 6:32 a.m. Los Angeles time, confessing on social media: “I love watching YouTube golf ⛳ videos!! Random I know. lol. SO COOL!” I email his rep a plea to slip the question to James while a YouTube golf video is loading. Do not hear back.) Ben Affleck cannot answer due to being “in the midst of a project”—aren’t we all? Jennifer Lopez is likewise “filming a movie right now” and therefore totally unreachable by terrestrial communication.

Do you want to know how abjectly I debase myself, attempting to divine this forbidden knowledge from the impenetrable minds of celebrities? I contact Chris Pratt’s publicist to seek Pratt’s answer, even though—since we’re all being so honest—I don’t especially care to know it. (I am merely asking to be polite.) “We need to politely hold off as there isn’t interest,” comes the reply. Excuse me! That is actually not polite! I don’t need to know that Chris Pratt isn’t interested; and also, how can he not be interested in such an interesting topic? And also, I am the one who is not interested! But this is not even my lowest moment. That nadir is struck when I am forced to reach out to my nemesis: a celebrity publicist I have previously sworn never to speak to again, because several years ago she lied to me—did not refuse to comment; flat-out lied—when I asked her a direct question. Typing my query about the best free restaurant bread in America to this individual feels like dragging my raw, bleeding fingertips across a gravestone that has been scorched by lightning. And would you believe that not only does this publicist fail to provide an answer to my fun and fascinating question; she does not even acknowledge receipt of my email or my follow-up email ? And so now I am forced to put into writing my new vow, a vow I will keep, even if it one day destroys my life, even if it kills me: Ashley, the next time you and I cross paths, it will be in hell.

(“What a nice article this will be to read,” Oprah Winfrey’s ultra-classy publicist writes, while unequivocally declining her client’s participation.)

I could go on quoting this article, but will stop now for fear of crossing the unfair use line and simply implore you to set an hour or so aside and read it yourself. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll question the amount of Diet Coke she consumes, and you'll learn where the best free restaurant bread in America is to be found. I'm so glad we played such a big role in its creation, you are welcome, Caity. (If you were one of the thousands of respondents to the survey, share your best free restaurant bread in America in the comments below!)