Here's the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow.
This is Katie Weaver.
She's a staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine.
She's reading from the beginning of her recent cover story.
At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what.
After 555 responses, 13000 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.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies.
It's for eaters.
I am Dan Pashman.
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
Katie Weaver writes for The Atlantic.
Over the years, she's also written for The New York Times, GQ, and Gawker.
She specializes in two things, celebrity profiles and going on quests.
She's interviewed Dwayne the Rock Johnson, Cardi B and Justin Bieber, among many others.
And her quests include an attempt to quit sugar, which became a journey into hell.
She tracked down a mystery inside a glitter factory and once spent 14 hours at a TGI Fridays that promoted endless appetizers.
I find Katie's writing to be sharp, incisive, and very funny.
And as a guy who spent three years trying to invent a new shape of pasta, you know I love a quest.
So when I heard that Katie had set out to find the best free restaurant bread in America, I knew we had to talk.
My first question?
Why?
Why?
Why is this something she needed to find out?
The answer is very simple.
It is my own mental illness.
The direct inspiration was a restaurant that I have been to now a few times in Atlanta that had a really great free bread.
And every time I ate it, I would think, oh, my God, this bread is so good.
I would say, this is the best free restaurant in America.
But I didn't actually know if I was right.
And the thought that there might possibly be another bread out there that was even better, but also free, just kind of drove me crazy every time I remembered it.
Every time I ate this bread, I would think, this is the best, but what if it's not the best?
As she said, Katie collected suggestions from 555 people friends family strangers, anyone she encountered.
She also reached out to many in the food world, including me.
And as she collected her responses, she noticed a pattern.
The people she talked to fell into three different categories.
So the first type this is the type with which I identify is people who can answer the question right away.
I thought that almost everyone was going to fall into this category.
It ended up being by far the smallest category.
I thought pretty much everyone would have an answer to this question.
It turns out most people don't.
I'm proud to say that I am in that first category.
My immediate answer was the bread at Charlie's Crab in Palm Beach, Florida.
When I was a kid visiting my grandmother, I went to town on those rolls.
I remember them being sort of like focaccia, but more buttery and salty, maybe with some Old Bay type seasoning.
Sadly, though, Charlie's Crab has closed.
So I went with the buttery, garlicky rolls at La Scala in Comac, New York.
Anyway, Katie and I are the types who know our answers to this question.
The second group?
This was by far the largest group.
People who know that they've eaten bread at restaurants they're pretty sure that's happened in their lives can't really recall any specific scenario, can't really think of any of the restaurants, or if they can, it's like I guess that bread was okay, but there's nothing that really stands out to them.
But I remember every good free restaurant bread I've ever had.
Katie's third group.
Many of them said verbatim the same thing, which was, it's too much pressure.
They maybe even thought of a bread that was really good, but they just couldn't be absolutely certain that it was the best.
And so they didn't even want to answer the question.
They would just get kind of scared and outright refused to answer.
This was many adults in my life.
You describe this type of person as a tragic, paranoid, though occasionally brilliant figure.
Yes.
A couple of my colleagues at The Atlantic who I consider to be truly brilliant people just could not bring themselves to answer this, could not answer it.
Katie took all these poll responses and tallied up the results.
She would use this poll as a guide to determine what places she should go to.
Still, in the end, she would be the one to crown the winner.
I was just confident that as soon as I put the best bread in my mouth, I would know.
I really believe in myself.
I'm an only child.
So I don't really second guess my opinions or my decisions.
So I said, I'll know when I have it.
It was a little shocking to me that Katie didn't have any kind of criteria for judging the bread itself.
No categories, no numeric scale, nothing.
She and I differ in that respect.
And yet there were certain things she was looking for.
There was one small set of tasks that I gave to every restaurant where I got bread, and that is, I asked for it before I sat down to see if they would bring it right away.
I asked for at least one, you know, round of seconds.
And then I also asked for some to go to see, like, how free is this bread?
Are they going to give me more free bread on my way out when they know they're not going to make any more money off me?
So how free was one of the criteria?
Yes, how free, exactly.
How much of the free bread can you get?
Exactly.
And what I found was it seems the limit does not exist.
All the places I mentioned were very generous with their free bread.
It did not seem like a huge deal to them to give me one on the way out.
Did you say that you asked for the bread before you even sat down at the table?
Definitely before I ordered.
Sometimes it would be like, as I'm sitting down, I would say you know, I'm starving.
Could I get a little bread?
Just to say, okay, how fast are you going to bring this?
Because I spoke to a chef for this story who explained to me that restaurants really ideally do not want you to start eating the free bread until after you've ordered, because they want you to order from a place of maximum hungriness.
And so as soon as you start tucking into that bread, maybe now you don't need an appetizer.
Maybe you don't want dessert.
How important to you was it that the bread was served warm?
That I would say was very important to me.
You know I spoke to a food scientist for the story who explained to me that because of the way taste perception works and scent molecules, bread that is warm literally, does kind of have more taste to us.
So I think it's pretty much always going to be the case that the best bread will be warm.
And I also know, from the data I gathered, that The temperature of the bread being warm, or sometimes even hot, was something that a lot of people mentioned over and over again.
If they mentioned a temperature, it was warm or hot.
No one ever said, oh, I really love the cold bread at this restaurant.
Absolutely zero people said that.
People like warm bread.
And if bread is warm, I think people will forgive a lot of sins.
Yeah, I think that's definitely true.
When the bread is warm, people forgive a lot.
Like it's nice to get warm bread, but it can kind of trick you into thinking the bread is like a higher quality than it is, because when it's warm you're kind of like, oh my God, it's warm.
It's fresh.
This is incredible.
My wife has dabbled occasionally in making bread and like in a bread maker in our house.
She'll be the first to tell you, like, she's not like a super hardcore bread expert, you know.
But even that bread, which is very basic, is amazing when it comes out of the oven and is fresh.
If I were your wife, I would kill you the way you're talking about my bread.
I think that she would agree.
But a few hours later, I'm sorry, it's not the greatest.
Okay.
All right.
Did you judge the breads at all on accompaniments?
Like if they came with olive oil or butter or like a flavored or seasoned accompaniment?
So this is something that came up a lot in my questioning of people, because some people and I would include my husband in this group he named as his best free restaurant bread a place here in town in Santa Fe, where I live.
And that man was really going off the butter because the bread is fine, but it's a special butter.
It has green chili in it.
And I'm not here to find the best free restaurant butter in America.
I'm not here to find the best olive oil in America.
I really wanted it to be about the bread.
So when I was doing my own testing, I really tried to specifically focus on the bread.
If I'm eating the bread with no accompaniments, is it still the best?
I would judge a place very harshly.
I do judge a place very harshly if they serve the bread with cold butter.
Like when the butter is so cold that you can't spread it.
To me, that's just a real negative and kind of makes me doubt everything the restaurant is doing.
Because it does seem like something that's pretty easy to accomplish, just having butter be room temperature.
So yes, I agree.
A lot of people.
You know people who would mention butter.
No one said that it has nice cold butter.
They would always say the butter is so soft, it's really smooth, it's spreadable.
I will say actually the place that I ultimately selected as the best three restaurant bread in America.
My second round of breads from there did not really arrive warm, but it was still fantastic.
It was good enough to overcome the temperature.
When Katie asked me to suggest a place with great free bread, my first thought after Charlie's Crab was actually the Cheddar Bay Biscuits at Red Lobster.
But I felt like a lot of people would have that answer.
And I was right.
A lot of people did.
And those biscuits and everything about Red Lobster hold a very special place in Katie's heart.
Red Lobster was the restaurant that my family would go to when cousins were in town or if we had something big to celebrate.
So I would go there, you know, for every graduation.
I have so many memories of being at Red Lobster that it kind of all blurs into one like years long memory.
Were we ever not at Red Lobster?
My mom really liked seafood.
She also was very cheap, so I don't think she ever would get a lobster, a red lobster.
She would get whatever the cheapest fish was that they had.
My dad did not suffer from that same personality trait.
He didn't mind getting the expensive items.
What was your dad's go-to order?
His is harder because my mom just always knew she was going to go for the cheapest thing.
Like he would maybe get a lobster, but he was more, he was kind of open.
Like, what does he feel like that day?
But it wouldn't be.
He certainly would not shy away from getting the most expensive thing if that's what he was feeling like that day.
What was the role of free restaurant bread in general in your family growing up?
If a restaurant had good free bread, we knew about it.
And we were the kind of family who I mean.
I don't know that I ever even went to a restaurant with my parents that charged for bread.
We certainly would not have paid for it.
But it's the kind of thing where, like I just know, automatically at Benihana they charge for refills.
And so we'd sit down and my mom would say, you're getting $1.
Soda.
So you choose when you want it.
You're only getting one.
So, you know, free restaurant bread is something that was an important part of a meal for us.
Your mom passed away a few years ago.
You wrote an obit for her that was sort of incredibly sweet and also hilarious, sort of went viral.
And you write that her true joys were helping people and anyone anywhere saving money.
Yes.
Yes, definitely.
And I have inherited that too.
I mean, not helping people.
I'm not here to help people.
But I do love hearing about people saving money.
And even now, my friends sometimes will text me if they, you know, get a really good deal on like a TV, or if they find 10 on the sidewalk.
They will send me a note and I'm like oh,
I love hearing about it.
It makes me so happy.
It's like it happened to me.
Coming up.
Katie embarks on her quest when she tries the free bread at a place in Vegas where dinner for one costs over 500.
Then she goes to the chain restaurant that received the most votes in her poll.
Stick around.
And now, a delicious word from our sponsors.
It's very good.
Welcome back to The Sporkful.
I'm Dan Hashman.
Last week on the show, I traveled to Houston, which has taken in more Afghan refugees than any other American city.
And when refugees arrive, Omer Yousafzai is there to welcome them.
He's the owner of the Afghan Village Restaurant, which has become a community hub and gathering place for Afghans and non-Afghans alike.
Omer got the idea for the restaurant while working as a defense contractor in Afghanistan, when he was getting a little bored of the food offered at the military base.
Probably if my supervisor hear what I did, they will not like it.
We were not allowed, but we would still bribe the locals, literally give them extra money.
They would bring food from outside, and $20, $30 will buy food for 10 people.
And everybody in that area would come and share.
So the American soldiers, what were their reactions?
They said, if we eat this food seven days a week, we will never get tired of it.
Omer tells me about how he recruited his mother to help with the recipes during the early days of the restaurant and why he offers some people meals for free.
That one's up now.
I hope you'll check it out.
Okay, back to Katie Weaver's search for the best free restaurant bread in America.
There were lots of places people recommended her when she polled those 555 folks.
One of the most luxe was Joelle Robuchon in Las Vegas, where she had the degustation meal for 525 per person.
And the bread service there was not something they took lightly.
So they bring out a beautiful, overflowing bread cart that has 16 varieties of bread.
And you can pick whichever ones you want, as many as you want.
It was absolutely humiliating to have to say to these people, I would like one of each.
Because some of the breads are really quiet.
Quite similar.
But they didn't blink it that they said, no problem at all.
So I got so much bread that they had to actually divide it into kind of two portions.
They did one that was just the rolls and one that was just slices of bread.
It felt insane.
But you know what?
They let me have as much as I want.
I imagine like bringing a second table over and like attaching it to your table so they can spread.
They would have had to do that if they hadn't divided it in half.
So they came up with something that slightly preserved my dignity.
You also for that one.
You booked your reservation at 915 pm, so you could be as hungry as possible.
Yes.
That was a mistake.
Why?
I, oh my gosh, I was just so absolutely famished.
And this is a restaurant, I think, because it is very fancy and expensive.
They really want you to feel like you're getting what you pay for.
So there's a lot of pageantry.
There's some explanations.
They're really taking...
They want you to feel like they're really considering you as a person.
And I was like, don't consider me as a person.
Just bring the bread out as fast as you can.
Please, I am starving.
And I also just love bread so much that I repeatedly noticed that I was throwing bread into my mouth like before I even remembered to taste it.
And my notes would say like, remember to taste the bread.
So I'd have to get more and I would have to think okay, now I'm really going to pay attention when I eat this and not just inhale it in three seconds.
Since the bread was effectively unlimited, I could make this mistake as many times in a row as I chose.
And there was always more bread behind it.
And I did.
And I did.
But I always, in the end, eventually remembered to kind of slow down and taste the bread.
I will say that I never again repeated the exact mistake of Joël Robuchon.
I never had as late a dinner as I did that first time.
Right.
At that place they had olive bread, rosemary brioche, basil focaccia, walnut raisin bread, two different cheese breads, multiple baguettes.
What were your thoughts?
Where'd you come away from after all that?
So this was a little tough because the only other thing about getting the tasting menus you get so many courses.
So by the end, I was so stuffed full of delicious food.
I was like, I hate my life.
I hate that I have been forced to go to this fancy restaurant in Las Vegas for free and eat a sumptuous meal on my employer's dime.
I am the most persecuted woman in america for being made to do this.
Um, i was just so full and it it was not helped by the fact that i had had like more than 16 breads because i kept getting seconds of things.
Mistakes were made.
Mistakes were made by me.
Mistakes were made i don't want to Point fingers.
We could say by them, by giving me the option of having so much bread, by not stopping me when I said can I have all these?
They should have said, no, are you crazy?
The original restaurants in America were inns and taverns that started opening up around the 1830s.
And those places didn't have menus.
You paid a flat price, they served one thing on a given day, and it always came with bread.
Over time, restaurants evolved into places offering different items at different prices, but the expectation of bread with every meal remained.
It's just a way to kind of earn goodwill among your customers.
People appreciate when you give them free bread.
And there are also some more practical reasons.
It can help you pace the meal.
If your servers are covering a lot of tables and maybe the service is a little slow, it can sort of – temporarily satisfy your customers, make them think that they're being attended to.
Not every restaurant does it today.
But when I was interviewing people and polling people, I found that people really miss free bread.
They are angry when restaurants that used to have it don't have it anymore.
In her piece, Katie cites industry data that in 2012, 6% of restaurants charged for bread.
By last year, it was more than 30% charging for bread.
She says some people think the change has to do with the rise of celebrity chefs.
Their names are so associated with their restaurants.
They feel like they have to have over-the-top bread options, which becomes very expensive.
Maybe that's true.
I think the biggest factor is all the economic pressures facing restaurants today.
Back to Katie's quest.
There were three chain restaurants that a lot of people recommended.
She started with the one that got the most votes.
The number one answer was bread from the Cheesecake Factory, and specifically brown bread from the Cheesecake Factory.
I would say the bread was like faintly sweet, came out warm, but really it's defining characteristic for me is that it is brown.
It is one of the brownest things you'll ever see.
Just like a lump of brown bread.
If I saw any kind of dark brown bread, I would assume that it was some kind of whole grain something.
It's shocking to me that a bread that has even the slightest veneer of healthiness first of all would be a star at Cheesecake Factory.
Second of all, it would be so high in her poll.
Well, I think that's the thing, because you see the brown and you think well, that's going to be somewhat good for me.
It's brown.
But then it's actually very soft.
It has a bit of sweetness, as I said.
You can slather it in butter.
So it's not actually that healthy.
But I think, especially if you're going to Cheesecake Factory planning to have a huge meal, you think well, let me have a little of this healthy bread to start.
Uh, not quite.
Turns out not quite.
Katie liked the brown bread, but not enough to crown it the winner.
Next stop, Texas Roadhouse.
Okay, that bread is gorgeous, I would say.
It's like a sort of perfect little soft kind of rounded square shape.
And what they do at Texas Roadhouse that I appreciate is they bring the bread with you to your table.
So you are not without bread at Texas Roadhouse for one second.
When you say they bring the bread to the table with you, like what?
Like they have a bread warmer at the host stand?
Where's the bread coming from?
Yes.
Yep.
Literally that.
You walk in, the breads are next to you.
When it's time for you to go to your table, they will grab one.
Like with the menus, they're grabbing bread.
With the menus.
Yep.
I will say, did not love my meal there.
We'll go back for the bread.
Yeah.
Even though it wasn't my favorite bread.
I have low standards.
I'll go anywhere.
I don't care.
And of course we can't forget about the beloved bread from Katie's childhood Red Lobster's Cheddar Bay Biscuits.
She had to do a proper evaluation, though in the context of all the other free bread she was trying.
And...
Oh, it tasted fantastic as they always do.
They taste exactly how I remember them from childhood, but I also.
I probably eat them every year, I would say at least once.
I really enjoy them.
Now, Red Lobster did not receive the most votes numerically in my poll, but of the chain restaurant breads it is my personal favorite.
But would it end up winning Katie's overall competition?
Too early to tell.
She still had more places to hit up.
Because, while chain restaurants got a large share of the votes, most people actually recommended little known indie restaurants.
So there were tons of places that each got one vote.
And I wanted to try to find a way to kind of represent all these stray votes without going to the hundreds of restaurants that received one vote.
So I said, I'm going to pick one that has the best name.
And I think Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro is the best name on my list.
I was tickled by it.
I loved it.
I said, I'm going to go wherever that is.
The Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro is in Townsend Tennessee, a city of 550 people in the gateway to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
And it turns out this bread was fantastic.
I loved it.
It was a cornbread.
And I usually don't love cornbread, but this cornbread was so good.
The butter that it was served with was beautifully whipped.
They really kept it coming.
They let me eat a lot of that bread.
One thing that I really loved about Dancing Bear was they felt...
So generous, almost crazily generous.
Not only were they like keeping that bread coming, but at the end of the meal, you know, the waiter brought out the dessert menu and said but also, we just have s'mores outside if you want to just make s'mores for free.
And when I interviewed the folks at this restaurant, I was like, is this a front for something?
Do you not have to make them?
And they insisted to me that they're not a front.
I didn't investigate that further.
But they said, we make money.
But they pointed out that because they are in the woods, they're a bit of a drive.
They said, you know, people are...
They're really driving to get here.
So once they get here, we don't want them to feel nickel and dimed on everything.
We want them to feel welcome.
We want them to have good memories.
And so the generosity with the free bread, I think, is a big part of that.
And they are.
You know making these little cornbreads in little cast iron skillets and slicing them up and putting them out.
And it's just, it's lovely.
That was such a nice experience going to this restaurant I had never heard of in a town I had never heard of.
And it turns out the bread is fantastic.
It was great.
I really loved it.
Coming up, Katie fulfills her promise when she reveals the best free restaurant bread in America.
Stick around.
Hope you're hungry because it's time for some ads.
Welcome back.
As Katie said at the start, this mission of hers was inspired by eating the bread at a place in Atlanta and thinking this must be the best free restaurant bread in America.
That place is a steakhouse called Bones.
Of course, it had to be on Katie's list of contenders.
But after traveling the country, eating so much great bread, would the free stuff at Bones be as good as she remembered?
So I actually don't mention this in the story.
I made a reservation and I was bringing a friend who lives in Atlanta but had never been, and I was so excited to show her oh my gosh, this is the best bread you're going to have.
So much fun.
They sat us maybe like 45 minutes late for our reservation and In that time didn't offer like oh, here's some bread.
Here's a little snack.
Here's a drink.
Nothing.
So I was kind of like, okay.
I actually was, again, starving as I had been in Las Vegas.
That's bad service.
Yeah.
So I was kind of like, okay.
I'm a little bit embarrassed that I've talked this restaurant up so much to my friend.
So we order our meal.
Bread comes out.
It is great.
It's a very—
I'm trying to think of the best way to phrase this, because the words that are coming to mind are like basic and simple.
And I guess it is, but it's a really just kind of perfect, straight up bread.
It's a lovely little golden boule, nice little, you know, big, like maybe grapefruit sized, roughly, ball of bread.
That was nice.
And I...
I got a lobster entree at this restaurant, and it's not like...
It's in a nice restaurant.
It's like a steakhouse.
So I was splashing out on this meal, and I was also sucking down my favorite drink, Diet Coke.
And when the bill came, I saw that I had been charged for every Diet Coke.
And I can put Diet Cokes away.
I had four Diet Cokes.
I could not believe that I was charged $4 for each one.
It felt.
So it just felt, you know, free bread, I think ideally feel sort of generous and like a nice gift.
And this felt like, what the heck?
I'm buying a lobster dinner.
You can't spot me if you diet Coke.
So it really, it soured the restaurant for me.
The experience was just not great.
But it just put such a nasty taste in my mouth that I was like, as much as I love this bread, I kind of don't ever even want to come back here.
But I should say in their defense they did.
Let me take a bull home when I requested okay.
So they were.
They were generous with the free bread, not so much with the sodas, and I was just so infuriated by that soda policy and I said I can't come back here.
There's another through line in Katie's story.
In the midst of her quest, her father's health was declining.
One day she went to visit him.
As soon as she walked in the door, she noticed something.
Uh-oh, smells like red lobster in here.
He had ordered an admiral's feast from Red Lobster for himself.
You know, initially...
When I walked in and I saw that he had gotten a feast, I thought, you know, that's good.
He's eating a bit because he hadn't been eating very much.
But then I saw that he, you know, hadn't.
My dad, everyone in my family, myself included, can really put away food.
And he hadn't eaten as much as I would have normally expected him to.
And he actually had not even finished his cheddar bay biscuits, which was very unusual.
And he and I talked about this and he was saying that you know, food just lately hadn't tasted the same to him.
And what did you think when you heard that?
It bummed me out.
I want him to, you know, enjoy his meals.
So I asked him, you know, what does it taste like?
And I believe he said it tastes like kind of like sawdust.
But he just, you know, I think as you can tell from the way I talk about free bread, food is free.
Something that my family really derived a lot of joy from for my entire life.
And I could tell that it wasn't bringing him joy anymore.
It was just something like to eat because he had to eat.
But the taste wasn't there.
So I could tell that, you know, he was really not doing too well at that point.
A few days later, Katie's father died.
He was on her mind when she visited one more restaurant on her list.
I asked Katie to read from the end of her piece about that final place.
It's called Park in Philly.
My visit to Park a few weeks after my father's death is the first time I go to Philly, his hometown, without his knowledge.
I am seated near a family, a mother, father, and college-aged daughter.
I can hardly look at them, even as I can't keep my eyes off them.
Veiled by Park's low lighting, I allow myself to sink into a luxuriant, tear-flooded sadness.
My parents will never again shout to be heard in a winter-crowded restaurant or identify the cheapest mom or most expensive dad entree.
They will never again call into a McDonald's drive-thru speaker the beverage order coda, that I have never heard anyone outside my immediate family utter.
And a cup of free water.
You know you have sort of the stated reason for your request when you set out on it Katie, that there's this place in Atlanta and you thought it was the best, but you didn't really know for sure.
Right.
Reading this and hearing about you know your family ordering the free cup of water, it sounds like there's sort of a larger driving force behind this quest.
It almost sounds like this was the quest you were born for.
Possibly.
This might be why God put me on this earth.
And now I'm done.
And I guess I could go at any moment.
And you know what?
I've had a lot of fun.
I've had a lot of great bread.
I wouldn't even be mad.
Yeah.
Well, I hope that doesn't happen anytime soon.
But whenever it does, I'm sure there will be a lot of free bread waiting for you.
God, I hope so.
That was Katie Weaver.
Her story in The Atlantic is I'm kidding.
I'm going to end there.
Of course not.
We have to reveal Katie's big winner.
Here we go.
So most of the top vote getters in Katie's poll were chains.
Then there were tons of indie places that each got one vote.
Two hundred twenty six of those, to be exact.
But there were only two places that were not chain restaurants that were named often enough to make the top 10.
One was Park in Philadelphia, and the other was Le Diplomate in Washington, D.C.
Both of them have this beloved cranberry walnut loaf.
Upon investigation, though, it turns out both places are owned by the restaurateur Stephen Starr.
So it's the same bread.
Plot twist.
People really went crazy for it.
There were very passionate descriptions of this bread.
And I would include, you know, those details in kind of my own private notes section.
And people were really just raving about this bread.
So I decided to go try it.
Let me go see what this bread is all about.
And I loved it.
It's so good.
It's crazy how good this bread is.
Can you describe it to me?
Yes.
It's a kind of rustic loaf and it is studded with cranberries very generously, to the point that some people thought that they were like cherries.
It has a fairly sweet taste.
But that sweetness is sort of counterbalanced by the kind of very chewy bread and the nuts.
It has a pretty thick crust.
It's more like it's sweet and it's savory.
And so it just kind of combines to form one perfect whole.
It's almost like you're getting an entire meal with every bite of this bread, because it's sort of hitting so many different taste sensations in your mouth.
You're talking about.
There's this balance of flavors that makes it kind of feel like a whole meal in one.
But also, it sounds like it's going to have a lot of different textures.
You're going to have kind of the juicy pop of the cranberries, the crunch of the nuts and then the crustiness of the outer part of the bread with the doughy chewiness of the inside of the bread.
Like every texture is in a single bite.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah, you're getting a lot of taste, you're getting a lot of textures, but they're not discordant.
They're all, it's sort of like you're moving, you know, like the movements of a symphony.
Like you're really, you're getting to enjoy these nice, discrete things that all work together very harmoniously.
And you talk to the owner of Park who says that at a cost of about 60 cents per basket, with 10000 customers a week, Park gives away slightly less than half a million dollars in free bread every year.
Yes.
That's not including the butter.
Yes.
So, like, does he think it's worth it?
I think he does.
He told me that, you know, he's thought in the past about charging for it, and every time he kind of thinks about it, he decides that he just can't because it's such a part of the experience of going to these two restaurants where it's served.
It's something that people really love.
I think that's the right call.
I think if he started to charge for it, people would absolutely flip out.
He would burn through a lot of goodwill.
That's the thing is once you start giving away free bread, it's hard to stop.
So, Katie, after 13,000 miles traveled and a lot of bread eaten.
Who won?
The winner was this cranberry walnut loaf at Park and Le Diplomat in D.C.
It is fantastic.
And one thing that's been fun now that the story is out and people can read it and see what I selected, I've heard from so many people who I hadn't heard from initially, who were saying that bread is absolutely fantastic.
You made the right call.
I agree.
And as I was already confident in my choice.
But every person I hear from who says that they love the bread makes me feel like oh, thank God, I got it right.
That's Katie Weaver.
She's a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Check out her cover story in the May issue of the magazine.
Next week on the show, we're live from Boston.
I talk with Matt Shearer, a.k.a.
Reporter Matt, about his viral Dunkin' Donuts stories.
Ian Koss joins us to tell us about how Julia Child convinced Americans to eat monkfish.
And cookbook author Omi Hopper discusses her new cookbook all about Puerto Rican cuisine.
That's next week.
While you wait for that one, check out last week's show, where I traveled to Houston, which has taken in more Afghan refugees than any other American city.
And when refugees arrive, Omer Yusofzai is there to welcome them.
He's the owner of the Afghan Village Restaurant, which has become a community hub and gathering place.
I went there to meet Omer and to eat.
It's a great story.
It's up now.
I hope you'll check it out.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage.
Does your podcasting app have that?
And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXMcom slash Sporkful.
This episode was produced by me, along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara.
It was edited by Camille Stanley.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Sirius XM Podcast.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Christopher David, from Washington DC, reminding you to eat more, eat better and eat more better.
