ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
Let's set the table a bit.
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NADWORNY: So you go to a restaurant. You sit down. You put in an order. And then occasionally, something glorious gets delivered to your table - a basket of free bread. Sometimes it's nothing to write home about, but occasionally, an absolutely extraordinary slice of carb heaven ends up on your plate. Caity Weaver, writer at The Atlantic, went on an Odyssean journey to find the best free restaurant bread in America. And she joins us now. Caity, thanks for being here.
CAITY WEAVER: Thank you for having me.
NADWORNY: OK. So first off, why did you begin this quest?
WEAVER: There was a restaurant in Atlanta, and the free bread at this restaurant was fantastic. It was so good that every time I ate it, I would think, this might be the best free restaurant bread in America. But then I would think, what if there's a bread that's even better than this that I can't even fathom? And the possibility that that was the case just drove me nuts because I'm super cheap and I love delicious things, and I hated the thought that it might be out there and I wouldn't find it just because I didn't know where it was.
NADWORNY: Well, I want to talk about restaurants and kind of how they use bread in a strategic manner. Like, what's the argument here?
WEAVER: One of my favorite interviews was with a chef from New Orleans. And he was pointing out that, you know, bread is something that you give to customers. If you're taking a while to take their order, it can appease them. But he also said that from the restaurant's perspective, you actually don't want them to have it before they order because you want - the restaurant wants customers to be ordering from a place of maximum hungriness.
NADWORNY: OK. Let's talk about your methodology on this quest of finding the best bread.
WEAVER: First was just to ask every single person I could think of out and about. Like, if I was in an elevator with you, I was going to ask you. For months, I asked so many people. I ended up with 555 usable responses, but I got many more responses than that.
NADWORNY: OK. So we actually have a bread basket, which includes some of the carbs you profiled...
WEAVER: Wow.
NADWORNY: ...In this story. We have two breads here for you, and I wonder if you know exactly what they are.
WEAVER: Absolutely do.
NADWORNY: And can you tell me?
WEAVER: Of course. On the left, we have the brown bread from the Cheesecake Factory. Cheesecake Factory was an unbelievably popular answer. Numerically, it was actually the No. 1 answer, although in the story, I get into the equation I came up with. I didn't want to penalize restaurants for not being chains.
NADWORNY: Right.
WEAVER: Or...
NADWORNY: 'Cause you can get this bread all across the...
WEAVER: Right.
NADWORNY: ...Country.
WEAVER: Right. So it makes sense that a lot of people would vote for it 'cause a lot of people just had access to it. But I will say that Cheesecake Factory customers really, really love this bread. And on the right, we have some very lovely thick slices of the cranberry walnut bread from - since we're in D.C., I'm going to say it's from Le Diplomate unless you people shipped this down from Philly, where it is also served at a restaurant called Parc. These breads together represent the top two breads, you know, as determined by me after months of research. The cranberry walnut bread is the one that I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in the United States.
NADWORNY: Why this bread?
WEAVER: So this bread was just really disproportionately nominated. Considering that it's only served in two restaurants in the U.S., it got as many nominations as some of the chains. So that told me this bread was worth checking out. It's a rustic kind of loaf. This is a bread that it - you know, it looks like the kind of bread that someone could have eaten, like, hundreds of years ago in a tavern. This bread is really, really good. You're lucky to live within 15 minutes of it. I wish I were so blessed.
NADWORNY: Caity Weaver is a writer at The Atlantic, and she wrote about the best free bread in America. Thanks for being here, Caity.
WEAVER: Thank you for having me.
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