Take This Bread

Back on October 23, a reader wrote to tell me that she and a friend had gone to Blackbird and while the overall experience was wonderful ("Both our meals were quite good — [my friend] nearly licked her plate — and I like that it’s in my neighborhood, friendly service, etc."), they were soured by the fact that they were charged $1.50 apiece for a couple slices of bread with foil packs of chilled butter.

I published her complaint in an entry called The Staff of Life. . . .Shouldn’t it be Free?, omitting the name of the restaurant (because I didn’t want to single out a small, family-owned bistro when many restaurants have the same practice) and asking other readers to weigh in. I had no idea what a firestorm would ensue.

"If you don’t want to provide bread, don’t provide bread. Charging for bread is tacky," one commenter wrote.

"I don’t understand why you won’t tell us the name of the place that
charged for bread," said another. "Don’t you want to prepare us so that we know that we
will pay for bread if we choose to eat there?"

"I agree that there’s no reason not to name names here," someone else chimed in. "If it’s a part
of the dining experience – for good or bad – it seems part of the
reviewer/blogger’s responsibility to inform and attribute, not simply
toss off as a curiousity."

So I’m naming names, but in the interest of fairness, I wanted to give the people at Blackbird an opportunity to respond. So I called Gail Mollner, who owns the cafe with her husband, Chris Stevens.

She sighed and said, "I thought diners were over this."

Ten years ago, when she worked at Table of Contents, Mollner says they instituted the practice of charging for bread, in an effort to keep costs to the customer above board.

Here’s the rest of what she said: "Restaurants have very small profit margins. We’re insane to be doing this. We do it because we love it and because it makes us happy and maybe in five years we’ll make enough money to go to Hawaii. But we can’t compete with the chains on entrée and wine prices. The only way we can compete with fair prices is to be totally up front and honest about everything you as a diner are paying for. I could offer bread for free but then my entrée prices would go up. Because New French Bakery doesn’t just come to my door and give me free bread, so I can’t turn around and give it away for free. In fact, grain prices recently went up about 15% on the commodities market; I just got a letter to this effect. So now I have to turn around and pass along this price to my customers."

The other point Mollner made is that as a small, neighborhood place with limited seating and a tight budget, they simply can’t afford those patrons who order only a dinner salad, get a free basket of bread, and sit, drinking tea and buttering slices for hours.

And that foil-wrapped butter (which, if you ask me, was the final straw for our reader)? Mollner said she hates it, too. But there simply isn’t enough space or time in her small kitchen to make, separate, and plate butter pats.

How about olive oil? I offered. Mid-grade virgin topped with black pepper. Call it done. Studies actually show that people eat less bread when it’s served with olive oil versus butter. But that would require a hefty investment, Mollner pointed out. Cruets, pepper mills, not to mention the oil itself.

In Blackbird’s defense, I want to point out that the bread they do serve (from New French) is of very high quality. And items such as soup, salad, and lasagna come with a piece or two for the purpose of sopping up dressing or sauce. Also, they’ve put a stop to a major source of wastage — which is a big problem in the restaurant industry. When they first opened, Mollner said they did provide free bread and about half of it went back to the kitchen, untouched. "And I kept thinking, why am I throwing away this beautiful product?"

For the record, I also called Cafe Maude, which one reader of my original post "accused" of being the offending restaurant. And while Maude does offer a baguette with jam on its mid-day menu (for $2), they do provide free bread in the evening when prices go up.

"We’ve had discussions about it but we’ve decided it’s just part of the dining experience," says manager Chris Gehrke. "It’s there to tide one over while we prepare what we hope will be a dynamic entrée. Bread is not the star of the meal, but we feel it’s part of the rounded experience."

I stand by my original recommendation that higher-end restaurants should provide bread gratis but ask patrons if they want it, eliminating perhaps 50% of their bread costs and most of the waste.

Beyond that, I found it is interesting how exercised people became over this issue. It reminded me of a passage in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, the 1943 novel by Betty Smith about an impoverished Irish-American family living in turn-of-the-century New York.

Katie Nolan, the mother in ATGIB, is a tough matriarch who stretches pennies to feed her family, even while her husband, a handsome singing waiter, drinks himself to death. But the one luxury she gives her children (her children, mind you) is coffee: three cups a day. The older, Francie, loves the smell of coffee and enjoys holding the cup in her hand but doesn’t particularly care for the taste. So after her coffee goes cold, it is dumped down the sink, every time.

Katie’s two sisters — both running lean households of their own — object, to which the usually hardened woman responds: "Francie is entitled to one cup each meal like the rest. If it makes her feel better to throw it away rather than drink it, all right. I think it’s good that people like us can waste something once in a while and get the feeling of how it would be to have lots of money and not have to worry about scrounging."

There’s something about a basket of bread, delivered with no contract or expectations, that makes a diner feel valued, cared for, and rich. And that feeling, in the end, may be worth every penny a restaurateur pays out to make it happen.