The price of dinner in restaurants is growing in the USA.
It is no longer just the bottle of wine (or the premium water that costs as much as a work of art) that literally increases the cost of an evening out: bread has also been added, brought table with a range of very special proposals that can raise the bill by as much as twenty dollars.
It's not just a New York or Los Angeles extravaganza.
At Dauphine in Washington, a restaurant inspired by New Orleans cuisine, slices of sweet potato brioche come with buttermilk biscuits and a half baguette at a cost of ten dollars a basket.
Bird Dog in Palo Alto serves a
Jewish-Japanese hybrid challah
, while Audrey's in Nashville serves
mini bowls of Appalachian bread
salt leavened.
Bread, the good one, is not a novelty in restaurants of a certain level, but now - the New York Times discovered - it has
become a menu item
like an appetizer, main course or dessert.
Like at Hav & Mar, Marcus Samuelsson's restaurant in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood that lists offerings ranging from whey
and teff flour biscuits to sweet cornbread under the heading "Our Breads",
all at a cost of 19 dollars, while at Nura, in the trendy area of Greenpoint in Brooklyn, the basket of bread costs 21, but the assortment of sauces with which to make the slipper sweetens the hefty price.
"At first I was afraid that customers would get scared, because they clearly aren't cheap. But complaints are immediately followed by compliments. They tell us it was worth it,"" Sam Short, who takes care of No bread and sweets are produced.The justification of the restaurateurs is that, if it is true that the flour is cheap, the bread requires a lot of work: at Hav & Mar the baker Farheen Jafarey starts work at seven in the morning and is alone six days a week. Sometimes the process takes days,
as for Audrey's Appalachian bread whose preparation begins the night before and continues the next day when 100 to 200 loaves are fermented, degassed, formed, tested and finally put in the oven: each loaf - they explain - is handled by five employees before the basket gets into the hands of the waiter.
The phenomenon is relatively new.
According to Michael Werrell of Audrey
it all started with the boom in homemade bread during the pandemic
: "It was then that, by searching for recipes on the net and exchanging advice,
Americans discovered their passion for good bread".
And if the mania for improvising bakers has been overcome with the end of the lockdowns, the level of collective experiences that no longer make banal loaf of bread accepted as passable has not disappeared.
