This morning, I was alerted to the Atlantic’s May cover story, headlined “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America.” The article is a roughly 10,000 word tour-de-force investigation that took me nearly an hour to read. It includes a 555 person straw poll, quotes from experts, and journeys hither and yon—to America’s backwaters and metropolises—all in search of the best slice of free restaurant bread that this great nation can provide.  The article’s author is none other than Caity Weaver, a magazine writer known for her lunatic quests (to bewitch the Super Bowl, to reach the end of TGI Friday’s “Endless Appetizers,” to track down the reclusive Tom Cruise) and for her uproarious, voluminous prose. Her bread story careens between hilarity and tragedy, into an intriguing digression about the public relations industry and through numerous gastronomical descriptions of great literary force. I hate to undercut Weaver’s narrative suspense by relaying her conclusion to you—but I maintain that true art cannot be spoiled, and this article is about the journey not the destination, etc. So you should still read it, despite now knowing that the best free restaurant bread in America, according to Weaver, is the cranberry-walnut loaf at Le Diplomate.  “The dried cranberries add so much sweetness that some people mistake them for cherries,” Weaver rhapsodizes, “but oats and nuts check the suavity before it runs amok.” She adds that the bread—which she tried not at Le Dip, but at its sister restaurant, Parc, in Philadelphia—is “assembled from familiar ingredients, but unusual enough to be memorable” and that the “terrazzo arrangement of nut and berry is beautiful by candlelight; the crumb appears studded with gems.” Stephen Starr, the restaurateur at the helm of Parc and Le Dip, gave Weaver some piquant quotes. Apparently, he wanted to create an array of breads so satisfying that “you didn’t have to spend any money. You could just come in here, order the breadbasket, a glass of wine, and you’re good for the next five, six hours. We just wanted it to be joyful.” But from a financial standpoint, he said, “it was the dumbest move we ever made,” because the free bread “costs so much and people eat so much of it.” Starr told Weaver that he sometimes contemplates charging for the bread, but has always balked in the end. While I do not wish to contribute to the financial ruin of Stephen Starr (just kidding, he owns a restaurant empire, he’s fine), the prospect of encountering excellence was tantalizing—so tantalizing that, this afternoon, I pulled a friend away from her boring law firm job and we headed over to Le Dip with the plan to order the cheapest thing on the lunch menu (a $6.50 slice of cheese) and then feast on the Best Free Restaurant Bread in America (which, the Atlantic informs me, “has an Everlasting Gobstopper–ish ability to harmoniously convey the sensation of eating an entire meal, with dessert, in every bite”). But I apparently did not explain this endeavor very well, because when my friend and I sat down on Le Dip’s capacious outdoor patio in the unseasonable April heat, we realized that she’s allergic to walnuts and left her EpiPen at her desk. Le Dip’s bread basket is uncommonly capacious. Photo by Sylvie McNamara. No matter. My companion’s misfortune simply meant that one hundred percent of our table’s Best Free Restaurant Bread in America would be mine. And when the bread basket was delivered—without much ceremony, in a deep wicker basket lined with a burgundy linen, filled with three varieties of bread—I buttered and bit into the cranberry-walnut slice. It was excellent, as described: crusty, with sweet notes from the cranberries, the buckling crunch of walnuts, rich with French butter, and emanating a slight tartness from the sourdough itself. It tastes like something I would pay for, like something that might bankrupt Stephen Starr by giving so much of it away. And God knows what might happen when word gets out; of the half dozen diners I queried at Le Dip, not a soul knew that they’d just been served such certifiably superlative bread. They’d not even heard of the Atlantic story. They were all just here for a meal. I did worry, for a moment, about poor Stephen Starr, giving away slice upon slice of this excellent bread. Surely he’s familiar with the cautionary tale of Red Lobster, recently bankrupted by its glorious-yet-misguided “Endless Shrimp.” Now that the Atlantic has blown up Le Dip’s spot, maybe there will be a run on the cranberry-walnut loaf. Maybe Starr will finally have to charge. For a fee, one can be served a curry chicken sandwich between two slices of the Best Free Restaurant Bread in America. Photo by Sylvie McNamara. But the thing is, I actually did pay for the bread. I intended to eat lunch for only $6.50 by ordering a single slice of cheese—and then, upon closer examination of the menu, I realized that you have to order, at minimum, three cheeses (coming to a total of $19.50), and by that point I figured I should just order the $17 curry chicken salad sandwich (served between slices of the Best Free Restaurant Bread in America), plus an iced coffee to cut the heat. My friend got a salad and a Diet Coke. So instead of spending $0 at Le Dip today (as we planned to do before encountering the Atlantic’s definitive piece on free restaurant bread), we actually spent $53.30. Anyway, I’m thinking that the delectable cranberry-walnut bread is unlikely to bankrupt Stephen Starr. It might actually keep him rich.The post Huge Investigation Reveals DC Restaurant Has America’s Best Free Bread first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less