Mark sells The Breadline and start consulting with other bakeries like Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery, Zack Golper's Bien Cuit. He develops the bread program for the Napa Valley campus of the Culinary Institute of America.

2005

In 1997 he opens The BreadLine, a restaurant a block from The White House serving traditional bread-based street foods that won him nominations from the James Beard Foundation as best chef in the Mid-Atlantic, ratings as a top restaurant in America by Zagat, and selection as one of the Washington Post’s favorite spots.

1997

Mark opened Marvelous Market in July 1990, the first bakery in Washington to offer traditional European breads. The concept and quality of his breads were so novel to the city that customers stood in lines that extended down the street to buy the two loaves to which they were limited. By October, the bakery is a retail sensation until Mark loses it to a too quick expansion in 1994.

1990

Mark begins writing for the Washington Post. There, reporting on what other people have done, he feels all the time as if he has stopped living his own life. He decides on his 50th birthday in 1988 that he is going to reinvent his career. On the block of Connecticut Avenue where his sister had put her bookstore, Politics and Prose, there was a vacant store. He decides to open a bread bakery. Although he did not know how to bake bread, he thought that having been a home baker all his life, he could learn. That was a foolish conclusion, but he did set about learning how to bake bread and open a bakery.  

1986

After a career spent in and around government, Mark finds himself managing a large company that makes copper tubing. Although that career lasts only four years, he discovers for the first time how rewarding it is to make a product, something that can be held in one’s hands, something people can use.

1982

Bread Furst

The History of

Everyday, many customers come to experience Bread Furst's award-winning food, inviting atmosphere, and joyful employees.

 Filling a void in Washington D.C. for a neighborhood bakery, he works with Ben Arnold, Robert Dalliah and others and opens Bread Furst. In 2017, he is named by the James Beard Foundation as Outstanding Baker of the United States. Now, Bread Furst is a neighborhood bakery just half a mile from Marvelous Market, by now just a nice memory.

to now

2014

Ben

Scott

Cecile

Scott is the bakery’s general manager and spent 15 years operating his own restaurant in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington.   

Scott Auslander

Cecile's zeal for baking began as a young woman while spending time at her grandparents' bakery in the French Alps. Now she guides our pastry program while teaching a team of young pastry chefs.

Cecile Mouthon

Originally from North Carolina, Ben Arnold found his passion for bread baking at the age of 15 while working in a local pizzeria. In 2013 while still the head baker at Washington’s restaurant Range, Ben began to help develop Bread Furst and created the bakery’s breads.

Ben Arnold

Ben, Cecile and Scott manage the day to day operations of the bakery.

TEAM

Meet the