I had dinner last week in an expensive restaurant.   As I read the menu my eye was drawn to a dessert: PISTACHIO IN OLIVES cake is made with the oil from castelvetrano olives, layered with pistachio cream, sorbet is the juice and flesh of cara cara oranges, crispy pomegranate, kumquats preserved in blood orange juice […]

One of my treasured neighborhood advisors keeps telling me to “advertise” our commitment to ingredients grown on local farms.  We are making pickles with local cucumbers and buying blueberries and beets from small farms.  Indeed, we are buying whatever we can get from farms around us.  Our doors are open to them when at the […]

A decade or so ago, I visited Sicily. Eager to avoid eating like a tourist, I asked during my first afternoon over coffee in a little Palermo café where I could find a real Sicilian dinner. A few hours later I was walking around the Teatro Massimo to a restaurant whose name I now forget. It […]

I didn’t get as many ideas from Steve Jenkins as I had hoped. Zanne Stewart, the former food editor of Gourmet Magazine and one of my favorite people, wrote, “ I’ll be eager to learn what Steve has to say. He’s one of my favorites and, possibly, the most entertaining of all…”  Me too. We […]

This, my first essay in some time, is an open letter to Steve Jenkins. You may not know his name but food people do as he really invented artisan cheese in America.  Well, that is to say he was the first person I know about who began to import really good cheeses from Europe and market […]

            We are now into our second week; and I find that during the first week, even though I was about as gracious as I am capable of being, I thanked customers far less than they thanked me:             “Thank you for doing this.”             “Welcome back to the neighborhood.” […]

The question I have been asked most frequently over the last months is, as I have said here, “When will you open?” I can answer that now: Today at 7 am. We are open and crowded and didn’t make nearly enough bagels, English muffins, and morning pastry. The second question I have been asked over […]

On Friday, we hung our photographs and the marble countertops and tables were installed.  Bruce Flippens of the D.C. Health Department returned to see whether we had done what he asked us to do and he then he approved our opening. And so we will open on Tuesday morning. This bakery is beautiful.  It’s like […]

We didn’t pass our health inspection yesterday and it was a great experience. That dreaded inspection is the penultimate step toward opening and I had been led to believe that it would be a horrible experience.  Indeed, I didn’t sleep much the night before – I mean it. But it was not a horrible experience.  […]

I feel a certain sad symmetry this morning as I wait for our health department inspection to be conducted in a few hours – the final requirement we must fulfill before we open Bread Furst. Dahmane Benarbane, the owner of Baguette Republic, a wholesale bakery in Chantilly, called me yesterday to tell me that the […]