Tom Sietsema’s spring dining guide, an annual restaurant listing of the Washington Post, appeared when some of us at Bread Furst were still in Chicago for the awards of the James Beard Foundation. Those honors are conferred in the first weekend of May each year in an extravaganza, a weekend of parties and restaurant dinners followed […]

Eating locally and seasonally is important to me.   I believe it is good for the environment but I also think it’s more fun to eat seasonally than to eat un-seasonally. I know that lots of people like to eat corn on the cob in December. Why not? If they like it there it is – […]

I have been thinking about the jambon beurre at Mirabelle, the wonderful looking new restaurant near Lafayette Square where the Christian Science church used to be. Frank Ruta is a friend whose meticulous food I love. You may recall he cooked dinners at Bread Furst after his restaurant Palena closed and before he went to […]

             I don’t write these little essays as advertisements for Bread Furst. I rarely beat the drums in this blog for our breads or tell you about new foods on the shelves. But this time I can’t resist telling about our new Cookie Roberts. When I was young and in college […]

Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.                                          Franklin Roosevelt, 1938   We used to call ourselves a nation of immigrants.   We still are that […]

I have been reading on the Cleveland Park neighborhood listserv an interesting discussion. It began this time with the news that 7-Eleven has rented the space that used to be Dino’s Restaurant, Connecticut Avenue and Ordway Street, and will now open a store one block from the store it closed several years ago. I say […]

We talk a lot at Bread Furst about ways of increasing the wages we pay to staff. It’s complicated. Bread Furst’s starting wage for sales help is $12 an hour; that is 50 cents higher than the minimum wage in Washington but it’s hardly worth boasting about. We’ll increase our minimum wage again at the […]

You don’t have to know precisely where the shop is because the first thing you see as you turn from Divisidaro onto California Street is the line that’s there at almost any time but, of course, especially thickly on weekends.   The line is out the door and down the sidewalk where people wait very […]

I used to believe that the best quality of life is found in America’s smaller cities. That was before I knew Reading, Pennsylvania I spent much of three years in Reading and after I came to know it very well and to love being there, I had a greater understanding of the impact on smaller […]

My son Philippe and I were eating rib steak with our friend Michel. It was his favorite. Someone came to the table and whispered to him that a tray of already baked puff pastry had been dropped on the floor. He left us and went into the kitchen of Central, his restaurant. After perhaps 20 […]