Pod Insights Search Engine Where’s the best free restaurant bread in America? About this episode An enterprising reporter goes on a quest to find the restaurant serving the absolute best free bread in this country, and finds it. She returns to Search Engine with her results.
Read Caity Weaver’s story. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/best-free-restaurant-bread-america/686582/
Support the show! https://searchengine.supercast.com/
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:58 PJ Vogt? Hello. Quick note before we start the show. Search Engine exists because a small but mighty portion of our listeners actually pay to keep us running. They subscribe to our premium tier, which is called Incognito Mode. It's $7 a month, or $50 for the full year. Those listeners get ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and discounts on our merch. But really, the thing that they do is they make this show work. Right now, we are in production planning for our next season, trying to figure out the size of the big swings we can take, the amount of episodes we can do. If our show has kept you company on some long commutes, or given you something to talk about at the dinner table, and if you're in a position to do it, we'd really appreciate your support.
1:43 PJ Vogt? It is a total pleasure to make this show for you. If you're interested, you can sign up at searchengine.show. Incognito Mode, searchengine.show, 50 bucks a year. I feel like I'm doing an ad for us. Okay, this week's episode, starting now.
2:23 PJ Vogt? Who are you? Can you identify yourself?
2:25 Speaker 01 I'm Katie Weaver, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
2:27 PJ Vogt? And what kinds of stories do you normally report? How do you characterize your work for people that are not familiar with it?
2:33 Speaker 01 Oh, my god. I still don't have a great answer to this question. Sometimes when you tell people you're a writer, or I don't even say journalist, although maybe technically, they like, thank you for the good work that you do. And I always have to say, oh, I don't do that kind of stuff. So I don't do anything important. I get to do fun stories about whatever.
2:53 PJ Vogt? This is a ruse. Katie doesn't actually do fun stories about whatever. She pretends to. A normal Katie Weaver story starts with something that feels defiantly superficial, a profile of Kim Kardashian, or an investigation into the question, what is glitter made out of? And then unspools and becomes something else, while insisting the whole time that it's not. The glitter question, for instance, led her to an industrial glitter manufacturer in New Jersey who adamantly refuses to say who their biggest buyer is, leading Katie into a 3,000-word paranoid industrial mystery that reads like a thriller. I won't ruin the ending, but that's a Katie Weaver story. Recently, Katie started wondering about something that feels typically Katie Weaver-esque,
3:38 PJ Vogt? a question that was weirdly both large and small.
3:41 Speaker 01 This is a question that I have been obsessed with for years. What is the best free restaurant bread in America?
3:48 PJ Vogt? The best free restaurant bread in America? Why? Why did you want for years the answer to this question?
3:54 Speaker 01 Because I have a very simple mind. And so I would eat free restaurant bread. And if it was particularly good, I would think, is this the best free restaurant bread in America? It was kind of inspired by, well, actually, it was directly inspired by a restaurant in Atlanta called Bones that I went to a few times with my husband, who's from Atlanta. And this restaurant had a particularly good free bread. I really, really, really loved the beautiful, like, gold. It was just a perfect bread. It was like, when you think of bread, this is what you think of, to me. It didn't really have anything in it. It wasn't trying to do anything crazy. It was just happy to be perfect bread. And when I would eat it, I would think, Is this the best free bread?
4:39 Speaker 01 This really might be the best free bread. And I was kind of starting to convince myself that it was. But then, in the back of my mind, I was like, what if it's not the best free bread? As good as this is, what if there's another bread that is also free? That is even better?
4:52 PJ Vogt? But why is it important? Like, I, I'm, I-
4:55 Speaker 01 Do you use? Why is it hard for you to understand why someone would want the best free restaurant bread in America? Does that sound like something you would not want?
5:03 PJ Vogt? I, I understand. I just want to make sure that some listener who doesn't immediately understand would understand. I mean, I know the feeling of, I've had a couple of experiences, not of free bread, but where I'm at a place and I'm like, this might be the best version of this thing that exists on Earth right now.
5:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:21 PJ Vogt? And that's exciting.
5:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:23 PJ Vogt? And I've also had the feeling of, I would like to know if that was true. And then immediately I thought, but I can't know if it's true. And then I thought, and that's okay.
5:32 Speaker 01 You're a quitter, you gave up. What if, what if you could find out if it was true?
5:38 PJ Vogt? So Katie, not a quitter, fell deep into finding the answer to her maybe impossible question. She began to research, in fact, the entire history of free bread at restaurants as a human tradition, which then led her to the entire prehistory of bread itself as a meal that people eat. Here's what she learned. She learned that for much of the time human beings have been on Earth, some form of bread has been our most commonly eaten meal. Unleavened bread for most of that time, but bread. For most of human history, people did not pay money for that bread, but only because for most of human history, money did not yet exist. Not because the bread itself was free.
6:17 PJ Vogt? Taverns first appear around 2000 B.C. in Mesopotamia and continue as late as the 19th century in America. A tavern is a place where you can eat a meal someone else has made for you, for money, but you don't get to choose the meal. You just pay for the one fixed meal they offer, which often was something like beer and bread. Bread you were paying for. Free bread cannot exist until restaurants do. And Katie says that restaurants are actually a pretty modern phenomenon.
6:46 Speaker 01 So restaurants where you can pick your own food and then they bring it and you pay just per item are really fairly new concepts. The one that is generally regarded as being like the first restaurant in the United States is Delmonico's here in New York City. And that began operating in the 1830s.
7:05 PJ Vogt? That's how recent?
7:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, isn't that crazy?
7:07 PJ Vogt? That is crazy.
7:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, it seems like a good idea, but people just weren't doing it this way before.
7:11 PJ Vogt? And so they're the first people, we think, who were like, what if people could choose? And then you could charge them different amounts of money?
7:17 Speaker 01 Well, they, I think, described this as like a French experience. So they were maybe the people who popularized it in the US, we should say.
7:25 PJ Vogt? And when they started, do they offer free bread?
7:28 Speaker 01 So it's a little bit hard to tell. It seems like yes. But starting, you know, from back then through now, people just don't put free bread on their menu. It doesn't say, don't worry, you're gonna get bread. So even though you can sometimes find menus from very, very old restaurants, it won't say that there's free bread because they just don't advertise it.
7:48 PJ Vogt? You know that feeling you sometimes get where you're like trying to understand something that happened in long ago history? And you can see that there was like, you can see there's something the text isn't mentioning. And there's almost like a profound sadness of like trying to squint at the past and not quite seeing it. It's funny to me that restaurant bread is like one of those things.
8:04 Speaker 01 You're right, it's heartbreaking to think about. You're right.
8:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. Well, so I found what I think is probably the first restaurant review in the United States. It was published in the New York Times, which is, I mean, it's really funny to read because it's very kind of meta. It opens with the writer explaining that his boss gave him this crazy assignment, like, go out and eat and report what people are eating. And he has to sort of explain to the reader that he's doing this because like it's a totally novel premise. He's just like, okay, now what you're gonna read is me going to restaurants and talking about what I find there. And he mentions bread at different places. And he doesn't say that you're charged for the bread or da, da, da. So it's, you can kind of infer from how he phrased it that it's just being handed out.
8:52 PJ Vogt? Okay, so, okay, so we think that this, I'm just trying to trace where we're coming from. So we, we think that free bread in restaurants exists because before there were restaurants, there were taverns. Bread would have been a big part of the meal because bread was relatively cheap. Once restaurants become a thing, bread stays on probably because people are used to it, because it's a cheap way for the restaurant to kind of like signal hospitality.
9:16 Speaker 01 Yes.
9:16 PJ Vogt? And because people are going to complain in some cases if they don't get it.
9:19 Speaker 01 Yes, as a marker of hospitality. I think that's a good way to put it. And also, people were always used to eating bread. I asked a historian who I interviewed for the article, you know, where did free restaurant bread come from? And he said that it's the opposite of what you asked. It's always been here and it's only recently that it's kind of disappearing. And a lot of restaurants now charge you for bread.
9:38 PJ Vogt? I find that disgusting.
9:38 Speaker 01 I hate it. No, it could be the absolute best bread in the world. It will not taste as good to me. If I have to pay $1 for it, I'll say, okay. I would rather have a less good bread for free. That would make me happier.
9:58 PJ Vogt? But of course, what would make Katie happiest is knowing that she was eating the best free bread in America, a country of between 750,000 and 1 million restaurants. After a short break, the experiment, the methodology, the investigation, the results. It's after these ads.
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11:45 PJ Vogt? Welcome back to the show. So I want to get into your methodology and your results.
11:50 Speaker 01 Okay.
11:51 PJ Vogt? How do you even set out to understand a question like this? Because it's not like you're not a magazine writer in the 1990s. You're not going to go to every single restaurant in America.
12:01 PJ Vogt? So what do you do today? Like, what's step one?
12:03 Speaker 01 Okay, step one was I just decided to ask every single person I could think of, everyone I ran into, like everyone I know, what's the best free restaurant bread in America? And I started tracking all their responses.
12:13 PJ Vogt? Tracking how?
12:14 Speaker 01 I made a little spreadsheet for myself. And I would just put, you know, the restaurant location, who told me this? And sometimes it was, you know, someone I knew. And sometimes it was like cousin's friend. And then I would tally the number of votes. And also, if they gave notes, if they described the bread in any way, I would put that down. So, you know, if they said it was really pillowy, or if they, some, I remember one woman remembered the color napkin that the basket is served with. It was with a black napkin. And that was like, it really stood out in her mind. So I ended up amassing several hundred responses this way. I also should say, The Atlantic, I think, tweeted it out and put the link a couple of times in one of our email newsletters.
12:58 Speaker 01 So I got some responses that way. But a lot of it was really just me directly asking strangers, like if I was in an elevator with someone, I was going to ask them, what's the best free restaurant bread in America?
13:09 PJ Vogt? Here's what Katie learned from her initial research. Chain restaurants were statistically overrepresented, not because they necessarily had the best free bread, but because they're everywhere. Katie made a mental note to find a way to adjust for that distortion in the data later. She learned that people listed both fancy restaurants, which they'd apologize for, and unfancy restaurants, which they would not apologize for, and that many people's memories of great free bread clustered in their childhoods at restaurants their parents had taken them to. Katie's dad was still alive during her survey. And when she asked him about his favorite free bread, his answer surprised her.
13:47 Speaker 01 So his answer was bread that he was served in the 1960s at the Four Seasons in Manhattan. And I didn't even know my dad had ever been there.
13:56 PJ Vogt? Very fancy place.
13:57 Speaker 01 Super fancy place. My dad was not a fancy guy.
14:02 Speaker 01 So yeah, that was how I found out that he had even gone to this restaurant, was that he remembered the bread.
14:06 PJ Vogt? And Why was it the Four Seasons?
14:09 Speaker 01 He was at the Four Seasons because he was visiting his dad, who he did not grow up with. His dad was pretty much out of his life. He's some few times over the course of his life, I'm gonna say. And he and my uncle had gone to New York to visit him. And my dad said that my grandfather, who died before I was born, liked to show off. And so he took his sons, and I think my dad was a teenager, to the Four Seasons for lunch. And my dad remembered that the bread was warm.
14:37 PJ Vogt? So it was like an emotionally complicated experience, but he remembers the bread being very good?
14:41 Speaker 01 When I said, what's the best restaurant bread? He said, the only one that I can really remember, which also surprised me because I thought that any member of my immediate family would be like me. It was like, oh, you know, it's this restaurant.
14:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was the one that just for some reason like really stuck in his mind as being the best.
14:58 PJ Vogt? And were you seeing generally across your data? Like, I understand that it's not like census level perfect data.
15:04 Speaker 01 Almost.
15:05 PJ Vogt? And you're trying to lasso a cloud. Like, I think it's okay. But one population you attended to survey were celebrities?
15:13 Speaker 01 Yes.
15:14 PJ Vogt? First of all, why?
15:16 Speaker 01 Okay, I had a real reason for this because I thought, who has access to all the best restaurants in the world? Celebrities.
15:23 PJ Vogt? That's true.
15:24 Speaker 01 They can go anywhere and, you know, they can, they don't mind paying a lot for a meal. But, you know, many celebrities did not grow up wealthy. So I'm thinking, if I became a celebrity, I would still be well aware of where I had eaten bread for free and where it was like something I had to pay for. So I thought, oh, I'll just ask a bunch of America's beloved celebrities. Where's the best restaurant bread in America? And they let me down.
15:48 PJ Vogt? Well, I want to walk through them. So LeBron James, you reached out to LeBron James?
15:53 Speaker 01 Too busy. Focused on the upcoming season. How's it going for you, LeBron? Actually don't know.
16:00 Speaker 01 Hope it paid off. What made me crazy was this, you know, this is a question, even if you don't have an answer the second you hear it, as I do, with a few seconds of thought, I think you can come up with something.
16:13 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
16:13 Speaker 01 It doesn't take a long, I'm not asking you to go through your taxes and give me some, like, you know, just think of your life, the something that happened in your life. Can you tell me about it in a couple of words? They can.
16:27 PJ Vogt? Chris Pratt. Chris Pratt was another person to reach out to.
16:30 Speaker 01 Okay, Chris Pratt's publicist response when it came in, they, I do think they were trying to be polite. It was phrased so rudely. All right, let me get the exact quote. And the publicist responded, "We need to politely hold off as there is an interest." You don't have to tell me that there is an interest. You just say, "We need to politely hold off."
16:50 PJ Vogt? Why do you think you're getting stonewalled on this stuff?
16:52 Speaker 01 I don't know. I, I don't know.
16:54 PJ Vogt? Do you think they felt like maybe this is a practical joke? Like that, that there was some opportunity to belittle them? Or do you think that they thought that maybe when people talk about, even though food is something everyone eats, that there's something revealing or like, like it's hard to answer that question without it feeling like they're trying to signal in one direction or another?
17:10 Speaker 01 I don't know. I don't know if it's that their reps like didn't want to bother them with this. Some people, I, I think some people maybe thought that they could be being made to look foolish, like, you know, they didn't, they wanted to know who else was participating. And it's like, what does it matter? Is it, is your answer so crazy that you're going to make a fool of yourself by giving it? I, I was so surprised by how few celebrities were willing to even entertain this question. I only got one. In the end, I only got one.
17:40 PJ Vogt? Who is that?
17:41 Speaker 01 Mr. Stephen King.
17:42 PJ Vogt? And what did Stephen King have to say about free bread in America?
17:44 Speaker 01 Okay. Stephen King's favorite for bread in America is, quote, "crusty and warm," end quote, and is served at Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse, another steakhouse in Sarasota, Florida. That's all, and you know what? That was all I needed. I didn't even need him to say it's crusty and warm, but I'm glad he did. That's, that's, that's the sign of a wordsmith. He's bringing the bread to life for you. All he had to say was Hyde Park Steakhouse. Great, done.
18:08 PJ Vogt? So he went into your spreadsheet?
18:10 Speaker 01 He went in the spreadsheet.
18:11 PJ Vogt? You also reached out to?
18:12 Speaker 01 He's the only vote for them, but.
18:16 Speaker 01 But I put him there.
18:18 Speaker 01 So he's wrong.
18:19 PJ Vogt? This is why celebrities don't want to play your sick games. They don't want to be humiliated and they lose either door that they pick.
18:26 Speaker 01 I, what could be more relatable than a celebrity revealing their favorite free restaurant bread? They're gonna look like a man of the people, a man who knows what bread is free and what isn't. They're gonna look like someone who eats bread. That's the other thing that made me crazy.
18:39 PJ Vogt? I honestly think they smelled a trap and didn't smell it well enough. I think they should have told their publicist not to write you even now because it's gonna end up in your piece.
18:46 Speaker 01 Well, many of the publicists did not. But the crazy thing to me was, say anything. I'm not gonna know if you're telling the truth. You can pick whatever restaurant you like, just say anything, it doesn't matter. And it'll calm me down.
19:01 Speaker 01 But no, they wouldn't, they refused.
19:03 PJ Vogt? You also reached out to the CEO of Red Lobster. Why and what did you learn?
19:08 Speaker 01 Okay, I love cheddar bay biscuits. I'm an American, we all love cheddar bay biscuits.
19:12 PJ Vogt? Why are they so good?
19:13 Speaker 01 Oh my God. I don't know what the hell they're putting in them, but they are just, they're, they're soft and warm and really salty. They're shiny with butter.
19:24 PJ Vogt? Oh, I've had these biscuits.
19:26 Speaker 01 See?
19:26 PJ Vogt? These biscuits are tremendously good.
19:28 Speaker 01 There we go.
19:29 PJ Vogt? They have like some Domino's pizza DNA in them somehow, like they give me like the, the feeling I like from Domino's. Like the breadsticks there, like there's something really greasy about them.
19:38 Speaker 01 Yes. Oh, God, yes. Yeah, yeah.
19:40 PJ Vogt? In a positive way, yes.
19:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
19:44 PJ Vogt? Wait, can you continue to describe these biscuits though?
19:46 Speaker 01 Okay, so they are, what's this size?
19:51 PJ Vogt? Hockey puck?
19:52 Speaker 01 I don't really know how big anything is.
19:54 PJ Vogt? Apple?
19:54 Speaker 01 Um, no, smaller than an apple. I'm looking at my fist and thinking of things that are smaller than it.
20:00 PJ Vogt? Egg?
20:00 Speaker 01 My fist years ago as a child is probably the size of these biscuits. Maybe like a, like a kiwi and a half.
20:08 PJ Vogt? Okay. Flaky, buttery, greasy.
20:11 Speaker 01 I don't know if they're even flaky. Like I couldn't, the, the texture of them, you, you're never gonna eat anything else that has this texture, this taste. They are warm, salty, buttery.
20:24 Speaker 01 Oh, I think they have garlic in them. And they will keep them coming. They'll keep them coming.
20:29 PJ Vogt? And they're free.
20:29 Speaker 01 And they're free. They're absolutely free.
20:32 PJ Vogt? Free biscuits feels like a luxury.
20:34 Speaker 01 Yes.
20:34 PJ Vogt? And so, OK, so why, but then why, like, they were just on your list, probably.
20:39 Speaker 01 They were on my, they, you know, a lot of people named them. They are my personal favorite of the chain breads. And they are also something, even people who kind of were struggling to come up with the favorite free bread would often think of Red Lobster. It was a bread that is distinct in many people's minds. And maybe they would say, oh, you know, Red Lobster. But they, they were trying to come up with something, maybe that wasn't a chain or that they like more.
21:05 PJ Vogt? But this was their real answer.
21:06 Speaker 01 But it was, maybe not even their real answer, but it was just what they could think of. It was like their brain is kind of frantically scanning for files labeled bread. And Red Lobster is one of the only ones they can pull.
21:16 PJ Vogt? So what did you want to know from their CEO?
21:19 Speaker 01 Anything at all. I want to know, what are you putting in these cracked out biscuits that is making them so good? I, I would be very curious to know. They seem like they must be of tremendous importance to Red Lobster. Because definitely for myself and for many people who I spoke to, the biscuits are truly why you go to Red Lobster. The food at Red Lobster is whatever. But you know that you can have as many of those biscuits as you want while you're there. So it's almost like Red Lobster is a Cheddar Bay Biscuits restaurant. And then also include, like, they have seafood options.
21:50 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
21:51 Speaker 01 And the, the best thing at the restaurant is this thing that it's giving away for free. That's very interesting to me. It's like a restaurant that is very, very strongly associated with bread in the American consciousness in 2026. Another one that came up, but not because people were voting for it a lot, was Olive Garden. People would say, oh, is everyone saying Olive Garden? Olive Garden actually performed kind of horrifically in my poll.
22:20 PJ Vogt? I think that's fair.
22:20 Speaker 01 People sort of associate it with bread, but they, and maybe they even like the breadsticks. But even among chains, Olive Garden was, was not one of the top ones.
22:30 PJ Vogt? Wait, but so what happened when you reached out to the Red Lobster CEO?
22:33 Speaker 01 So I was going through a kind of third party PR firm that Red Lobster works with. And I, I had visions of myself like going down to Red Lobster HQ, going in the test kitchen. Maybe he and I are learning to bake the Cheddar Bay biscuits. I don't know. And I'll never find out. Because they would not let me get close to this man. They they didn't refuse to participate. They offered me, you know, I could talk to like a kind of random VP of whatever. They were not as excited about the bread story as I was.
23:04 PJ Vogt? I feel like a surprising amount of people in your reporting treated you like a journalist out for blood.
23:11 Speaker 01 Yes.
23:11 PJ Vogt? And I'm not totally sure why.
23:15 Speaker 01 The only person who saw me as a human was Stephen King.
23:18 PJ Vogt? Or he just talks to monsters.
23:23 Speaker 01 Damn, good. Fair enough.
23:26 PJ Vogt? But did you strike them from your list or did they stay on?
23:28 Speaker 01 Oh, no, I couldn't strike them from my list. You know, I'm tracking the data. So if they had had the most votes, I would have said, well, if they had had the most votes through my complicated equation that I eventually developed, then I would have said, OK, they're the best.
23:41 PJ Vogt? OK, so tell me your results.
23:43 Speaker 01 OK.
23:43 PJ Vogt? Who's number three?
23:45 Speaker 01 Number three might be Red Lobster. But it's sort of, it's a little bit hard to say because the equation that I eventually came up with took into account the number of locations and the number of votes.
24:00 PJ Vogt? Because the idea is that some places are going to be overrepresented in a survey because more people have been there.
24:04 Speaker 01 Yes.
24:04 PJ Vogt? Whereas the best bread might be at a place that fewer people have been to.
24:08 Speaker 01 Yes.
24:08 PJ Vogt? So you came up with some Haiti math to try to?
24:11 Speaker 01 Exactly, yes. And I I I looped in a statistician, a professor emeritus of statistics at the University of Cambridge to ask him, hey, I've collected all this data haphazardly. Can you make it into a magazine article for me?
24:27 PJ Vogt? So he helps you refine it?
24:28 Speaker 01 Uh, no, he did not. But he did kind of explain the conundrum very well. He said, if a restaurant had 10 customers and eight thought that it had the best bread, this would seem more impressive than if another restaurant had 100 customers and 10 thought it had the best bread.
24:44 PJ Vogt? So the thing you're trying to say, what percentage of the people walk out of this place thinking it's the best bread in the world?
24:48 Speaker 01 Exactly.
24:48 PJ Vogt? Not how many customers they have.
24:49 Speaker 01 Exactly, yes. So so that's why it's a little bit hard to get to number three because I think Red Lobster maybe had the third most votes overall numerically.
24:58 PJ Vogt? But that has as much to do with the denominator of people who have gone as the numerator of people who think it's awesome.
25:02 Speaker 01 Yes, so I really can only tell you kind of. I could tell you the chain restaurant that had the most votes. So this overall, on paper, is gonna look like the best free restaurant bread in America because it has the most votes. So this is just raw votes. Cheesecake Factory.
25:15 PJ Vogt? Cheesecake Factory?
25:16 Speaker 01 Cheesecake Factory. People love that bread. They love that brown bread. Have you had it?
25:20 PJ Vogt? I have, but it, my memories of Cheesecake Factory are the cheesecakes, not the bread.
25:24 Speaker 01 Okay.
25:24 PJ Vogt? The bread's really good.
25:26 Speaker 01 That's what people tell me. I, it was not my favorite free restaurant bread.
25:31 PJ Vogt? And it's brown bread?
25:32 Speaker 01 It's brown bread.
25:33 PJ Vogt? Like what they eat in like Middle Earth or whatever?
25:35 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yes. We want breads that look like they involve more labor, they're different in some way. So this is like a dark brown bread. It looks healthy. Turns out it's not that healthy. Um, sticks out in people's mind because it's like, oh, this is a shade of bread I'm not seeing all the time.
25:51 PJ Vogt? Did you try it?
25:52 Speaker 01 Of course. Uh, yes, I tried it and I thought it was perfectly fine. Some people think that it has chocolate in it, partly because of the color and also because they find that it tastes a little bit sweet. I really love sweets. I love sweet things. This bread to me was not sweet. It was sweet in the way that, you know, you get like a basil, like sorbet for dessert at a restaurant that does not have real desserts.
26:18 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
26:18 Speaker 01 For some people, that's gonna be sweet enough. For me, uh-uh, no. So I didn't consider this bread sweet. Um, but they, you know, a lot of people named it. And specifically, the brown bread. So actually Cheesecake Factory brings out a brown bread and a white kind of sourdough loaf. But people, most people named the brown bread specifically. They would say Cheesecake Factory Brown Bread.
26:49 PJ Vogt? Cheesecake Factory's Brown Bread, the highest ranking chain restaurant in Katie Weaver's survey. But what was the very best free bread in a non-chain restaurant? Where was that bread to be found? Katie Weaver has the answer. She's gonna share it with us after these ads.
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28:48 PJ Vogt? Welcome back to the show. So, the answer to the question we'd been hunting for this week. The winner of Katie Weaver's intensely-reported American survey of free bread?
28:57 Speaker 01 I think there were ultimately two restaurants in the top 10 that were not chains. And they were the only two in the top 10, I believe, that were not chains. And it turns out that they serve the exact same bread because they're owned by the same person, even though they're different restaurants.
29:11 PJ Vogt? So they're different restaurants, but same bread?
29:13 Speaker 01 Two different locations, same bread. One in Philly, one in DC.
29:16 PJ Vogt? And what are the restaurants?
29:17 Speaker 01 The restaurants are Le Diplomat in DC and Park in Philly.
29:21 PJ Vogt? And tell me about the restaurants and tell me about the brand.
29:23 Speaker 01 So the restaurants are owned by Steven Starr.
29:26 PJ Vogt? Oh, very famous Philadelphia restaurateur.
29:29 Speaker 01 And I lived in Philadelphia for years and I walked by Park many times and I never went inside because I assumed it was too expensive. But actually, it's funny, a college friend of mine who still lives in Philly was the first vote for Park. And I was like, oh, I'm glad there's a Philly restaurant nominated. And then like, people kept voting for Park. Park ended up with, of the two restaurants, even though they serve the same bread, Park had slightly more votes.
29:47 PJ Vogt? It also feels like it's meaningful that people were identifying this as the best bread appearing in two different places. Like, that feels like a pretty strong signal.
29:54 Speaker 01 Yes, totally. And they were, this was a bread that people tended to give a little bit more information about. They would describe the bread to me in detail. They would, not always accurately.
30:06 PJ Vogt? What types of things would they say about this three bread?
30:08 Speaker 01 So, the bread has cranberries in it and some people would name that. Some people would say it had cherries in it. You know, they're just picking up that it has like some kind of reddish fruit. They, some people were, seemed kind of ashamed to be naming this bread. They were like, it's an obvious one, but I have to say it. They, you know, noted the temperature, it arrives warm, that they serve it with the, you know, nice soft butter, duh, duh, duh. It was just a bread that, kind of similarly to the Red Lobster cheddar bay biscuits, this is a bread that sticks in people's mind.
30:40 PJ Vogt? And so, did you try the bread?
30:42 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
30:43 PJ Vogt? And?
30:44 Speaker 01 I loved it. It was great. It was great.
30:47 PJ Vogt? The best?
30:48 Speaker 01 I think it might be. Might, you know, I feel like this many people can't be wrong.
30:52 PJ Vogt? Many people are wrong in many ways.
30:54 Speaker 01 I know, but I feel like they can't be. I'm not a scientist.
30:58 PJ Vogt? But what was your experience of it? You ate it. Your subjective experience.
31:02 Speaker 01 So, it reminded me of the scene in Willy Wonka where they try everlasting gobstoppers. And Willy Wonka explains that it's a great candy for children with very little pocket money because it kind of gives you like a full, wait, is that the everlasting gobstopper?
31:18 PJ Vogt? I think so. He eats that candy where it's like a full meal.
31:22 Speaker 01 It's a full meal, yes.
31:23 PJ Vogt? And it like evolves as you're eating it. Like, you feel like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
31:25 Speaker 01 And you get like soup and you're moved through the mains, and then you end in dessert. And it sort of felt like that because it has this kind of nice, warm, rich, buttery, savory, nutty component with the walnuts. But then you also get the cranberry. So, it's like you have the savory, you have the sweet. It is a thick, hearty bread. It really felt like a meal by itself. Like, I could just have this and a glass of water and be good to go.
31:53 PJ Vogt? Like, this is what people would have happily eaten 20,000 years ago.
31:56 Speaker 01 Except for... Oh, my God. They would have been over the moon to eat something this good. I'm sure they weren't eating bread this good. But, yes, it's like bread, you know, it just felt like this could sustain my life. I could live off this bread.
32:08 PJ Vogt? Did you feel, obviously, this is a hard question to answer, but like, eating it, did you feel either like certainty or at least satisfied that you had found the thing you were looking for?
32:20 Speaker 01 I was like, OK, this bread is really pretty freaking good. Everyone's right. Yeah, God, if I hadn't liked it, I don't, I guess we would have scrapped the story months in. It was a relief to find the bread really delicious. But if I hadn't liked it, you know, like the Cheesecake Factory bread, I would say I was ultimately slightly disappointed by because so many people loved that. But they disproportionately loved this other bread. And I think that the people who loved this bread were right. I think it's really good. I mean, anyone else is welcome to do a more thorough study than I have done. I think you're gonna have trouble getting funding for such a study.
33:00 Speaker 01 I have probably pushed to like the extreme outer limits of what anyone will tolerate in terms of time and money spent investigating this.
33:10 PJ Vogt? But you want people who have theories to continue to email you forever for the rest of your career?
33:14 Speaker 01 Honestly, yes.
33:15 PJ Vogt? Really?
33:16 Speaker 01 Why not? I mean, if you really think you know the best one, I'll put it on my list to like my personal list of, oh, if I'm ever in, you know, St. Louis, I have to try this bread and see if it's better than the bread that I named the best.
33:27 PJ Vogt? So you both found it and you feel like you're still looking?
33:30 Speaker 01 I guess so. I'm pretty confident I found it.
33:33 PJ Vogt? And what did you learn from eating the best free restaurant bread in America?
33:36 Speaker 01 That I love the best free restaurant bread in America.
33:41 Speaker 01 That I love free bread.
33:42 PJ Vogt? OK, the names of the restaurants in Philly and DC are?
33:45 Speaker 01 Are Parc, P-A-R-C, it's French, in Philly. Actually, they're both French, I guess, and Le Diplomat in DC.
33:53 PJ Vogt? There's this thing, you mentioned this story, which I didn't totally like know what it meant to you. You mentioned this like almost offhandedly where you say, you talk about your dad getting sick. You talk about visiting him in Santa Fe. And you describe how he'd ordered the Red Lobster Ultimate Feast, which includes the biscuits, but that he didn't finish his bread, that he said it tasted like sawdust. What did that story mean to you? Why did you mention it in the course of this reporting?
34:19 Speaker 01 Um, so you know, it's funny, when my dad named the Four Seasons, I had actually been expecting him to say Ralaphor because I knew he loved that bread. Uh, and so I was surprised that he hadn't named it. And I guess I included it because maybe it was to show that I do also have like a real life where things happen to me. Uh, and it's not just like, I create the adventure and try and free bread like endlessly on someone else's dime. Like there, I was also like living a real life while I was reporting this story.
34:53 PJ Vogt? Here's what confused me about the piece that I really loved and what it confused me about your reporting, which I really loved. I mean, the thing that like a listener is not going to get from this interview is like the piece is like, it's written in such an over the top beautiful way. Like there's these highly evocative sentences about the bread in different restaurants and it's hyper focusing on this small pleasure that can totally go unnoticed in your life. And then there's several times you mention your dad, you mention what bread meant to him in the context of this like complicated relationship with his dad. You mention briefly on this like otherwise very like silly quest, this experience of being with him near the time when he was dying. And then Park, which is like the restaurant that ends up being the best one.
35:38 PJ Vogt? He shows up there too, where you say like, he was from Philadelphia. It was the first time going to a city where he didn't know about it because he died. And it's just weird because it's like, you have this person who's trying to answer like the smallest question in the world. You're trying to marshal everyone's like focus and attention on this like tiny pleasure in the world that could go easily unnoticed. And then there's these just like background references to the fact that the person who's taking you on this adventure is also grieving. And I have like the intuition that these things are connected, but I don't totally understand. What do you think? Am I crazy? Or are these things connected to you?
36:13 Speaker 01 No, no, no. I think they are connected. Uh, well, part of it is also that my dad was someone who
36:20 Speaker 01 It's so funny. He would like describe himself as a gourmand, but had no money and in many ways, no one lived worse than this man. Like, he grew up really, really poor in South Philly and had a lot of, as, you know, much later in life, had a lot of health problems and physical problems that he just, you know, he couldn't really get around very well. So his world became kind of very limited. But he still would not only think of himself, but tell people like when they met him, he's like, well, I'm a gourmand. And it's like, are you? Because you're just like sitting in this room eating like McDonald's. But he's definitely someone who...
37:05 Speaker 01 It's funny, you know, like you could say he enjoyed the little things in life, but he also enjoyed like very fancy things in life. And he and my mom were kind of opposites in the sense that when they would go to a restaurant and look at the menu, my mom would invariably order whatever's the cheapest thing. And he would very often order the most expensive thing. So I don't know, I guess I really associate both of my parents with just the experience of being at restaurants and trying to figure out, are you getting your money's worth? And one way to ensure that you are is if the thing you're getting for free is really good. You know, good free bread, that's, you got to build that into the, you know, mental price of the meal. So I don't know, maybe that's one of the reasons why I worked him in. It's also just the fact that it was happening at the same time.
37:49 Speaker 01 So truly, I was, you know, like flying around to these different places. And he died before I went and tried the bread that I ultimately named the best. He knew I was working on the story. He was a big Atlantic fan. And I am bummed that he didn't get to see my cover story. He would have been really, really excited about that. And actually, since I took this job, is... When I was interviewing, I mentioned that my dad really liked it. And the woman I was interviewing with, who was our executive editor, said, "Oh, what's that? They're sending tote bags." And actually, that is sort of like free bread to me. The fact that she just lightly, instantly, you know, she didn't know if I was going
38:31 Speaker 01 to take the job or not, but she's throwing out free tote bags just for the heck of it. And I was like, "That's a classy move." I love this place. So it really, it gave me early on, like, one of my first really good impressions of The Atlantic. I was like, "They're going to send my father tote bags, even though they don't know if I'm going to take this job?" And it's like, "They're going to give me incredible bread, even though they don't really know, they don't know what I'm going to order, they don't know if I'm going to order. I might have this bread and leave." I guess I'm just easily won over by very small token acts of kindness.
39:11 PJ Vogt? Small token acts of kindness. Maybe that's what this is. Things people give you, even if they're comically small, without the expectation they'll get something back. Fortune cookies and bank lollipops. Things most of us barely notice, but which one American writer completely obsesses over. Our country's foremost free-bread investigative journalist, Katie Weaver. Katie, thank you.
39:34 Speaker 01 Thank you.
39:36 PJ Vogt? You can find Katie's article and all of her work these days over at The Atlantic. Also, an important correction about fictional candy. While Willy Wonka's everlasting gobstopper is good for kids without much pocket money, because it never gets smaller and changes colors and flavors, the candy that provides the sensation of a full meal is the three-course dinner chewing gum. Our apologies to Mr. Wonka.
40:34 PJ Vogt? That's our show this week. If you're looking for a way to help our show in a very minor way, something that we always appreciate, if you have time, is to head over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. Our parents read these reviews. It makes them happy. And it algorithmically helps people find the show. Please don't jump on to leave a mean review, which people sometimes do when I ask them to leave reviews. Nice reviews only. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our associate producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. This episode was fact-checked by Madeline LePlante-Doubey. Our executive
41:16 PJ Vogt? producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey: Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Shutt. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, please email us, [email protected] , subject line, "Advertising." If you'd like to support our show as a listener, if you'd like ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and bonus episodes, please consider signing up for incognito mode, search engine dot show. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.
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