Bread and Butter: The Truest Test of Hospitality

You can tell a lot about a restaurant by their bread and butter. It arrives on the table before anything else has been set before you, the first thing to pass between a restaurant and the person who has just sat down in it, the first thing sent from the kitchen to pass your hungry lips. And in that first glance and first bite, you can read everything: how the kitchen thinks, its skill, its intention, and its generosity. Bread and butter is not a preamble but a position.

Why give it away?

Nobody has put the case more plainly than Fergus Henderson, whose line that "bread is as essential as your knife and fork in the eating process" is a central belief of his iconic restaurant. At St. JOHN bread and butter is free, arriving on your table with the menus, because charging for it would be a little like charging for cutlery: it is not a present, but equipment. In his mind a restaurant that withheld it would be doing something closer to rudeness than to thrift.

At St. JOHN the butter is served unsalted, so that you might season it yourself and express yourself with the salt. Similarly at La Petite Maison the bread comes out with tomatoes, lemons and olive oil and an invitation to build a salad of your own from them, which is a very lovely thing indeed to have happen to you in Mayfair. Baking bread and handing it over with no line on the bill is a decision somebody has to go on making every single service. And these things are not just financial decisions, they are deep philosophical ones about how the guest experiences your intentions, and what you wish to convey.

At The Glenturret Lalique, as Mark Donald explained to the Scotsman, a whole sliced loaf goes out rather than a single piece "so guests don't feel too shy to ask for more", which is hospitality reduced to its purest form, namely the removal of the moment in which somebody has to ask. The generosity of good bread and butter is all the more so because there is no ceremony, no preamble from the floor, nobody explaining the hydration of the starter or the blend of grains in the flour. Something very good simply turns up, unasked, while you get on with your lunch. 

Why bread at all?

There is something undeniably rather odd about eating a loaf of bread before your dinner; certainly it is something one would never do at home. So why is it such a norm in restaurants? At home you can largely control when your food is served, and keep yourself occupied until it is. At a restaurant there is necessarily a stretch of time between the moment you sit down and the moment your dinner arrives. You peruse the menu, wait for the server, order, then wait again for the plates to arrive: in a restaurant you are captive to that wait, with nothing (other than your companion) to distract you. A basket of bread keeps you nicely entertained, softening the irritation of the necessary delay, relaxing guests into the experience as the sharp edge of their hunger is cushioned by the comforting carbs.

Adam Handling, speaking to the World's 50 Best, notes that "people light up when bread and butter arrive at the table; it's comforting, nostalgic and something everyone understands". This is the one course in the meal that asks nothing whatsoever of anybody. There is no decoding to be done, no bravery required, no menu literacy involved, since everyone at the table already knows what to do with it.

For a long time that was all it needed to be, and in recent years it has become a great deal more. From the sourdough mania of lockdown to the specialist bakeries sprouting up like beautiful dough-scented mushrooms in every corner of the city, customers have become far more knowledgeable, and therefore far more demanding, about their bread. Restaurants have upped their game accordingly (or maybe simply because they too are delighted to be swept up in the same enthusiasm). Bread is now a platform for the chefs' skills and imagination, put together hours before service by somebody who knows perfectly well how closely it is going to be read.

When Kudu relocated to Marylebone last year, the fluffy house-made bread with melted butter was the most-talked-about dish in the opening weeks, spoken of with swooning reverence, and a year on it has become such an icon of the menu that a good number of people order it before they have looked at anything else. Served hot and with a luxurious selection of gloriously flavoured butters, this is not a pre-dinner freebie. It is a course proper and, at £16, it is charged accordingly.

Who pays?

There has been a ripple of discontent in recent years that bread and butter is increasingly charged for. It's possible that Kudu's £16 may raise some eyebrows for those who merely read the menu (but it's just bread and melted butter!) , but the reality is not only that this is carefully constructed as a proper starter, it is also expensive to produce. Not just because of the raw materials: it's the beautiful cast-iron skillets in which those particular loaves are cooked and served, and even for a different restaurant's (deceptively) simple offering there will be production time which may well require a whole additional shift: mixing, kneading, rising, shaping, and baking before the ovens are busy with service. Whipping the cultured butter, forming the quenelles. Once you have that context, giving bread and butter away for free becomes even more of an act of generosity.

There is the blunter commercial worry as well, which is that a table filling up on free bread is a table ordering rather less of the food that pays the wages, and so more and more restaurants have decided, not unreasonably, that something made with this much skill ought to be priced like it, and have put it on the menu at £6 alongside the olives. But not everyone is having it. Sat Bains, who bakes his own sourdough and sends it out alongside a treacle bread and a butter made for the restaurant, insists that "bread is a staple of the table" and that "I would never charge for it, even if a guest orders eight baskets". 

One could argue that the price point of Restaurant Sat Bains allows for generosity with the bread, and it's a fair point that tinkering with GPs may cover anything given for free, whatever the nature of your establishment. Andreas Antona of Simpsons, speaking to Sudi Pigott in the Telegraph, agrees with Bains: "as a traditionalist, it makes my blood boil when I see restaurants charging for it", reasoning that "the act of breaking bread has been with us since biblical times". Yes, but in biblical times were restaurant margins quite this squeezed?

What are you reading?

The argument about who charges and who doesn't is a distraction. What you are reading is not cost but generosity. A £6 plate of extraordinary bread served with a butter that somebody cultured in-house is not a meanness at all, it is a kitchen asking you to give their work your attention. If they are able to find a way to put that extraordinary bread on the table without a bill, what a joy that is. But bread given away carelessly is not generous in the slightest, it is merely free, which is a different and considerably cheaper thing.

All of which returns us to the thing you noticed before you had read a word of the menu. Bread and butter is, more often than not, the one part of the meal that you did not choose, put in front of you by people who had already decided how they wanted you to feel in the first ninety seconds of sitting down. And where it is charged for, the chef knows perfectly well that it is still the one thing on the menu you are already an expert on. You have eaten it thousands of times before, at home, at your grandmother's table, at weddings, and you need no instruction whatsoever to decide whether this one is any good. That is why it tells you so much, and why it repays the attention. Everything that follows is cooking. Bread and butter is the welcome.