Earlier this month, the IRS finished collecting 2025 taxes, taking in an estimated $5.2 trillion from businesses and households. That’s a lot of cash.

But Congress is spending $7 trillion a year, pumping out as much fiscal stimulus now as it did during the Great Recession. All of those excess dollars are spurring retailers to raise prices and the Federal Reserve to slow down interest-rate cuts. Were the economy to tank—because of, say, a war with Iran—we could end up with a toxic combination of widespread joblessness and rampant inflation. Congress is creating long-term risks too. In the coming years, a smaller share of Americans will work and a larger share will require Social Security payments, Medicare, disability-insurance coverage, and long-term care. More mandatory spending plus less revenue plus soaring interest costs on a hefty preexisting debt load add up to a big problem.

Instead of doing something about it, Washington is egging on a nationwide tax revolt. Politicians from both parties are slashing rates and spinning loopholes. They’re telling workers that they shouldn’t have to pay for social services, and that even prosperous Americans are overtaxed. In doing so, they are imperiling the country’s financial security and making it harder for future politicians to pass transformative initiatives. Uncle Sam is going to need to raise some money. And that’s going to be hard to do if Americans see their tax returns not as a fair contribution to the greater good but as a punishment or an injustice.

Over the past decade, the share of Americans who believe that their income-tax bill is unfair has climbed by 14 percentage points. A majority of Americans, in both parties and at all income levels, say that they are kicking in too much. The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, which teaches people how to conscientiously object to income levies, reports surging interest in its training sessions. Grassroots groups around the country are fighting to “ax the tax.” Most people want rates to go up—just not on them.

No wonder. For 50 years, Republicans have made taxes out to be the enemy of the government and the governed alike, passing cuts that have increased inequality and spilled red ink. Ronald Reagan argued that “taxes should hurt” as he dropped the top marginal rate from 70 percent to 28 percent. (Shouldn’t hurt that much, I guess!) George W. Bush provided “relief” to families, while phasing out levies on multimillion-dollar estates and lowering charges on capital gains. Over the past year and a half, Donald Trump has foghorned about what he has done for waiters and whispered about what he has done for real-estate developers. “Every single American at every income level has more money in their pockets,” he told supporters in Las Vegas earlier this month. Technically true—the worst kind of true. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut the tax liability of 85 percent of households, though 60 percent of the cuts went to the wealthy.

Washington has applied lighter taxes to investment profits than to salaries and wages for nearly as long as it has been in the business of taxing income at all. Yet under Trump, something has changed. Income levies have become not just uneven but irregular, contingent. The “big beautiful bill” created special provisions for tips, overtime, and retirement benefits, as well as profits taken by owner-operators. Viewed one way, Trump helped blue-collar workers and job-creating entrepreneurs. Viewed another, he created some nice tax-avoidance options for his base, leaving the salary-earning professional-managerial class as the last finger in the national-revenue dam. At his State of the Union address this year, Trump even proposed using tariffs to “substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.” (Trump continues to insist that foreign exporters pay tariffs. Domestic importers do, passing the costs onto consumers. Thus, Trump’s tariffs constituted the biggest tax hike since 1993.)

Along with depressing revenue and complicating the code, Trump is making it harder for the IRS to do its job. He has called its civil servants vindictive, factional, and even anti-Christian. He has fired 25,000 of them, slashing the agency’s budget by nearly 10 percent. The campaign feels personal. In 2022, two of Trump’s businesses were found guilty on four counts of felony tax fraud. Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion for failing to prevent the leak of some of his tax records. (Were he to win, the payout would cost every American taxpayer $62.) He refuses to release his returns on his own, breaking with half a century of presidential tradition.

The IRS’s reputation as a competent, professional agency is under assault. And the notion that the tax code should be simpler and fairer has become a quaint relic of a less polarized time—like proposing that the country bring back voice votes at town halls. Or restore the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit. (Honestly, not a bad idea.) Or tie scolds to the ducking stool again. (When you think about it …) Nobody on the Hill talks about broadening the base and lowering rates anymore. Republicans are all in on giving away goodies to their co-partisans and fermenting a code that looks like Swiss cheese. Democrats are too.

To close the deficit, Bill Clinton raised income taxes on filers making more than $250,000 a year in today’s dollars. To pay for the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama raised income taxes on individuals making more than $284,000 a year in today’s dollars. In 2019, Joe Biden vowed never to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000 a year—a colossal sum, even in Greenwich, Connecticut, or Cupertino, California. To Democratic politicians, apparently, families in the 97th income percentile are middle-class.

Perhaps Democrats have exempted high earners from tax hikes to account for the cost-of-living crisis. Perhaps they are trying to address the fractal nature of American inequality, or trying to keep the tax code progressive, even if they cannot keep its revenue stream sufficient. Perhaps, like Trump, they are just pandering to their base. “Democrats used to be the party of the struggling, working class, and downtrodden,” Jessica Riedl of the Tax Policy Center told me. Now they are the party of the “upwardly mobile professional class in major cities—doctors, lawyers, financial advisers, who live in Silicon Valley and Hollywood and New York—and don’t want the Democrats raising their taxes.”

Some prominent Democrats are even pushing for tax cuts, beyond the ones the Republicans just made. Senator Chris Van Hollen wants to take a family’s cost of living into account on the 1040 form. Senator Cory Booker wishes to expand credits for kids and low-wage workers. Both want to exempt millions of working-class families from income taxes entirely.

While tinkering with marginal rates, Democrats have threaded deductions, credits, and exemptions into the tax code, engaging in “submerged” policy making, as Cornell’s Suzanne Mettler describes it. Tax expenditures are easier for Congress to pass than spending programs, and they’re easier to target at low-income households. Still, Americans don’t really understand these policies. Two in three claimants of the home-mortgage-interest deduction say it doesn’t do much for them. (The deduction can reduce a family’s tax bill by as much as $15,000 a year.) Two in three people with a 529 college savings plan believe that they have never used a government program. The more tax breaks a person receives, the less likely they are to report that Uncle Sam has improved their quality of life, Mettler has found. Yet such initiatives cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars.

[Read: We shouldn’t need accountants]

The fiercest tax revolts are brewing at the local level. Governor Kathy Hochul of New York has cut state income taxes for joint filers earning up to $323,000 a year, permitted towns and cities to exempt seniors from property taxes, and pushed for abolishing taxes on tips. “If you’re working long shifts, nights, or weekends, those tips should help you pay the bills, not get taxed away,” she said, echoing Bush in promising her constituents “relief.” Politicians in North Dakota, Indiana, Texas, and Montana have slashed property taxes; politicians in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kansas are trying to do so. The front-runner in the Georgia governor’s race wants to eliminate income taxes for public-school educators.

The few tax hikes on the table tend to be hyper-focused on the hyper-rich. California is contemplating a one-time, 5 percent levy on the state’s billionaires—200 or so people in a population of 40 million. Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani want taxes on pieds-à-terre worth more than $5 million. The president does not like the proposal: “Mayor Mamdani is DESTROYING New York!” he posted on Truth Social. “The TAX, TAX, TAX Policies are SO WRONG.” (Trump’s Central Park triplex reportedly sports views of all five boroughs, a diamond-encrusted front door, a marble sculpture of Eros, a czarist malachite table, and a ceiling mural of Apollo astride a chariot.)

The proposals have some legitimate rationale. Wages for hourly employees have crawled, while the paychecks of investors and executives have soared. At the same time, the wealth of investors and executives has skyrocketed, with the taxman scarcely tapping these fortunes at all. As the law professor Ray Madoff has observed, Amazon has paid Jeff Bezos a salary of roughly $82,000 a year since the late 1990s, “low enough to make him eligible to claim the child tax credit (which he did!).” From 2014 to 2018, his net worth climbed by $99 billion, just 0.98 percent of which went to public coffers, whereas many middle-class families fork over 25 percent of their earnings. Plus, again, the cost of living has become brutally high. Even households making six figures are struggling to afford child care, rent, groceries, health insurance, summer camp, and student-loan debt.

Yet tax cuts aren’t a great way to handle high prices. They’re inflationary: They cause high prices. And a lot of these supposedly progressive policies would aid the prosperous, as well as the middle class and working class. Getting rid of property taxes in particular feels like a sop for the well-heeled. Assessments have gone up because home values have gone up. People might not like it, but it is not unfair.

It is unfair, however, to give tax write-offs to specific kinds of people making specific kinds of money, even if the policies sound nice in a stump speech. Why should teachers be exempt from income taxes, but not firefighters, sanitation workers, NICU nurses, aides in memory-care units, or paramedics? Why should California’s billionaires pay a wealth tax, but not its near-billionaires? Why should a 66-year-old homeowner get a write-off, but not a 64-year-old homeowner? Why should waiters and security guards get “relief,” but not line cooks or roofers? Why are we calling tax provisions “relief” at all? And why are we casting loopholes for labor instead of cutting them for capital?

For Democrats, today’s anti-tax ideology will limit the scope of the possible. Say that a presidential candidate wants to create universal prekindergarten, implement a comprehensive parental-leave policy, lower the Medicare-eligibility age, and invest in clean energy and cancer research. How would they sell the necessary tax hikes? They could raise rates on businesses and millionaires, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Liberal European countries fund their welfare programs with broad-based taxes on workers and consumers, not just confiscatory taxes on oligarchs. Nothing suggests that Democrats have the stomach for it. “For all of their talk about taxing the rich, Democrats have not significantly raised upper-income taxes since 1993,” Riedl, from the Tax Policy Center, said. “Why do we assume this massive utopia of huge tax-the-rich revenue is just around the corner?”

For Republicans, anti-tax ideology is endangering their political fortunes right now. To pay for his tax cuts for the rich, Trump axed Medicaid and SNAP benefits for the poor. People don’t tend to notice when their tax liability goes down. They really, really notice when they can’t put food on the table or go to the ER for an infection. And in time, anti-tax ideology might threaten the country’s solvency and end up necessitating austerity budgets. Washington has run large deficits without spooking the bond market for years. But what if yields surge and inflation spikes when millions more Americans are retired and millions fewer are working?

Average citizens aren’t hearing these arguments. Politicians have spent years telling people making $312,000 a year that they are middle-class, and offering credits, exemptions, loopholes, rate reductions, and deductions to anyone who might cast a ballot for them or cut them a check. They have spent decades making the tax code impossible to understand and the filing process incomprehensible. Nobody needs to enjoy paying their taxes. But the amount they pay has to be reasonable. And they do need to pay up.

In March, I put my iPhone into a yellow cardboard box with MO stamped on top—the M looked like a riff on the Motorola logo; the O looked like a flower. Over the next several weeks, I left my phone there for roughly 23.5 hours out of every day.

I did so as a participant in “Month Offline,” which started last year in Washington, D.C., as a kind of Dry January challenge, but for smartphones. Now it is a fledgling business with a footprint in New York City. Members of each monthlong “cohort” pay $75 for the experience, during which they swap their iPhones for a lower-tech device and participate in weekly meetups. I joined the cohort that began on March 2 and received an email just before the first meeting: “Excited 2 see u soon,” it said.

My month offline began with the MO pledge—a document with curious capitalization that declared us all “Free and Independent Human Beings” who were “Absolved from all dependence on big tech and their attention-grabbing algorithms.” By signing at the bottom, I agreed to “forego” the use of my smartphone for 30 days and thereby “trade dopamine for daylight, doomscrolls for detours, pixels for paper maps.”

The other members of my cohort, who would meet on Monday nights in a still-semi-industrial corner of Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood (near a soup factory), were mostly women, mostly in their late 20s or early 30s. They had heard about Month Offline from a friend, or they had seen a wheat-paste flyer (Flip Off!) on the street, or, in at least one case, they had come across a post about MO on the party-planning app Partiful, which is where this person did their scrolling after having deleted all other forms of social media from their phone. Several people in our group had full-time jobs in technology, and nobody I spoke with considered themselves to be “anti-tech.” But they all felt like smartphone use was costing them hours of free time every day, access to stores of creativity, and opportunities for adventure and friendship in the great city of New York.

One salve for these anxieties could be a different kind of phone. Month Offline has spun off a tiny start-up, dumb.co, that sells the sort of flip phones that you might want to use when your iPhone has been hidden in a cardboard box. Their design is more than just a relic from the aughts. It’s a relic from the aughts that has been kitted out with a custom operating system designed by a former Washington Post software engineer named Jack Nugent. You can pair a dumb.co flip phone with your smartphone through an app called Dumb Down, such that your normal calls and text messages are forwarded to your dumb.co number. (Many of the numbers in my cohort had the Atlanta area code 404, as a joke about going offline.) Nugent’s system also comes with scaled-down versions of Uber, WhatsApp, Google Maps, and Microsoft Authenticator. “Before this device, a lot of people would say something like, I wish I could use a dumbphone, but I need X,Y,Z,” he told me. So he started adding X and Y and Z. The next version of the flip phone will allow for music streaming and include the retro phone game Snake. Nugent said he drew a hard line at email, though—the dumb.co flip phone will never have email.

For several weeks I took my dumbphone everywhere I went, and for several weeks strangers asked about it. Even people who did not seem like they would hang out in semi-industrial Bushwick were intrigued. One evening in lower Manhattan, a polished-looking man who had just been talking with someone else about his job in finance turned and saw my flip phone sitting on the bar. His face lit up. He wanted to know where I’d gotten it, and said that he’d been thinking about getting one too. A spirit of dumbphone curiosity seemed to be all around me.

Clearly, one of the flip phone’s thrills is that it flips. It flips, and the feeling of its flipping is neat and familiar. For people of my cohort’s age (and mine), it’s a reminder of our first phones, which were amazing devices that conferred agency, independence, and the possibility of receiving secret messages from a crush. It’s nice to have a flip phone again.

Month Offline leans into this feeling of nostalgia. At my second weekly meeting, my fellow travelers and I had the thrill of our lives decorating our new flip phones with stickers, just as we might have done in 2007. I added one baseball sticker to the front of my phone and one to the back, but some others created intricate patterns with rhinestones. The get-togethers were heavy on crafts; we often expressed ourselves through crayon. At the end of each meeting, we received a gift to help us get through the next week in an ever more analog fashion—a disposable camera, a book of crossword puzzles, a compass on a carabiner.

A key concept, discussed every week, was that of “friction”—or the specific discomfort we were feeling whenever we ran up against our reliance on our boxed-up smartphones. One week, we used the crayons to draw a “moment of friction,” and most people drew themselves getting lost. The flip phone’s tiny version of Google Maps is hard to use, and some people were trying not to use it all, preferring to navigate the city as their parents and grandparents once did, going only by their memory and directions from strangers.

I embraced the frictions of my month offline, except for when they made me extremely annoyed. Once, I settled down at a coffee shop to do some work and realized I was locked out of my computer; I had to call my fiancé and ask him to bring my iPhone to me so that I could two-factor in. (My job requires a specific authenticator app that is not available for dumbphones.) I stewed while I waited. A couple of days before, I’d missed a text from my sister telling our family that she’d gotten into a medical residency. (Group chats sometimes glitched on my flip phone; other people in my cohort also reported having scattered problems with text-forwarding.) And because I had not received that text, or any of my family’s responses to the biggest news of my sibling’s life, my contribution to the chat was to blithely inform everyone a few minutes later that Seiya Suzuki would not be a good draft pick for our family’s fantasy-baseball league, because he’d injured his knee in the World Baseball Classic.

At times like these, I felt as though this experiment in freeing myself was doing just the opposite.  After all, I was paying for a second phone plan on top of the one I had for my iPhone—dumb.co service costs $25 a month for Month Offline participants—and then all this other annoying stuff was happening to me too. But the Month Offline program has a protocol for such moments of weakness: Between meetings, we were encouraged to text or call a couple of assigned “Flipmates,” who were similar to Alcoholics Anonymous sponsors, and also to leave voicemails in a centralized mailbox for the group called the “Dumbphone Diary.” The diary entries, which we sometimes listened to together at meetings, were brief, palpably sincere stories of the teller’s struggles without a smartphone, or else their pride at having reconnected with art, nature, their friends, and their own mind.

Our group had three facilitators who would lead each week’s activities and offer guidance. One of them, Lydia Peabody, explained that she had left her job as a therapist while participating in a previous Month Offline. The experiment had been a revelation, she told me. A few days into using the flip phone, she’d noticed that her mood was worsening. “I was like, Holy shit, why do I feel so awful?” Eventually, she deduced that her mindless smartphone scrolling had been a way to distract herself from her unhappiness. Without that option, she was forced to face reality. So she quit, and shortly after that she went to a Grateful Dead–cover-band show with the CEO of dumb.co, who hired her to run Month Offline because of her experience leading group therapy.

Her expertise has certainly been germane. Though the meetups weren’t set up to be group therapy, people seemed to want to talk (and talk, and talk) about the ways their lives had changed without smartphones, and the discussions sometimes took on a therapeutic tone. I found this all a bit grating and repetitive, but as the month went on, I began to see the same results as everyone else. I read more, talked with strangers more, worried less, and forgot about Instagram almost entirely. I felt worse, and then I felt better.

At the final meetup for my month offline, we participated in a graduation ceremony, complete with Vitamin C’s “Graduation (Friends Forever)” playing on a portable speaker. Cards on which we had written our average daily smartphone screen time at the beginning of the month were redistributed, and we wrote down our new totals. Mine went from nearly 4 hours to 19 minutes.

Peabody asked if there was anyone in the room who had not touched their smartphones at all, for the whole month, and two people raised their hands. The rest of us ooh-ed and clapped. I left with a feeling of genuine camaraderie. I also left having turned over my credit-card information to sign up for another month of dumb.co’s dumbphone-service plan. My experiment was over, but I wasn’t ready to give up on my little flip (which I’d started calling “my little flip”).

[Read: Get your kid a watch]

The following week, our cohort came back together for a show of the creative projects we’d made with all of our offline free time. Those without artistic talents were encouraged to interpret the prompt liberally, and so one Month Offliner presented cookies she’d made from a favorite recipe, and another just sat at a table with a simple crossword puzzle she’d made.

At least 100 people came out for the event. Some were friends of Month Offliners who were there solely out of the goodness of their heart. When I asked one such woman what her level of interest was in participating in a Month Offline herself, she said it was “medium to mild.” Other attendees were part of the city’s broader, burgeoning subculture of “attention activism.” I ran into Dan Fox, who works for the minimalist phone company Light, as well as Nick Plante, a community organizer who is one of the scene’s best-known voices.

In his writing, Plante can come off as a zealot. He recently described social-media platforms as “prisons of the mind” and speculated that we may one day “see these companies burn and smolder.” But when I spoke with him by phone after the Offline art show, he presented his stance in less fiery terms. Phone-free parties and club nights are already taking off, he said, and he guessed that New York will soon have an assortment of phone-free bars, restaurants, and co-working spaces. A culture shift away from smartphones is already under way, he said. “They’re perceived as being so central to our society right now,” he said. But what if they weren’t?

My cohort mate Alana Kupke, a 30-year-old freelance stylist, had been thinking along the same lines. She’d signed up for the group because she works in the fashion industry and has felt obligated to be online all the time, just to keep her finger on the pulse. She’d been wondering whether she could do the same just by observing her physical surroundings and talking with people. At first, when friends saw her on the flip phone, they would freak out, she said. They would say “Oh my God” and swear that they could never get through the day with such a thing. “It kind of is a problem if people are scared to not have iPhones,” Krupke told me. By the end of the month, though, she’d persuaded her roommate, several of her friends, and four people she’d met during gigs to make the switch to flip phones.

[Read: Can Gen Z get rid of its iPhones?]

Jenine Marquez, 26, another member of my cohort, told me that ever since our month offline she keeps her iPhone in a zippered pocket in her bag, where she can still reach it for emergencies and to answer video calls from her dad. Also, she can feel it buzzing if she gets a bunch of Microsoft Teams messages. Otherwise she doesn’t touch it. Krupke said she’s been switching out her iPhone for the dumbphone whenever she goes out with friends, so she can be more present. As for me, after signing up for another month of service, I haven’t picked up my little flip even once.

A few days after the art show, when I met Peabody for tea, she acknowledged that not everyone who goes to Month Offline continues with the flip phones. Some treat the month like a detox. Others want to stay offline but struggle to stay on the wagon. “When you stop going to something each week that holds you accountable, it becomes harder for anybody to face this alone,” Peabody said. She encourages people not to think about it as all-or-nothing. Her iPhone usually stays at her desk in her apartment, plugged in like a computer, she said. But she’ll take it out to use it for something specific. “I don’t make my life a living hell trying to use only this,” she said, holding up her flip phone. “I use it most of the time because I feel better.”

Only a few hundred people have participated in Month Offline so far, and participation may be limited to those whose lifestyles allow for voluntary inconvenience. But Peabody said she thinks the early flip-phone readopters will create a snowball effect. Each one will normalize the dumbphone’s use a little more, even if it’s just within their social circle or in the bars and coffee shops through which they pass. “Most people can do this, or a lot of people can do it,” she said. “If you and I meet in a year, we’ll be having different conversations.”

Photographs by Hugo Yu

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Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.

I encounter on this quest three types of Americans, because only three types exist. The type that you are—or the type that you are dealing with—is revealed in response to the question “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?”

The American people, alas, have grown skittish about answering plain questions. An unconscionable number ask what I mean by this, as if the words might have an obscure double meaning. To be clear: Any bread from any restaurant in America is eligible, so long as it is free to all customers. The contents of the basket set on the table before the meal arrives, the cost of which is invisibly diffused throughout other menu items. Rolls that arrive unbidden. Popovers, if everyone gets a popover no matter what. You know what I’m talking about. Free restaurant bread.

The first type of American: people who joyride the day’s updrafts like marvelous, glossy crows. They easily recall the locations of treats encountered over their lifetime. They answer this question Glock-shot fast, as if they have been waiting to be asked it. They are happy.

The second type: fairly certain that they have consumed bread at some point; allows that a portion of that consumption could have occurred within the confines of a restaurant, or a restaurant-like environment; will grant that some pieces of said bread were perhaps free and/or enjoyable to ingest. But they profess to have retained no specifics. Their personal histories are inscribed in chalk, regularly power-washed with jets of deterging Time. They resent the implication that they could ever derive meaning from the pale, abstract remnants of narrative that constitute their internal autobiographies, and, with a few kindhearted exceptions, will not attempt to. Many, in fact, will appear oddly furious to have been asked this question, and will invent wafer-thin excuses as to why they are unable to spend two seconds considering it.

The third type: a tragic, paranoid (though occasionally brilliant) figure. Ask this person, “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” and their eyes shimmer with panic. These individuals live with the terrific knowledge that there is a best free restaurant bread in America, and the awful conviction that they are incapable of identifying it. It is not a lack of contenders that prevents them from volunteering an answer—the prison of their mind teems with memories of free restaurant breads—rather, they are silenced by a hallucinatory fear of nebulous consequences that could befall them should they personally misidentify the best free restaurant bread in America, even in private conversation. Asked this question, such people refuse to answer. “It’s too much pressure!” they insist. Whence this pressure, of what force, applied to what possible end, is never explained. Men and women with advanced degrees are overrepresented in this type.

Though it strikes the ear as an insoluble query, there is a correct answer—right now, known only to God (and to me, an agent of his will), but erelong to the steadfast reader.

Here is where the notion for the undertaking came from: Tucked within the viscera of the continental United States is a restaurant that gives away superb free bread. Every time I have eaten it (before this past year, three times total), I have said aloud (to my husband, who did not care), “This is the best free restaurant bread in America.” The thought made me feel the way you do when you realize you were just a half a moment away from being plowed by a car, and were spared only by a chance nanosecond of dawdling before stepping into the street: giddy and flabbergasted and grateful to be alive. It seemed incredible, but also possible, that this really could be the best free restaurant bread in America. What if it was? Even more dizzyingly, what if it wasn’t? What if—unfathomable—someone else was giving away an even better bread for free? The thought drove me crazy. I begged for the opportunity to investigate.

[From the November 2025 issue: Caity Weaver on what it takes to be a Revolutionary War reenactor]

Naturally, I told my superiors, this investigation would bring me into contact with the entire arc of human history. People have been eating bread—in many places, eating mostly bread—for millennia. We can’t say for certain that the individuals who fled their burning homes on the shore of the Sea of Galilee 23,000 years ago (leaving behind baskets they’d woven, tools they’d carved from bones, and sleeping areas they’d turned snug and cozy) ate bread, but we know from microscopic barley and oat remnants embedded in a grindstone abandoned to the flames that they were, at least, processing flour. (To situate these folks in time: Cats would not be domesticated for another 14,000 years or so.)

Once people began munching bread, they never stopped. (Or, at least, they never stopped until very recently.) The word bread can also refer more generally to food, sustenance, or livelihood—not just in English, but in languages from Russian to Hindi. Breadcrumbs are scattered throughout our language. The word lord is derived from a compound word in Old English—hlāfweard—translating, roughly, to “loaf guard” or “loaf keeper” (breadwinner could be seen as a modern fraternal twin); lady comes from hlæfdige : “loaf kneader.” The arm bones of Neolithic women, researchers have found, were 11 to 16 percent stronger than those of the women’s rowing team at the University of Cambridge, likely from grinding grain for hours every day.

[Read: What bread tasted like 4,000 years ago]

(Of course, eventually, my investigation would lead me back to the site of the bread that inspired it, thereby accomplishing my secret personal mission: procuring a fourth basket of free bread from that restaurant. Unfortunately, what happened to me on my return visit was so shocking and abominable, I was tempted to re-pitch this article as “What Is the Restaurant in America That I Hate, That I Will Never Go Back to, That Has Made of Me an Enemy for Life Due to Its Psychotic Soda Policy”—on which, more upsetting details to follow.)

How would I determine the best free restaurant bread in America? Simple: I would ask every single person I encountered, “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?”; travel to the most likely candidates; and try the bread myself.

The $725.32 Free Bread

Sixteen splendorous bread varieties are yours for claiming off the three-tiered lacquered rolling cart at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas. You can have as many as you want, all for free, with your meal. My meal was the Degustation Menu, which costs $525 per guest. The breads range from the fanciful (surprisingly pointy bacon-and-mustard pods, heart-stoppingly yellow saffron focaccia) to the nearly indistinguishable (classic baguettes, traditional baguettes). There are flaky spirals and poofy cubes and bread with the gently rounded profile of a tasteful breast implant. There is olive bread; rosemary brioche; basil focaccia; walnut raisin; one miniature croissant; two cheese breads; a third kind of baguette that is exactly the same as one of the other baguettes, only smaller. There is country loaf. Sixteen.

The three-Michelin-star Joël Robuchon is located within the abyss of the MGM Grand Las Vegas, directly adjacent to a Cirque du Soleil–themed gift shop, though it seems determined to ignore this fact. The MGM’s more than 5,000 rooms colluded to make it the Earth’s largest hotel when it opened in 1993; it has since lost that ominous distinction without shrinking in square footage. Roaming its purgatorial interior, you could be wandering a mega–cruise ship beached in the desert, or vacationing amid the elevator banks of a parking garage containing every car in the world. It is as all-encompassing as the world of a nightmare. In addition to Joël Robuchon, at the time of my visit, the MGM’s droves of restaurants included a Netflix-themed chow palace, Netflix Bites—where screens over the bar silently flashed random trailers for Netflix original programming, interspersed with Stranger Things and Bridgerton screen savers (Netflix Bites has since closed)—and a restaurant inspired by the Jonas Brothers’ great-grandmother, Nellie’s Southern Kitchen: A Jonas Family Restaurant.

Unlike at Netflix Bites, there are no hot-pink signs reading I’D BON APPETIT HIM inside Joël Robuchon; it is a refined place, its cream facade evoking the stately grandeur of Haussmann’s Paris. Chandeliers, plural, are visible through the glass doors. The Robuchon dining room is peculiar within the MGM in that it was built to human scale; it feels like a rich person’s living room, down to the smattering of black-and-white framed snapshots of Nicolas Cage and Celine Dion. I am seated on a velvet couch of Tyrian purple, opposite a tabletop trio of pink roses and in front of a Nic Cage photo. My black napkin is of a material lovelier than my dress; to sleep beneath sheets stitched from such napkins would be the apex of indulgence.

The concept of an elegant chuck wagon buckling beneath the weight of its cargo of bread is not unique in Las Vegas to Joël Robuchon, but the Robuchon grain trolley is esteemed as one of the finest. To ensure that I will be hungry enough to sample the totality of its breads at my 9:15 p.m. reservation, I consume nothing after a modest breakfast. This will prove to be a mistake. By afternoon, counting down the hours in my MGM hotel room ($39.20 a night before fees, a little more than 5 percent of my dinner bill), I pay more serious consideration to a can of Sour Cream & Onion Pringles—which I do not even like—than I did to the paperwork when I bought my car. I gaze, too, upon a lavender can next to the potato chips, envisioning the sugarplum delights it might enclose. Upon closer inspection, it turns out to contain a vibrator, two condoms, and personal lubricant (could this be edible as a kind of syrup?). By the time I am shown to my purple couch, I am hungry enough to eat the tablecloth.

The army of waitstaff who attend to each patron at Joël Robuchon is classy. When I confess to my headwaiter that I would, if possible, prefer not to have lamb for one course, he thanks me as if I have paid him a compliment. These professionals, many of whom have worked here for decades, would never make a woman eating a $525 meal alone at 9:15 on a Monday night feel bad for any request. But still. It is impossible to lock eyes with a Frenchman, after he has just spent minutes delicately extolling the virtues of 16 different breads, and ask, “Could I do one of each?” without feeling ridiculous, no matter how evenly he responds, “Absolutely!”

Unaware that every passing second escalates the odds that they will lose a silver button, a finger, or even a limb to my ravenous maw, the waiters continue the pageantry of the bread service. “Butter from France!” one trumpets as he wheels over a second cart, this bearing a hoodoo of butter beneath a spotless glass cloche large enough to contain a human head. A spoon in each hand, he shaves off a translucent spiral, which he confetties with salt. I am so dangerously close to eating the butter plain, like a scoop of ice cream, that I hear him announce, “Olive oil from Alicante!” only faintly, as a cry from a distant ship.

At last, 20 impeccably choreographed minutes after my arrival, my first round of breads is placed before me: 12 oven-warmed rolls crammed into a silver bowl. For one light-flooded second, I am a doe in high beams, paralyzed by everything that could happen next. Then I grab the bacon-and-mustard roll and throw it into my mouth so fast that I forget to taste it. I am about to snatch a second roll, any roll, when a waiter materializes at my elbow to tell me a story.

It is the history of what he calls “a beautiful dish”—a beautiful dish he has recklessly placed between myself and my breads. It is a shallow bowl of mesmerically arranged dots: three concentric rings of molar-size white dots, each topped with a little green dot, converging, as if in worship, upon a perfect circle that is itself an agglomeration of still smaller black dots—all suspended in straw-colored jelly. It looks like something from the biology lab at Liberace University. These, I am informed, are chlorophyll-kissed cauliflower pearls surrounding a caviar disc. The caviar is flecked with 24-karat gold leaf. I scarf it down like my dog inhales breakfast, in order to get back to the bread.

The saffron roll tastes of nothing. The pale-green basil focaccia looks like bread from the morgue. Some of the pickings are quite tasty, but the sheer number of rolls dilutes the impact of each. When the headwaiter asks if I have a favorite “so far,” I humiliate myself by describing a square bread covered in cheese that does not exist. He instantly identifies the two rolls I have conflated—an ethereal marshmallow-size cube made with milk instead of water, and a sphere crowned with crunchy, oven-toasted Gruyère that tastes like cheese-flavored air—and brings out more of these for me to confirm. I accept; I could eat 60 to 600 more!

Another mistake. I had meant to merely sample the breads; instead I am consuming each in toto. The remaining 13 courses are whisked out to me at a relentless pace. There are triangles of many colors; foam; a leaf that is a cake; a ladybug that is candy; gold foil distributed with such apparent abandon—festooning a truffle; smeared on the rim of a glass—that it may simply be drifting through the kitchen’s HVAC system like ash from a phoenix’s nest. “I’m eating so much gold,” read my notes.

As I challenge the elastic limits of my gastric wall, distending it with hundreds of dollars’ worth of fabulous things in rare shapes, and also rolls, I rely more and more on the chemical burn of Diet Coke to excoriate my palate between bites. Joël Robuchon’s Diet Coke is crisp and cold, and swims right up to the brim of the voluptuously curved glasses they serve it in; it devours my tongue like a cleansing fire. Feeling sheepish, and also sluggish, and also like I will never be hungry again, I ask the maestro of the bread cart if I might have my second round. It is time for the loaves.

At 10:46 p.m.—90 minutes after my arrival; I’m exhausted, unable to eat another bite of anything—I calculate how many courses I have left. Five?! I am given a plate of Ibérico ham. It tastes exquisite: nutty, salty, rich. I force it down like I am eating packing peanuts. I notice that I have begun shivering slightly, probably because of the frosty Diet Cokes. “I love Diet Coke!” I write in my notes. Tendrils of conversation from other diners drift to my table. “This was such a good dinner!” one woman declares—a demented way to describe what has happened here tonight; this is dinner in the same way that Australia is an isle. I impel myself to eat all of the foie gras I am served, because I know it is made inhumanely. It is 20 minutes to midnight by the time my posh experience draws to a close. I prefer the traditional baguette to the classic baguette.

What’s the Point of the Article?

“What’s the point of the article?”

This is the question an exasperated William Rubel, the author of Bread: A Global History, demands of me. Rubel is an American who was made a Chevalier of the Ordre National du Mérite Agricole by France’s minister of agriculture for contributions to agricultural knowledge. He is a scholar affiliated with no university. His objective is the total comprehension of a small portion of culinary history—aptly, because, with his untamed thatch of shoulder-length white hair and woolly-caterpillar brows, he looks like someone who could have been alive at any point in the era of man. He also founded a children’s literary magazine.

“Fun article for people to read,” I tell him glumly.

Rubel’s knowledge of bread is so comprehensive—and mine so nonexistent—that he is quickly, if cantankerously, becoming my own hlāfweard : the curmudgeonly warden of all loaf understanding. I came to him originally with a question to which I could find no answer: Why did restaurants start giving away bread for free?

“It’s the opposite of what you asked,” Rubel says. “It’s not ‘When did they begin giving away bread for free?’ Because no one could have imagined sitting down at the meal and not eating bread. It was not possible.”

In the timeline of Western civilization, restaurants are a brand-new trend. The United States had batteries before it had a restaurant. Delmonico’s began operating in New York City in 1837 as a novel kind of dining space: one where patrons could purchase individually priced items off a menu. Prior to the importation of this French-style concern, a person who wished to be served a meal away from home was pretty much restricted to an oyster saloon (where they could have oysters) or an inn or a tavern (where a flat fee purchased whatever meal everyone else was getting—not necessarily oysters). To say that a 19th-century American tavern meal included bread would be like remarking that a 21st-century restaurant meal includes cutlery. We know that America’s first restaurants offered bread to patrons because it would have been unthinkable not to.

People have judged restaurants on the quality of their free bread from the institutions’ earliest days. In what is possibly America’s first restaurant review (a madcap meta-account published in The New York Times in 1859), the bread at New York’s Astor House is deemed “the best bread in the universe.” And although dozens of poll respondents insisted to me that complimentary bread, as a concept, has been lately abandoned in this country—that “every” restaurant charges for bread “now” (not true)—in fact, people have been complaining about vanishing complimentary rolls for at least a century. In 1912, the Times devoted days of coverage to outrage over a new 10-cent charge for bread and butter: “HOTEL DINER BRINGS IN HIS OWN BREAD,” read the headline of an article that described one man’s attempt to skirt the fee.

In the days of tavern dining, proprietors would have wanted customers to fill up on as much bread as possible, so that they would consume less of the more expensive ingredients to which they were entitled. À la carte restaurants perhaps felt themselves grandfathered into what had become a mark of hospitality. Chefs I consult attest to free bread’s ability—a finite ability—to make kitchens run more smoothly (by slowing down orders). It also makes customers less whiny: Restaurants give you free bread “just so that you have something to do with your hands and your mouth,” Richard Horner, a New Orleans chef and restaurateur, tells me.

Horner lays bare the strategic timing of this generosity. Ideally, free bread should not hit the table until after customers have ordered their meal, “because then they order from a position of maximum hungriness,” he says. Plus, the delay builds anticipation: “Will there be bread? I see other people with bread. We haven’t got bread yet.” And then, once the bread is bestowed: “Oh! There is bread! What a fun surprise.”

Horner’s demonic calculation for how many slices or rolls each table’s basket should contain is [Number of diners] + 1. Unevenly divisible bread creates “a tension that I really enjoy.”

But Horner describes himself as “anti–free bread”—a common position among restaurant professionals. A premature breadbasket can gut the total bill. Also, the bread intended to placate customers can just as often be something else for them to complain about. “They get really, really particular about this thing you’re giving them for free,” Horner says. “ ‘This isn’t hot’ or ‘Bring me more stuff ’; ‘I need more bread’; ‘I need more oil and vinegar for some reason’; or ‘This butter is wrong.’ ” He sees the decline of free bread as a consequence of restaurants being stretched so thin during the pandemic. They just got fed up: “You know what? You don’t get bread anymore! ”

Several chefs, including the author Alison Roman, make the case that customers, by demanding bread that is free, deprive themselves of bread that is worth eating. “It’s either good and you pay,” Roman tells me, “or it’s free and bad. Bread costs money to make. It takes skilled labor, and it shouldn’t be free.”

Horner echoes her point. When free bread is “an afterthought”—provided only because free bread is expected—“I would rather just not have it on the table,” he says. If you’re going to give customers bread, “it should be as good as the rest of your food. And if that’s the case, you should charge for it.”

(No one outside the food industry ever tells me they’d prefer paying for excellent bread to receiving mediocre bread for free. Most people just want to be given bread they have not paid for. That bread being good constitutes a rare and wonderful possibility—certainly not an expectation. Nothing tastes as good as free costs.)

My primary means of determining the best free restaurant bread in America is to demand answers from people—my father and friends, yes, but also anyone else I can think of. Strangers encountered on errands. Everyone who sends me an email during the month of October. “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” I amass several hundred answers.

In harvesting this knowledge, I am exposed to countless novel methods through which humans might delight, disappoint, irritate, and surprise one another. Some people invent their own question on the spot and answer that instead: Asked to identify the best free restaurant bread in America, they tell of a great bakery where bread can be purchased for money, or the worst free restaurant bread in America. Others imagine that the question contains some hidden constraint, which they undertake to expose—“It can’t be a chain restaurant,” they declare, or “It has to be a chain restaurant.” The fixins’-dazzled deliver monologues about butter and olive oil, forgetting that bread exists. One smug stranger in a hot tub tells me that she cannot answer, because she makes her own bread. (Does she bring it to restaurants?) A number decline to consider the question, because they no longer eat gluten. (I don’t require anyone to eat the bread they mention.) (Unrelated warning—not a threat: Gluten-free bread is unable to transubstantiate into the body of Christ, according to Catholic law.) Some folks itch to argue with me about what I mean by bread, daring me to reject their votes for pitas, sopaipillas, corn tortilla chips, or hush puppies. They are disgruntled to learn that I let each person define bread as he or she wishes, desiring only that it incorporate a non-raw staple starch.

[From the March 1989 issue: Corby Kummer on the ideal panettone]

I am astonished that only a minority of people can summon an answer quickly. My mental filing cabinet devoted to cataloging free restaurant breads is one of the largest and most scrupulously maintained in my neocortex; I’ve discarded the contents of other filing cabinets (“Visuospatial Reasoning,” “First Aid”) to make room for it. What occupies the free-bread space in others’ minds? Americans of the second type—those who don’t have an immediate answer to the best-free-bread question—are certainly not charmed by being asked. They seem to resent being pulled out of the swift current of their life and forced to ponder restaurant bread for a few seconds. But aggression is not limited to such people. A man from Boston overhears me asking another stranger the question in an elevator, and cuts in: “Any restaurant you walk in, in the North End, is the best bread.” I ask him to name one. “Any of them,” he says. “Pick one,” I encourage. The man grows furious: “Any of them!”

My father’s answer surprises me. When I was growing up, he, my mother, and I were all serious eaters (not in the sense of being discerning, but of deriving satisfaction from doggedly plowing through any volume of food) with a special penchant for free items. At 81, he tells me, he possesses a single vivid memory of free restaurant bread: He ate it on one of the handful of days in his life that he saw his father. “He would show up occasionally and try to act like the big dad,” my father recalls, bringing Christmas presents to his wife and sons in South Philly. Once, in 1962, my grandfather bought his sons—one in the Air Force, the other (my father) a teenage gang member—lunch at the Four Seasons in Manhattan.

I am stunned to learn that my father—an indefatigable storyteller who I thought had long since frog-marched me through everything that had ever happened to him—once went to a restaurant as nice as the Four Seasons. I’d thought he might say the biscuits at Red Lobster, a restaurant that was the setting for so many jubilant meals with my parents, grandparents, and cousins that I struggle to recall a distinct memory from it; every meal blurs together in a montage of steaming biscuits and laughing faces, not unlike a commercial for Red Lobster. I ask my dad if he has any happy memories of his father. “None that I can think of,” he says. But he remembers that the bread was warm.

What Celebrities Don’t Want You to Know

Hear me when I say this: Irrespective of the vibrant plausibility of your parasocial fantasies, America’s celebrities are not your friends. There is only one good celebrity in this world: the author Stephen King. According to Mr. King, the best free bread in America is “crusty and warm” and served at Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse in Sarasota, Florida. Given the fact that no other star, out of the scores I contact via their representatives, successfully manages to answer this question, I can conclude only that America’s celebrities consider it their unholy mission to ensure that her masses—their fans—die ignorant of the identity of her best free restaurant bread.

Publicists demand to know which other celebrities are telling me their favorite free restaurant bread before they will even consider passing along this question. LeBron James cannot devote one minute to contemplating the best free restaurant bread in America, a representative confides in October, because the totality of his “focus” is “on preparing for the upcoming season”—a frightening and lonely thought. (A few weeks later, James will shatter the tempered-glass backboard of his concentration at 6:32 a.m. Los Angeles time, confessing on social media: “I love watching YouTube golf ⛳ videos!! Random I know. lol. SO COOL!” I email his rep a plea to slip the question to James while a YouTube golf video is loading. Do not hear back.) Ben Affleck cannot answer due to being “in the midst of a project”—aren’t we all? Jennifer Lopez is likewise “filming a movie right now” and therefore totally unreachable by terrestrial communication.

Do you want to know how abjectly I debase myself, attempting to divine this forbidden knowledge from the impenetrable minds of celebrities? I contact Chris Pratt’s publicist to seek Pratt’s answer, even though—since we’re all being so honest—I don’t especially care to know it. (I am merely asking to be polite.) “We need to politely hold off as there isn’t interest,” comes the reply. Excuse me! That is actually not polite! I don’t need to know that Chris Pratt isn’t interested; and also, how can he not be interested in such an interesting topic? And also, I am the one who is not interested! But this is not even my lowest moment. That nadir is struck when I am forced to reach out to my nemesis: a celebrity publicist I have previously sworn never to speak to again, because several years ago she lied to me—did not refuse to comment; flat-out lied—when I asked her a direct question. Typing my query about the best free restaurant bread in America to this individual feels like dragging my raw, bleeding fingertips across a gravestone that has been scorched by lightning. And would you believe that not only does this publicist fail to provide an answer to my fun and fascinating question; she does not even acknowledge receipt of my email or my follow-up email ? And so now I am forced to put into writing my new vow, a vow I will keep, even if it one day destroys my life, even if it kills me: Ashley, the next time you and I cross paths, it will be in hell.

(“What a nice article this will be to read,” Oprah Winfrey’s ultra-classy publicist writes, while unequivocally declining her client’s participation.)

On a handful of occasions, my interactions with public-relations professionals are at least moderately helpful. When pressed, Buzz Aldrin’s and Tyler Perry’s publicists reveal what they (these men’s publicists) consider to be the best free restaurant bread in America, though they will not ask their principals; I duly log their data.

More often, the exchanges are vexing. The senior director of media relations for the country’s largest food-service lobbying group, the National Restaurant Association—the other NRA—tells me that no one from the group will be able to speak with me about free restaurant bread in any capacity, because it “isn’t a trend that we track.” I ask if someone might be able to chat with me about free restaurant bread anecdotally. “It’s not even something we could talk about anecdotally,” she responds. I ask if she will tell me what, in her personal opinion, is the best free restaurant bread in America. She never replies to me again. (Neither here nor there, but in 2023, an investigation by The New York Times revealed that this NRA used the $15 fee that restaurant workers pay to attend its mandatory food-safety course to fund a nationwide lobbying campaign against minimum-wage increases.)

Almost but Not Actually the Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America are words that, in deference to the integrity of this investigation, I am unable to print immediately followed by the cymbal-washed, experimental-jazz phrase Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits. But such an announcement would be very nearly true. Raw poll numbers situate Red Lobster’s signature bread offering—knobbly, crimpled clods, butter-radiant and freckled with parsley—comfortably in second place. I have personally enjoyed these rolls (introduced in 1992 under the straightforward name Hot Cheese Garlic Bread) so many times that I worry I will struggle to evaluate the biscuits impartially, the same way a friend’s beauty seems to increase over time as your love for her deepens. And so I beg my friend Alice, an Englishwoman for whom Cheddar Bay is mare incognitum, to let me watch her sample her first at our local Red Lobster in Santa Fe.

Our Ultimate Feast is not without some painful moments, such as when, one second before tasting the milky-slurry piña-colada dipping sauce for our Parrot Isle Coconut Shrimp, Alice asks, “What is this?” and then, at the exact same moment I gaily sing, “You’re gonna like it!,” gasps, “Oh my God—that is disgusting.” But her verdict on the Cheddar Bay Biscuits is effusive: “Americans have got a lot of things right regarding the texture of foodstuffs,” she says. “Outstanding.”

The problem is that I want to examine the nubiform texture of these foodstuffs at Red Lobster’s culinary-development center, in Orlando.

My email inquiry is answered by a representative from the PR firm that fields press requests for Red Lobster. I express my desire to visit the offices of the company that purchases a quarter of the lobster and crab caught on boats in North America; she tells me she will “check in with the brand to see what is possible.” What is not possible, I am informed a few days later, is setting foot anywhere inside the corporate lobster den, let alone its gleaming test kitchen. I can enjoy no audience with Damola Adamolekun—who at 35 became the youngest Red Lobster CEO in company history and has spent recent months in a media blitz, promoting the brand’s determination to claw its way back into the hearts of young Black Americans as part of a post-bankruptcy revitalization strategy. Instead, I am invited to submit some questions via email or Zoom to ancillary executives.

By coincidence, in the midst of these faltering negotiations, I meet someone who previously worked with Adamolekun. She says he’s “really cool,” “actually quite lovely”; I should just email him directly, rather than becoming ensnared in PR red tape, like the hundreds of thousands of dolphins, whales, seals, etc. that perish in the Earth’s oceans each year, tangled in trash and fishing gear; here is his email address. I send Adamolekun a short email, in which I attempt to make it clear that I am likewise really cool and actually quite lovely. “I’d like to figure out a fun way to feature Red Lobster in the story,” I say. “I have a couple ideas that would involve you directly.” (Ideas like: eat the biscuits with him, and many other ideas that will hopefully occur to me if he writes back.)

And that is how I learn that Damola Adamolekun is a snitch.

The next day, I receive an email from the same PR rep. “The brand and I connected following your email to Damola,” she writes. “To keep things streamlined and to spare Damola’s inbox, feel free to continue corresponding through me. 😊”

This PR representative is made of steel. Googling her name unearths a YouTube assignment recorded for a college public-relations class a few years ago. In it she coolly addresses the camera while expressing regret for a factory collapse in which, “so far, 1,100 people have lost their lives.” (The crisis-video exercise was apparently inspired by the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, in which 1,134 people were killed while working in a building where clothing was manufactured for retailers including the Children’s Place and Benetton. “I cannot express how sorry I am that this had to happen,” she tells the camera calmly.) I give up trying to penetrate the Red Lobster carapace.

What Is the “Best”?

Let us acknowledge that the “best” bread is influenced by current fashions. Soft white bread was, for much of human history, a yearned-for extravagance. Today, Americans generally regard it as the nastiest, lowest form of bread and stock it in their cheapest grocery stores. Tastes change.

The late 19th century in New York City—soot-blackened, ammoniac with horse urine—spawned a frenzy for breads baked in sanitary conditions. Under the headline “Bread and Filth Cooked Together,” an 1894 exposé by The New York Press devoted several lurid paragraphs to the cockroach kingdoms of cellar kitchens, where, according to state inspectors, vermin “abounded, and as chance willed became part of the salable products.” One baker recounted how an employer had forced him to mix worm-infested, “green and rotten” old pumpernickel into new dough to add volume. The English language “is not sturdy enough,” the article insisted, to convey “the animate and inanimate horrors” that its reporters had uncovered. (“Unclean Men Mix the Dough and Sleep in the Same Rooms”!) Within eight months, public outcry fast-tracked a law implementing minimum hygiene standards, including housing toilets in rooms separate from the ones where dough was kneaded.

By the early 1900s, basement bakeries were being replaced by aboveground factories. The new operations began packaging bread in waxed paper as a visual marker of sanitation. The paraffin-coated paper, moreover, helped bread go stale more slowly by delaying moisture evaporation; new additives incorporated directly into the dough delayed staleness further. Soft white bread that stayed fresh for days, once a product of wild fantasy, became commonplace.

[From the November 1935 issue: Ready-sliced bread]

The rolls served at Texas Roadhouse (third place in the best-free-restaurant-bread contest by raw votes) are indisputably soft and white, roundly square, and immaculate enough to have possibly made themselves with no outside aid. Seven hundred years ago, a king might have eaten such satin-smooth bread on Easter; the Roadhouse gives it out for free, in portions that are infinite. (The first basket accompanies you to your table, like a fellow guest.) The menu items my husband and I order during our visit are remarkable in their own way—no rabbits stealing the last of the November lettuces by moonlight ever chewed a colder salad than our Caesar—but without question, the free rolls, accompanied by honey-cinnamon butter, are the only items really worth paying for (besides the lovely, big Diet Cokes).

If the paschal king were served the bread now in vogue in the United States, he would be apoplectic. People might die. Our most au courant breads would be, to him, peasant fodder—dun-colored, chewy, whole-grain bricks or, even more inexcusable, loaves rendered intentionally sour.

That the “best” bread is prescribed by trend is demonstrated by no bread better than sourdough. Before the 20th century, William Rubel points out, it was considered unwise to eat bread that tasted acidic, biting, or in some way off: “Eating sour foods was credited with the reason that your family had diarrhea.” But, he says, in the 21st century, “the high-end culinary elite in this country is very aggressively against any bread that’s not sourdough.”

After an explosion of interest in the United States during the first spring of COVID, the obsession has continued to flourish, borne, Rubel says, on a memory mirage. In contrast with, say, grits (a dish that has, more or less, been eaten continuously in North America for more than a thousand years), there is, he insists, “no sourdough tradition in the United States.”

In this country, sourdough gained widespread usage in the days of the Gold Rush—as a term to refer not to bread but to people. According to legend, fortune hunters in the western hinterlands, far from a steady supply of baker’s yeast, kept their starters (a bit of fermented dough that could be added to the next day’s mix) warm by sleeping with them, which caused the miners to reek of sour dough.

As a term referring to a type of bread, rather than a type of person, sourdough did not take off before the 1960s, when it was presented as a kitschy, tough-to-chew wilderness food. Alice Waters—the farm-to-table divinity whose altar is every traffic-thronged urban farmers’ market—brought a craving for French-style sourdough back to California after she had it in Paris, where levain has a much longer history. Americans have now “fetishized the sourdough,” Rubel says, so much so that, in their pursuit of tradition, they have bolted out beyond it, into an ahistoric gastronomic delusion: American sourdough, Rubel says, is uniquely astringent. “In France, they don’t want it to taste sour.”

Rubel also tells me that the whole premise of my article is flawed. “I think you need to think about favorite versus best,” he says. He objects to the fact that I am using the terms, essentially, interchangeably: “Obviously, those can be really different.”

Rubel’s pronouncement severs the tether that has been weakly holding me to reality as I attempt to determine the best free restaurant bread in America. I spend an afternoon losing and evading my own mind across a kaleidoscopic astral plane of axiological and epistemological contemplation. What if the true criteria for what makes one bread the best are unknown, not just to me, but to everyone on Earth? What are the chances that my 555 poll takers represent, exclusively, morons and deviants, whose tastes in no way reflect those of normal people? Wouldn’t many people citing the same thing as their favorite necessarily make it, at least in some way, the best?

The Bread That Flies Through the Air

While I attempt to ask as many different sorts of people “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” as possible, my sample—though it encompasses respondents of diverse ages, races, incomes, political persuasions, formal-education levels, points of geographic origin, etc.—is inevitably limited.

Lambert’s Cafe is a remarkable contender for several reasons. Although it has only three locations, in Missouri and Alabama, its bread is among the 10 most-named by respondents: four strangers from the internet, two members of my husband’s family, a museum curator my friend knows, and the chef of another restaurant I visited on my quest. But the most noteworthy thing about Lambert’s Cafe is that it distributes its free bread to diners by lobbing it at them from across the room, forcing them to catch it in their bare hands. It is, as its shockingly robust gift shop makes clear 20 million times over, the “Home of Throwed Rolls.”

I make my pilgrimage to Lambert’s a few days after last Christmas; in Foley, Alabama, families are milling around outside at night in T-shirts and shorts. The restaurant sprawls like a commercial ag shed. Its furnishings are psychotropic, but devoid of the gentle embrace of tranquilizers. Above my booth hang several wooden birdhouses and one birdcage (all vacant), an Alabama license plate, a lithograph of a magician, signs advertising gasoline and Coca-Cola, an illustration of mules in a river, a T-shirt for a wheelchair basketball team framed behind cracked glass, and a metal pictogram that appears to warn of ducks.

Not since stoop-shouldered Irish monks illuminated miracles on vellum in aureate arsenic have more densely inscribed materials than the Lambert’s Cafe menu been produced in the Western Hemisphere. Each page bears more rules and explanations than I have ever seen on a menu or legal document—all the more impressive because each page also contains more pictures. There are portraits of Lambert forebears; cartoons of farm animals making dry allusion to the fact that they are subject to slaughter for their protein; a Zodiac Killer cipher key, elucidating the 12 abbreviations for common allergens that speckle the menu; edicts governing plate sharing and doggie bags; an exhortation to visit the gift shop; a list of salads, all of which contain meat; the yowl “SLICE O’HOG From the left side and cut fresh every day!”; and many other elements, besides.

The one that soothes me so totally that it sends all the adrenaline molecules in my body drifting away on a blood lazy river is a red-text promise: “ALL YOU CAN DRINK” soft drinks. My Diet Coke is served in the restaurant’s signature mug, which, I learn later, while typing these very words, holds 64 ounces of liquid, and which, I also learn—upon Googling 64 oz x 2 to gallons—means I drank an entire gallon of Diet Coke in one sitting? No???

Lambert’s Cafe ovens turn out an average of 520 dozen rolls a day, for a total of more than 2 million five-inch rolls a year. On the night of my visit, the roll warden—the hlāfweard—is a young man in heatproof gloves with the salient biceps and keen sight of a baseball player. Patrons signal that they would like a roll to be hurled at them by raising a hand in the air. The accuracy of the bread thrower’s aim is spectacular, especially considering that his mental calculations must incorporate a flash assessment of each customer’s degree of hand-eye coordination. In the nearly two hours I spend in the restaurant, I see only one roll miss its mark, obviously due to catcher error.

These rolls are, I discover when one collides with my chest cavity, as hot as meteorites slamming into the Earth. They are, by far, the hottest part of my meal, which includes numerous cooked items. The rolls—big and bulbous, with a dense and super-soft interior; faintly sweet and just east of gummy; the tranquil hue of hot-dog buns—are fine but not great. I would absolutely go back. Terrific big sodas!

The Bread of the Appalachian Dancing Bear

Do you know what I love most about my spreadsheet containing 555 replies to the question “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” (Apart from the fact that it has revealed to me, and soon to you, the hitherto hidden knowledge of what is quite possibly—and in fact I really do believe—the best free restaurant bread in America.)

I love seeing what 555 people said. I love the American optimism, which even more American confidence transforms into certainty, that every respondent is, or at least could be, possessed of the knowledge of the best free restaurant bread in America. I love the fact that no matter where you travel within the 50 states and Washington, D.C., you are never far from what at least one person considers the best free restaurant bread in America.

I love the town names—Big Indian, New York (named for a Munsee Lenape man, allegedly more than 7 feet tall, who lived there); Bee Cave, Texas (named for the honeybees—Mexican honeybees, allegedly—who lived there). I love the chance that the best free restaurant bread in America is to be found on an island off the coast of South Carolina with a population of 130. I love contemplating the food court inside the Pentagon—site of a Lebanese Taverna, whose warm pita is nominated as the best free restaurant bread in America by a man eating at Netflix Bites, and by the chef José Andrés. I love the outrageous-but-not-impossible prospect that the best free restaurant bread in America might be handed out by an oyster bar in Omaha, which is almost as far from an oyster bed as it is physically possible to be in America.

Cafe Capriccio. Sanitary Fish Market and Restaurant. Silver Saddle. Spindleshanks. Because I lack the budget and employer patience to journey to each of the 226 restaurants that received only a single vote, I determine, instead, to visit just one. This will serve as a spot check, to assess the quality of random strangers’ nominations. Having no better means of selecting the spot, I pick the one that has the most charming name. This is how I end up driving into the woods—fully into the woods—of Townsend, Tennessee, to dine at Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro.

Dancing Bear’s entrance is an illusion of carved pine and glass. On approach, its doors appear to depict the arches and stained-glass windows of a Gothic cathedral; close up, the woodwork resolves into the sloping tree branches of a humble forest scene. The dining room, on a cold winter night, is a cozy hall abundant with wood, lit and warmed by an immense stacked-stone fireplace.

The free bread arrives on a slate slab: two wedges of corn bread drizzled with sorghum syrup, next to a ruffled dollop of whisper-light butter. The bad news: Corn bread is just not my favorite. Therefore, I do not believe Dancing Bear’s corn bread is the best free restaurant bread in America. The good news: If you love corn bread, this might well be the best free restaurant bread in America, to your misguided taste. It is fathoms above other corn breads. It does not crumble into infinite particles when I bite it. The wedges leave wet sorghum smacks on the slate. In fact, I am dribbling sorghum all over the table. What decadent madness, to entrust every diner with such a sticky substance. I request more bread and, using my trowel-shaped knife, coat it in butter as thickly as a mason mortaring a chimney. I eat a knifeful of the salty butter alone because I am a wild animal. The bread is so good, it makes me giddy. Is corn bread my favorite?

(Eventually, I learn that I just happened to be there on a corn-bread evening. The restaurant also serves two varieties of focaccia.)

The rest of my meal—roasted-garlic-and-herb-crusted beef-tenderloin tips with local mushrooms, apple-cider gelée, Granny Smith apples, and pickled cranberries; steamed Moosabec mussels—is so delicious as to border on the hallucinatory. The room thrums with conviviality, pierced, now and then, by shrieks of intoxicated laughter. I cannot shake the thought that, when people imagine a perfect little restaurant, this dining room is what they are searching for. When, as I mull dessert options, my waiter tells me that I may also just help myself to free s’mores outside, I wonder how this reasonably priced restaurant (my meal, with dessert—and free s’mores—comes to just over $60 before tip) can possibly make money.

Datassential, an analytics company that monitors the food-and-beverage industry, uses a representative sample of 4,800 establishments to keep tabs on restaurant-menu trends across the United States. In 2012, when the company began tracking the practice of charging for bread, 6 percent of restaurants did it. Last year, 36 percent of restaurant menus in the sample offered some form of bread as an appetizer, and 41 percent of menus listed it as a side. Seemingly every newspaper or magazine story about the increasing popularity of “bread courses” features at least one chef, owner, or manager explaining that a restaurant can no longer afford to give bread away. I want to know how Dancing Bear pulls it off.

The restaurant’s bread cost per table is “really not that much,” says Dancing Bear’s executive chef, Jeff Carter—about 40 cents, he estimates. The vice president of operations, Houston Oldham, tells me that has “very little effect on our bottom line.”

“If somebody’s telling you that they are scared of having bread on their menu because it costs too much,” Oldham says, “there is a cost of pain for your guests too: a cost of a bad experience when you don’t have a way to fill the gaps between courses.”

And, Carter says, the bread enhances the festive atmosphere. “We kind of consider this our gift to the guest.”

The other thing that Dancing Bear gets just right: nice big Diet Cokes in stout glass jars. And they keep them coming.

The Restaurant in America That I Hate, That I Will Never Go Back to, That Has Made of Me an Enemy for Life Due to Its Psychotic Soda Policy

A confession: Throughout this investigation, I nurture an unscientific—though, I am fairly certain, forgivable because ultimately correct—bias. Although it receives just one vote (mine), I remain confident that the bread that inspired this quest truly is the best free restaurant bread in America. A week after my trip to the earthly paradise known as Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro, I fly to Atlanta—to the steak house Bones—to eat it.

Here is what the restaurant does beautifully on my visit: the bread. It is a boule cut into four wedges. Every possible shade of golden retriever, from pale cream to the deepest cognac orange, is represented by some centimeter of this rotund loaf; its floured bottom is the dark brown of all of their paw pads. Its crust is a texture known to old-fashioned Yankees as cat ice—the brittle sheet, so thin that a cat’s paw could shatter it, of an iced-over puddle. On very close inspection, the irregular latticework of air pockets inside the chewy crumb resembles a network of semi-translucent cobwebs. It has no dominant taste other than the flavor of the verriest bread—simple, warm, perfect bread—which it possesses in extraordinary quantity.

Here is what the restaurant does poorly: serves Diet Cokes in glasses that are, I’m going to say, no bigger than a thimble inside a sewing kit inside a dollhouse and, I am astounded and appalled to discover upon receiving my bill, charges you $4 for each and every single one you drink. (Having previously dined here only as my husband’s brilliant and visually stunning dream date, I had apparently never looked at a bill at this restaurant.) Over the course of one evening, I spend a total of $16 on Diet Cokes. Worth every penny, of course—1,600 of them—but I’ll never go back.

I award this restaurant negative 10 million stars.

The Chain-Restaurant Popularity Paradox

Can the best free restaurant bread in America come from a chain restaurant? According to raw poll votes, the answer is yes. Chain restaurants claim nearly every spot in the top 10 of my poll. On the one hand, this is to be expected; people are more likely to have been exposed to the bread at a restaurant with 940 locations than at a restaurant with just one. On the other hand, although chains are named most often in the responses, the number of a restaurant’s locations do not predict its overall popularity; Olive Garden, with the most locations, receives the fifth-most votes.

I email Sir David Spiegelhalter, a professor emeritus of statistics at the University of Cambridge and a former president of the Royal Statistical Society, to see if he might suggest a math equation to derive meaning from my helter-skelter data. “If a restaurant had 10 customers, and 8 thought 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,” he writes back. I concur with my associate. The problem: To weigh the number of votes a restaurant received against the number of that restaurant’s customers, I would need to find reliable estimates of each restaurant’s customers per year. “But I don’t know where you get the footfall data from!” replies Sir David, now as hopelessly lost as I.

I decide to calculate the rate of bestness by analyzing the two variables I know for certain: the number of each bread slinger’s locations and the number of nominations it received.

Dividing votes (40) by location (215) gives the Cheesecake Factory—the restaurant that received the most total votes—a bestness rate of 0.19, or the equivalent of 19 votes per 100 restaurants. Lambert’s Cafe earns a bestness rate of 2.66—the equivalent of 266 votes per 100 restaurants. While imperfect, this method at least does not penalize restaurants for failing to be national chains—though, for the purposes of the poll, I accept all nominations at face value. If a person tells me they believe the best free restaurant bread in America can be had at Olive Garden, I believe them. I am open to the possibility.

William Rubel is not open to the possibility. When I mention that table bread, these days, is most reliably found at restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory and Texas Roadhouse, he is staggered that I’m even considering them as possible purveyors of the best free restaurant bread in America. “It never occurred to me that that’s what you’d be referring to,” he says.

“There is no best bread, in an elite cultural sense, at these places you’ve mentioned—which are places that people like me have never been.” He “cannot imagine why I would ever walk through the door” of such a place. He would “never go to” them “under any circumstances.”

I imagine a circumstance: What if a Red Lobster is all that’s around?

“I don’t eat at chain restaurants,” he says. “I eat at artisan restaurants.”

What if he were driving, I insist, and there were no other options. Would he starve?

“That’s why I don’t travel the United States,” he says.

Red Lobster, Rubel explains, is “what I would read as sort of down-market. I’m sorry—you go there.” (Only when it’s open!) “But it’s not going to Chez Panisse.” The amount of money possessed by the average Red Lobster patron is likely less than the average diner at a restaurant evaluated by the James Beard Foundation, he observes. Therefore, he points out—not unreasonably—their concepts of “value” may differ.

It will be impossible, Rubel thinks, for me to identify the best free restaurant bread in America if I’m willing to entertain nominations for chain restaurants. “Because, I’m sorry, those factories are not producing anything that would be called ‘best’ by any objective standard—probably,” he says.

However, “brown bread” from the Cheesecake Factory is not only the most popular answer in the poll; it also tends to come to people quickly. Helen Rosner, a food correspondent for The New Yorker, sums up the tastes of the nation even without being privy to the polling data. “Obviously the Cheesecake Factory’s brown bread is the gold standard of free restaurant bread,” she writes to me in an email—and, in the same heartbeat, presents a bang-on psychological profile of the country’s citizens. “It’s distinct,” she writes. “Dark brown bread shows up pretty rarely in most people’s daily lives, so it both feels special, and has the competitive advantage of not being subconsciously compared to near-infinite other breads of similar complexion.”

One January afternoon, I travel to the smallest Cheesecake Factory in America—the flagship location, in Beverly Hills—to break brown bread with Jay Hinson, the company’s senior vice president of restaurant-kitchen operations. The average Cheesecake Factory location serves about 7,500 “brown breads”—they are “whole-wheat baguettes,” technically, drearily—a week, plus 6,800 of the less-remarked-upon sourdough baguettes that accompany them in the same basket. All of the bread is baked off-site—the sourdough at facilities in New Jersey and Los Angeles, the brown bread in Chicago—frozen, and shipped to the restaurants, where it is rebaked to order. The Cheesecake Factory declined to share any details about the amount of money it spends creating thousands of breads for hundreds of restaurants every week, but at one point in our conversation, Hinson observes, “It is very expensive to have a bread program that is free.” At another, he tosses out a hypothetical scenario in which a restaurant company might spend “$10 million” on bread, which seems like an absurd number to chance upon as a totally random example; make of that what you will.

Hinson, an amiable man with six daughters, began working at the Cheesecake Factory as a line cook in Westbury, New York, 28 years ago, and now flies to Chile to meet salmon vendors, and Turkey to meet branzino vendors, and Sweden to watch German-made ovens churn out pasta and steak simultaneously, with an eye ever fixed on the horizon of potential Cheesecake Factory refinements. He is loquacious only about the science of cooking, but also possessed of a striking corporate verbal tic, in which he substitutes the word opportunities for problems : “If your equipment, after five years, has opportunities, you have to place service calls.” “We’ll meet with my team and discuss any opportunities that happened the week prior. Did we solve them all?” Many customers “had some opportunities with” a previous sourdough iteration that was unacceptably crusty.

The miniature whole-wheat baguette placed on our table is the rich brown of life-giving Diet Coke. It is warm, of course; soft, but with a firm crust; covered in a dense constellation of oats, for “a little bit of texture,” Hinson says. It is sweet in the way that adults like things to be—marginally—and mellowed further with the addition of salted Grassland butter. I sample it as I sample everything: like a black hole. I consume two baskets of baguettes solo; Hinson seldom eats free restaurant bread. I would like it to be sweeter, or saltier, or both. But it feels virtuous to be eating something at least moderately healthy, and so blatantly brown.

Except, Rubel informs me (of course), brown bread is not especially healthy. “It’s not?” I ask. “In real life?” Rubel replies. “No.”

I think of Rubel, and his self-sentenced ignorance of the delights of Red Lobster, a few weeks later, when I visit my father. Measured by the amount of joy it is capable of producing, I’d told Rubel, “a Cheddar Bay Biscuit at Red Lobster is pretty good.”

We moved my father cross-country to his apartment in Santa Fe a few years ago, after my mother died unexpectedly. I can tell before I’ve set one foot inside his door that the man has treated himself to a Red Lobster Ultimate Feast. “Ohhh, it smells like lobster in here!” I exclaim; he has been feeling poorly, and I have taken, recently, to entering his apartment with the verve of a cartoon character. My father is in his recliner, the Ultimate Feast sprawled out before him: A snow crab’s severed Jurassic limbs jut over the edge of his wooden tray alongside a half-eaten Cheddar Bay Biscuit.

I am happy to see that he’s summoned an Ultimate Feast for himself, because a couple of weeks earlier, he told me that food doesn’t “taste like food” to him lately. But I realize that he hasn’t made his characteristic dent in the spread.

“What does it taste like?” I ask.

“It kind of tastes like sawdust,” Dad says. “Even the biscuits didn’t taste good, and I love their biscuits.” He is so darkly fascinated by this—Cheddar Bay Biscuits’ novel flavorlessness—that he repeats the observation a minute later. “It’s amazing,” he says, “because I usually love their biscuits.” He encourages me to take the extra biscuit home, which of course I do.

My dad will die a few days later, while I am working on this story. This conversation about Cheddar Bay Biscuits will turn out to be one of our last.

The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

Based on survey responses, Americans seem capable of genuinely convincing themselves that they have just eaten the best free restaurant bread in America anytime they are given gratis bread that is warm or hot. This is not just psychology, Kantha Shelke, a food scientist, tells me; “it’s actually thermodynamics.” Because aroma is “80 percent of the flavor,” Shelke explains, and warm bread releases volatile aroma compounds into the air, “the warm bread literally tastes better to us.” (She also tells me that, short of seizing a Cheesecake Factory and transforming it into your private residence, you will never, ever be able to re-create the exact taste of its brown bread at home. Commercial enterprises have access to oxidizing agents, dough-conditioning enzymes, and surfactants that “simply are not available to home bakers.”)

Apart from temperature, pillowy, soft, and sweet are the most common adjectives applied to favorite breads in people’s responses, followed by crispy and crusty. Small efforts to enhance presentation, plus novel shapes and flavors⁠—bread served on a black linen napkin, for example, or apple fritters—seem to pay off big in terms of memorability. There are some quirky regional trends: Many Californians are able to name the exact local bakery from which their favorite restaurant bread is sourced. Millennials from Massachusetts are inordinately likely to at least mention a pizza chain called Bertucci’s that, I am informed over and over again, gives young diners raw dough to play with at the table. Immediate family members frequently identify the same bread as their favorite, as if this has been determined by group vote. Many people can only recall breads eaten as children.

Two restaurants are named often enough in the poll to reach the top 10 without being chains: Parc, in Philadelphia, and Le Diplomate, in Washington, D.C. These restaurants, both operated by the Philadelphia restaurateur Stephen Starr, turn out to serve the exact same bread. If, for the purposes of calculation, we consider them a single restaurant with two outposts, they receive the equivalent of 1,150 votes per 100 restaurants. There are other, no doubt smarter ways to manipulate the data. And, of course, there remains the possibility that the poll has demonstrated only the peculiar tastes of morons and deviants—with the exception of the gracious Stephen King. But you can’t keep fiddling with the numbers of your bread poll forever. At a certain point, you have to rejoin the world.

The wicker baskets at Parc, a French bistro on Rittenhouse Square, contain three varieties of bread tucked into wax paper—but the only one people talk about is the cranberry-walnut loaf. It is fitting that the best free restaurant bread in America should contain cranberries; they are indigenous to North America. If you were going to design a restaurant bread specifically intended to appeal to 21st-century Americans, you might well create this exact foodstuff: It is a very chewy sourdough, with a thick, crispy crust that is chocolate brown in color—practically the same hue as the Cheesecake Factory bread. The dried cranberries add so much sweetness that some people mistake them for cherries, but oats and nuts check the suavity before it runs amok. In fact, the bread has an Everlasting Gobstopper–ish ability to harmoniously convey the sensation of eating an entire meal, with dessert, in every bite. It is assembled from familiar ingredients, but unusual enough to be memorable. The terrazzo arrangement of nut and berry is beautiful by candlelight; the crumb appears studded with gems.

Starr estimates that, at a cost of about 60 cents a basket, with 10,000 customers a week, Parc gives away slightly less than half a million dollars in free bread every year—a figure that does not include butter. The kitchen turns out about 1,500 loaves a day, of which 200 are the cranberry-walnut. The brief that Starr gave his chef and baker when the restaurant opened was: “Just come up with the greatest breadbasket ever.” The goal, he tells me, was to create a breadbasket so satisfying that “you didn’t have to spend any money. You could just come in here, order the breadbasket, a glass of wine, and you’re good for the next five, six hours. We just wanted it to be joyful.”

“From a financial standpoint, it was the dumbest move we ever made,” he says. “It costs so much and people eat so much of it.” He’s come close to charging for it, he says. But “the moment I think I’m going to do it, I go, ‘I can’t do it.’ ”

My visit to Parc, a few weeks after my father’s death, is the first time I go to Philly, his hometown, without his knowledge. I am seated near a family: a mother, father, and college-age daughter. I can hardly look at them, even as I can’t keep my eyes off them. Veiled by Parc’s low lighting, I allow myself to sink into a luxuriant, tear-flooded sadness. My parents will never again shout to be heard in a winter-crowded restaurant, or identify the cheapest (Mom) or most expensive (Dad) entrée. They will never again call, into a McDonald’s drive-through speaker, the beverage-order coda that I have never heard anyone outside my immediate family utter: “And a cup of free water.” Before my check arrives, I request a to-go box of just cranberry-walnut bread, and am floored by the quantity of pieces I receive in a swish brown bag. I wish I could tell my parents about it. Just knowing it was possible to receive so much bread for free would have delighted them.

William Rubel’s profoundest anxiety about my article, I learn, is that I will inadvertently denigrate another culture’s bread—by suggesting that a yeasted roll is inherently superior to, say, chapati. He fears this more than the possibility that I might assert in print that Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits taste better than the bread served at Chez Panisse. (“I guess I need to eat it,” he says, catching himself declaring, with no firsthand knowledge, that the table bread at Red Lobster could not possibly be superior. I will extend this same grace to the bread at Chez Panisse.) “You’ll need to find some way to clarify that you aren’t saying these are the best breads in the world,” he tells me. “These are what people you talked to in America at this time considered the best.”

“There’s no recipe for the best bread,” Rubel says. “The best bread is written in each person’s heart.”

I disagree. The best bread—at least the best free restaurant bread in America—is the aforementioned cranberry-walnut loaf.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Donald Trump wants to stop the renewable energy revolution. But he can’t — it will continue to advance around the world because the economics and the science are compelling. Trump can, however, ensure that the revolution passes us by. And the big geopolitical winner from Trump’s hostility to the energy revolution will be China, which dominates the production of renewable-energy infrastructure.

Furthermore, the China-led energy future will arrive ahead of schedule thanks to the debacle in Iran.

Soaring oil and gas prices, combined with the threat of shortages, have driven home the riskiness of relying on fossil fuels. The New York Times had a striking graphic about electricity prices in Europe:

France and Spain, which mostly generate electricity from non-fossil sources (including nuclear power in France), have been partially insulated from the war’s side effects. Italy, heavily reliant on gas, has suffered badly.

Also, Trump’s decision to counter Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by blockading the Strait of Hormuz surely adds to the perception that relying on U.S. oil and LNG, which is what countries will have to do if they don’t turn to solar and wind, isn’t safe. Who can guarantee that an erratic America won’t try to weaponize other countries’ dependence on our energy?

So Trump’s adventurism in Iran has sparked a global rush to invest in solar power, wind power, and the batteries that make renewable energy work 24/7.

And where will the world procure most of the renewable energy equipment it seeks? From China. China is the workshop of the world. Its manufacturing sector is larger than those of the U.S., Japan, Germany and South Korea combined.

While China is strong in many industries, it is utterly dominant in electrotech, the cluster of industries — solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles — at the heart of the renewables revolution. Or as the Wall Street Journal puts it, China’s “green industrial complex” rules. China accounts for more than 80 percent of global production in all these sectors with the exception of wind turbines. In the wind turbine sector, China’s share is “only” 60 percent because Europe retains a significant role.

Why does China dominate electrotech? Industrial policy — deliberate government promotion of these industries — is part of the answer. But a key driver of China’s success has been the speed with which the Chinese themselves have been adopting renewable energy, creating a huge domestic market that provides their electrotech industries with big advantages even in foreign markets.

There’s a widespread, completely erroneous belief among opponents of renewable energy that China produces electrotech equipment but doesn’t use the stuff itself. Speaking at the World Economic Forum three months ago, Trump declared that

China makes almost all of the windmills and yet I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China. Did you ever think of that? That’s a good way of looking at it. They’re smart, China’s very smart. They make them, they sell them for a fortune. They sell them to the stupid people that buy them, but they don’t use them themselves. They put up a couple of big wind farms, but they don’t use them, they just put them up to show people what they could look like. They don’t spin; they don’t do anything. They use a thing called coal mostly.

China does, in fact, still burn a lot of coal. But its use of wind and solar power is rising rapidly. The demand for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries depends on the increase in renewable generation rather than its level. And China’s growth in renewable energy, both wind and solar, has been larger than that of the rest of the world combined:

Source: Our World in Data

China also accounts for more than 60 percent of world sales of electric cars:

Source: Our World in Data

And electrotech is exactly the kind of industry in which a large domestic market translates into success at exporting into other markets. For all of the component industries of electrotech are marked by steep learning curves: the more a country produces, the better it gets at producing. By dominating electrotech now, China is gaining experience and know-how that no other country can match. It is also creating an industrial ecosystem of specialized suppliers that, again, no other nation will be able to rival. And the low costs generated by this industrial ecosystem gives China a huge advantage in global markets.

Under President Biden the United States took much needed steps toward developing its own electrotech sectors, notably batteries and electric vehicles. It also sought to accelerate the growth of renewable energy in general. But not only has the Trump administration canceled all of Biden’s renewable energy programs, it is also actively trying to block private commercial investments in renewable energy.

By the time America frees itself from Trump’s fossil fuel obsession, if it ever does, China’s lead in the manufacture of renewables will probably be insurmountable.

Now, a world that relies on China for solar panels and batteries isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s certainly less risky for most nations, politically and economically, than relying on LNG imports from Qatar — or, at this point, the United States.

Furthermore, although the Trump administration is full of climate denialists, climate change is continuing. March was a record warm month in the United States:

Given the rate at which the planet is warming, a shift away from fossil fuels can’t come fast enough. Where the equipment needed to make that shift happen was manufactured is a secondary issue.

Yet it’s sad to watch this country sabotage itself and cede the most important industry of the future to China. In doing so, we make ourselves poorer, technologically backward, and less influential in a world that is speeding towards the energy revolution. In the end, we aren’t just burning fossil fuels; we’re also burning our future.

MUSICAL CODA

If you made money last year, you will almost certainly owe taxes by April 15. And if you made a lot, you will probably owe a lot. That’s true for most Americans—just not the richest ones.

And if that makes you angry, you’re justified in feeling that way. But the solution you’re hearing from a lot of politicians at the state and federal levels—wealth taxes—isn’t the answer. Instead of introducing a new, difficult-to-administer, and potentially unconstitutional tax, we should do something simpler: Bring billionaires back into the income-tax system. Believe it or not, the way to do this starts with abolishing the estate tax.

You probably think that sounds nuts. But the estate tax hardly raises any money—less than 0.5 percent of federal revenue—and yet at the same time makes it seem like the rich pay more in taxes than they do. Our current jumble of tax rules, with separate taxes for income and estates, stokes confusion and misunderstanding.

The tax system that we currently have—a progressive income tax with an additional estate tax—was enacted after the Gilded Age and was specifically designed to impose the greatest taxes on the rich. Over many decades, the richest Americans have cultivated a three-step tax-avoidance playbook.

The first step: Don’t take a big salary. The greatest tax burden is imposed on those who get paid for work. A Californian earning a $10 million salary would owe more than $5 million in combined federal and state taxes. And payroll taxes are imposed on even the lowest earners. A self-employed California Uber driver earning $60,000 would still owe almost $15,000 in taxes.

[Rogé Karma: Buy, borrow, die]

That is why Warren Buffett’s combined salary and bonus was capped at $100,000 for decades. Jeff Bezos’s was set at $82,000 a year, low enough to make him eligible to claim the child tax credit (which he did!). Many others, including Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison, are $1-a-year men. They are all low-salaried and still well compensated. The great bulk of their pay comes from the growing value of their stock. The magnitude of this growth is staggering. Since 2023, Buffett’s wealth has increased by $35 billion, Bezos’s by more than $100 billion, Zuckerberg’s by more than $150 billion, and Elon Musk’s by $500 billion.

By forgoing a salary and instead relying on the value of their shares, these individuals shift their tax bill from the income- and payroll-tax rules applicable to wage earners to the capital-gains rules applicable to investors. Their tax rates are lower: The maximum rate for long-term gains is 23.8 percent, once you factor in a surcharge for high earners known as the net-investment-income tax. But the greatest benefit accrues to those who avoid stock sales, and thereby taxes, altogether. This is the second step of the tax-avoidance playbook.

Deferring taxes on profits until a property is sold is the greatest tax advantage in our system. In the United States, this lets investors and their heirs (and their heirs) avoid taxes indefinitely. By using stock and other properties as collateral for loans, the very wealthy can enjoy the financial benefits of their wealth without the burden of taxes. Many of the richest Americans—including Ellison and Musk—support their lifestyle this way.

An obscure Securities and Exchange Commission rule change in 1982 dramatically increased this opportunity for tax avoidance. Before then, the only way that an American company could share profits with its stockholders was by issuing dividends. For much of the 20th century (though not anymore), dividends were subject to high tax rates, similar to the ones imposed on salaries. People who owned lots of stock typically received lots of dividends and therefore paid lots of income tax.

Beginning in November 1982, the SEC ruled that companies using their profits to buy back their own stock would be given safe harbor from price-manipulation investigations. Buybacks reduce the number of outstanding shares, which tends to boost a stock’s price. The effect of this was to make taxes on these profits optional, because shareholders who did not sell could enjoy tax-free growth indefinitely.

The third step used by rich Americans to avoid income taxes is by acquiring money the old-fashioned way: through inheritance. Someone who inherits $10 million—or even $100 million, or $100 billion—doesn’t even have to report it on their income-tax return. The exclusion from income tax for gifts, life insurance, and inheritances is based on the assumption that a well-functioning estate tax is addressing these assets. This is no longer the case.

In part because of a powerful lobbying campaign funded by 18 of the country’s richest families, much of the public has come to see the estate tax as an immoral “death tax.” Congress has not moved to close any of the loopholes that wealthy Americans and their tax planners have developed to avoid or minimize payment of the estate tax since 1990. As a result, the tax has become functionally eliminated, even though it still appears on the books.

Instead of introducing a wealth tax or trying to reimpose the estate tax to capture the more than $50 trillion in stocks, real estate, art, and other assets owned by the richest 1 percent of Americans, tax reformers should agree to abolish the estate tax. Its reputation has been too tarnished for it to be restored. Calling “uncle” on the estate tax for good would create an opportunity to introduce a simpler and more coherent system that would tax inheritances as well as investment gains using income tax, instead of through a separate system.

To ensure that the person who earns investment gains pays the tax bill, taxes should be paid on gains whenever property is transferred—not just by sale, but by gift or at death as well. A rule like this has worked in Canada for decades. It will work here too.

Without an estate tax, the government can bring gifts, inheritances, and life insurance into the income-tax system, where they rightly belong. Unlike the estate tax, an inheritance tax would not be assessed on the assets of a dead person. It would instead tax the person who receives the money, just as we tax nearly all other acquisitions of wealth.

[Annie Lowrey: How the richest people in America avoid paying taxes]

The income-tax system is designed to be a broad-based system imposed on—in the words of the tax code—“all income from whatever source derived.” This is why lottery winnings, money found on the street, and even barter exchanges are subject to income tax.

This does not mean that every dollar received as a gift or an inheritance needs to be taxed. The system could provide exclusions for education, transfers to spouses, health care, and annual gifts, perhaps using the current $19,000-a-year exclusion for gift taxes. We could make special accommodations for family farms and businesses. In addition, each person could be allowed to inherit $1 million, even $2 million, tax-free. Heirs receiving more than the tax-free limit would pay ordinary income-tax rates, just as lottery winners do. Life insurance, too, would be taxed to the person who receives them.

This expansion of the income tax would raise money not just for the federal government, but also for the majority of states, which use the federal definition of taxable income as a starting point for their own income-tax rules.

These reforms would create a simpler, fairer tax system, wherein the wealthy pay taxes based on the profits they earn and the income they acquire, not the complicated web of loopholes they currently navigate.

Gerontocracy has always thrived in undemocratic places—Communist people’s republics, Gulf monarchies—where only death could pry power from the ruling elders. American gerontocracy is exceptional for being freely elected. Donald Trump will soon be an octogenarian, and is president in part because the preceding octogenarian, Joe Biden, did not want to admit his senescence. The median senator is 65, and the oldest, 92-year-old Chuck Grassley, has not ruled out running for reelection in 2028. The typical general-election voter is a spry 52, but in primary elections, which decide the majority of political contests, that number rises to 59. Half of all the money donated to political campaigns comes from Americans age 66 and older.

Although political gerontocracy has operated overtly, the rising economic power of the elderly has escaped much notice. Over the past 40 or so years, American wealth has grown ever more concentrated among the oldest generations. In 1989, Americans over age 55 held 56 percent of it; today they hold 74 percent. During that same period, the share of wealth held by Americans under 40 has shrunk by nearly half, from 12 to 6.6 percent. The color of money is now gray.

Much of this shift is the result of demographic change: 18 percent of Americans are senior citizens today, up from 13 percent in 1990. But even at the household level, Americans over 55 have accrued wealth more rapidly than those who are younger. Among those 75 and older, the numbers are particularly striking. In 1983, their household net worth was only slightly above the national average; by 2022, it was 55 percent higher.

For nearly a century, some of the central debates in American politics have been over inequalities—between rich and poor, male and female, Black and white. When the Baby Boomers were children, older Americans were widely viewed as vulnerable. “Fifty percent of the elderly exist below minimum standards of decency, and this is a figure much higher than that for any other age group,” Michael Harrington wrote in his 1962 book The Other America, often credited with inspiring the War on Poverty. “This is no country for old men.”

Three years later, in 1965, Medicare was created. A major expansion of Social Security followed in 1972. These changes were remarkably effective: The share of elderly people living in poverty dropped by more than one-third within a decade. But because these programs are broad-based entitlements, they have transferred huge sums to the prosperous, too. The portfolios of that latter group, meanwhile, have been swelled by a rising stock market and rising home values, outcomes that may not be entirely replicable for younger generations. As a result of all of these factors, intergenerational inequality between old and young has not merely reversed. It has accelerated.

Most current Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries will receive more from the program over their lifetime than they paid in taxes, and the extra money will necessarily come from the pockets of younger generations. The two programs now pay out more than $2 trillion a year, more than one-third of all federal expenditures. Their sustainability was a subject of major debate during the Obama years, when the national debt was much lower than it is today and interest rates on that debt were close to zero. Financially, the matter is more urgent now. The trust funds for Social Security benefits and Medicare’s hospital insurance are projected to become insolvent in roughly seven years.

[Lyman Stone: The Boomers ruined everything]

Yet even noticing the looming threats has become taboo for the two major political parties. One of Trump’s shrewdest political realizations was that entitlement reform—once a priority for fiscal conservatives—was a losing issue. Instead, he has pledged not to touch entitlement spending and lavished seniors with even more government money. His One Big Beautiful Bill Act created a special $6,000 tax deduction for seniors, which will cost taxpayers $91 billion over the next four years. The same bill cuts $1 trillion in spending on Medicaid, which is expected to leave some 5 million working-age Americans uninsured.

This bodes poorly for intergenerational peace. Respect for elders is being replaced by resentment of elders. A majority of young Americans no longer believe in the American dream. Many Millennials and Gen Zers expressly blame the Boomers for that, accusing them of hoarding wealth, jobs, and power. Many of these accusations are inchoate, but they are not entirely baseless.

The best rebuttal to the gerontocratic critique is that young Americans do not appreciate how good they have it. Although people of working age possess a smaller share of the national wealth, they are richer in absolute terms than Boomers were at their age. The median 35-year-old Millennial earns 38 percent more in post-tax, inflation-adjusted income than the typical Boomer did at the same age, according to research by the economist Kevin Corinth. Gen Zers have only begun their careers, but so far they are earning more than their Millennial predecessors. This trend shows up in wealth statistics, too. When Boomers were between the ages of 25 and 43, they had a median net worth of $58,000 (in 2022 dollars); Millennials at the same stage of life had a net worth of $85,000. So why are young Americans so depressed about their economic future?

[From the May 2023 issue: Jean M. Twenge on the myth of the broke Millennial]

The pathologies of the housing market are one reason. The typical home today costs five times the median annual income, up from 3.5 times the median annual income in 1984. Boomers got lucky: When they were young, they could afford to buy houses that then appreciated fantastically in value. But that luck was arguably manufactured by Washington, which engineered the rise of 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages and created tax deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes.

These government subsidies still exist today. But even with them, younger Americans cannot buy houses at the same rate that Boomers did. In a paper titled “Giving Up,” the economists Seung Hyeong Lee and Younggeun Yoo predicted that Millennials will enter retirement with much lower homeownership rates than the generations before them—74 percent compared with 84 percent for Boomers. Some 15 percent of Millennials, they noted, had already given up on homeownership by age 30. These Millennials, they found, work less, spend more on credit, and are more likely to buy cryptocurrency or make other risky investments. Feeling locked out of owning a house casts a malaise—one made worse by the anxiety that the welfare state they currently support will become stingier when they eventually need it.

Older generations used the levers of government to create this situation. In high-cost cities, the building of new homes and apartment complexes is often derailed in local planning and zoning-board meetings. In 2019, the political scientists Katherine Levine Einstein, Maxwell Palmer, and David Glick published a study examining who attended such meetings in the Boston area. The attendees, they found, were likely to be longtime homeowners who oppose new development. Preventing construction kept the value of their assets high—at the expense of younger, prospective homeowners.

Homeowner preferences hard-coded into state constitutions decades ago now further sustain the gerontocracy. In 1978, Californians voted by referendum for Proposition 13, which severely limited the property taxes that existing homeowners would have to pay—so long as they remained in place. In one study, the law was estimated to have caused a 15 percent increase in California housing prices all by itself. As longtime homeowners profited, the lost tax revenue forced reductions in school spending.

California is not unique, and housing is not the only means by which the older generations have effectively pulled up the ladder behind them. Preferences for the elderly over the young are a fixture of public budgets nationwide. Across all government programs—federal, state, and local—$2 are now spent on seniors for every $1 spent on children.

According to Tim Vlandas, an Oxford political economist, advanced democracies around the world are reaching the point of “gerontonomia”—his term for a stagnating political economy set up to prioritize elderly citizens. These citizens punish their elected governments for inflation, which lessens the value of savings and pension payments. They are much more tolerant of unemployment, because they no longer work; slow growth, because their wealth has already accumulated; and high public debt, because their descendants will pay it. The result, Vlandas argues, is lower wage growth for those still working, and also worse outcomes for their children, as a result of lower social investment over the course of their lives.

Graying democracies everywhere have made generous pension commitments that they are struggling to maintain. In the United Kingdom, the “triple lock,” a rule that in most years mandates that state pension payments increase more than inflation, seems politically impossible to change. In France, people protested for months against Emmanuel Macron in 2023 over the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64.

Yet these challenges are especially acute in America. Because Social Security still has a trust fund to draw on, voters may not realize that benefits already exceed contributions. But this fund, which stood at $2.9 trillion in 2021, is on pace to dwindle to zero by about 2033. The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown will hasten the arrival of exhaustion day by cutting the number of tax-paying workers who support retirees’ benefits. Once that trust fund is gone—absent a tax increase on current workers or some other change—beneficiaries would suffer an immediate 23 percent cut in payments. A similar process would leave the Medicare Part A program, which covers hospital stays for the elderly, insolvent at about the same time.

The national debt will by then be gargantuan. Previously unthinkable ideas—such as means-tested Social Security benefits, confiscatory wealth taxes, even health-care rationing—might be contemplated. The bill coming due for the senior welfare state might not trouble this president, but it could well be the defining problem for the next one.

Some people would like to start the fight over how to resolve it now. Among them are radical thinkers who contend that in order to defeat economic gerontocracy, Americans must first defang the elderly ruling class. In his forthcoming book, Gerontocracy in America, the 54-year-old Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn calls for destroying this “tyranny of the minority,” set up by “old people with enormous private power who hold society in chains.” Power, he argues, needs to be seized back, leaving “the elderly divested of political power, wealth, and property.”

Moyn wants to create mandatory retirement ages, perhaps starting as low as 65, for elected officials and people with some desirable private-sector jobs. Then he would come for the money, increasing taxes on both income and accumulated assets to dilute the share of elderly wealth. Most astonishingly, he proposes diluting older Americans’ political power too, by literally valuing the votes of young people more, on the theory that the latter will suffer the consequences of political decisions for much longer. (This proposed social engineering is both harsh and vanishingly improbable. The modern legal principle of “one person, one vote” exists for good reason.)

Still, Moyn’s ideas underscore the need for an equitable post-Boomer settlement, one that will be easier to find if we start the search sooner rather than later. In the 20th century, the United States realized it was too rich and too decent a country to allow its elderly citizens to live in penury. And it made an enduring commitment to address that problem, one that has unequivocally succeeded: There has never been a better time to be a senior citizen in America. And yet the U.S. has made no comparable commitment to working families, who are stymied not only by expensive housing but also by child-care and higher-education bills. Child poverty in America persists at levels alarmingly higher than in other advanced democracies.

Initiatives such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society established what current workers in a decent country owed to retirees. A new social contract can be struck that would deliver at least some optimism for today’s workers. Curing gerontonomia would require redirecting some public funds from programs aimed at the elderly, such as Social Security, to family benefits, education, and infrastructure. But an intergenerational recalibration can come about in gentler ways than Moyn’s: The wealthiest Social Security recipients, for instance, could forgo some of their scheduled benefits, which could instead be contributed annually to “baby bond” accounts for America’s children, a source of capital to be used in adulthood.

And not every solution rests with the welfare state. Cutting through housing restrictions would generate enormous social benefit, if America’s elderly ruling class were to allow such a feat. Today’s gerontocrats will eventually die. But their legacy will be a mess to sort out.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “A Fine Country for Old Men.”