Bread, once thought of by some as a necessary but uninspired staple, is taking on new importance in this competitive landscape. 


Much as restaurateurs’ perception of coffee has shifted from commodity to point of distinction, great bread is now seen as a way to impress customers.


“If you don’t make a good first impression, you’re never going to get customers back in the restaurant,” said Phil Deffina, executive chef of Highpoint Bistro & Bar in New York. “And your bread service is the first glimpse of what they’re going to have for the rest of the night.”


That’s one reason why Scala’s Bistro in San Francisco makes all of its bread in-house, each month using 5,000 to 6,000 pounds of flour from a local mill. Scala’s portfolio of house-made bread includes hot dog buns, breadsticks, sourdough, fig-and-walnut bread for the cheese course and levain, ciabatta and focaccia for the bread baskets.


Executive pastry chef Tim Nugent said his philosophy is
that anything made in-house will be fresher and thus better tasting. 


“If there’s a wedding for 250 people, I make 500 to 600 dinner rolls,” he said.


But Nugent added that Scala’s Bistro is a 16-year-old “orchestrated machine” with the equipment and staff necessary for such an operation.


That’s not true for everyone.


Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, a 460-unit casual-dining chain based in Greenwood Village, Colo., buys its sandwich bread from five different suppliers across the country. Red Robin’s offerings go beyond the basic white, sesame-seed-speckled bun. Bread choices include a jalapeño cornmeal bun for spicier burgers, a rustic ciabatta bun for a grilled-chicken sandwich, marbled rye for patty melts, a baguette for French-dip sandwiches, an onion bun, sourdough and Texas toast. 


And for its Oktoberfest festivities this fall, Red Robin has introduced pretzel bread for a burger with beer mustard, onions sautéed in that mustard, Black Forest ham, Swiss cheese and green leaf lettuce, served on a beef patty.


Executive chef Dave Woolley said he also was starting a test with a burger on Texas toast, but he wouldn’t go into specifics.


An effort to deliver fresh bread to the restaurants five days a week is currently under test at 81 of the chain’s company-owned restaurants. Other company-owned locations have bread delivered frozen two or three times per week.


Finding the right bread can be a challenge.


“I’ve been tasting pretzel buns since I got to Red Robin,” said Woolley, who joined the company about 1 1/2 years ago after working as executive chef of The Fort, a fine-dining restaurant in Morrison, Colo.


Alan Hixon, president of Mooyah, a 24-unit fast-casual burger chain based in Frisco, Texas, also had trouble finding the right bread, so he resorted to baking buns in-house.


The dough for the buns is all made by one supplier who flash-freezes it and ships it to Mooyah locations in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Hartford, Conn.


Then, it’s proofed and baked in-house twice a day.


“You bake enough to get into your lunch run, and then do another bake in the middle or toward the end of lunch,” he said, noting that it takes 12 minutes to bake the buns.


Hixon said he plans to stick with the same manufacturer as they prepare to open restaurants in California, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Virginia and Alabama.


He added that the decision to invest in ovens for each restaurant and bake in-house made sense not just in terms of quality, but also from a scalability perspective.


“As you expand, it’s challenging to find regional bakeries that will maintain consistency in terms of quality and price,” he said. But the same manufacturer can continue to ship frozen dough.


He noted that buying dough costs significantly less than buying bread, and the labor cost is manageable.


“We have found that we don’t have to dedicate a lot of labor to it at all,” Hixon said.


The largest chains have also recently introduced new bread.


Subway, the only national sandwich chain so far to successfully market itself on a health platform, this summer announced that the bread at its 24,000 domestic units would henceforth be fortified with calcium and vitamin D.


At the time, corporate dietician Lanette Kovachi said the Milford, Conn.-based chain had chosen those nutrients both because they were important for bone development — essential for their young customers — and also because many people have difficulty getting enough calcium and vitamin D in their daily diets.


In May McDonald’s, which has more than 14,000 domestic units, played to demands both for nutrition and premium products when it rolled out a chicken sandwich on a new bun that was round instead of oval, prepared with whole grain and topped with cracked wheat. The bun has 8 grams of whole grain, and fewer calories, less sodium and less sugar per serving than the chain’s traditional honey-wheat bun.


Elizabeth Campbell, marketing director for McDonald’s USA, said the bun has received a “very positive response from our customers.”


Mama Fu’s Asian House, a 13-unit flex-casual chain — fast casual at lunch, full service at dinner — doesn’t have much need for bread since it features the cuisines of Thailand, Korea, China, Japan and Vietnam. But the Austin, Texas-based chain recently did introduce a Vietnamese banh mi sandwich to its secondary “black market” menu. Made with grilled protein — beef, chicken or shrimp are the options at Mama Fu’s — with a tangy and spicy sauce and fresh vegetables, this vestige of that Southeast Asian country’s French colonization is served on a crispy baguette.


Chief executive Randy Murphy knew baking bread wasn’t an option, but a banh mi is supposed to have a crispy crust, so he decided to go ahead and install toasters for the single item.


Murphy opted to go with durable $100 household toaster ovens that hold four sandwiches at a time rather than the $400 industrial variety.


“Right now, the smaller ones are doing just fine,” he said, adding that there was shelf space in their pantry area under the restaurants’ current configuration, and a 110-volt plug is close by.


The sandwiches are assembled to order and then toasted.


Murphy said it wasn’t easy to get the relatively low quantity of baguettes he needed at each restaurant.


“Not a lot of people want to talk to you when you want a little bit of one small thing,” he said. 


“We tried a broad-line distributor and didn’t find a good fit,” he said, and so they ended up sourcing it locally through an Austin vendor. “The key was finding the right size supplier that’s willing to grow with you.”


Many independent restaurants bake their own bread, but Deffina, the chef at Highpoint in New York, is in a unique position. His menu is modern American, but his bread oven is an Indian tandoor.


The round, top-loading wood-burning oven is essential for North-Indian cooking, but it’s rarely seen elsewhere. Highpoint’s owners are Indian, however — the name comes from the fact that opening an American restaurant is the high point of their careers — and they wanted a tandoor.


Deffina said the oven is great for delivering hot and fresh bread to each customer.


“As soon as someone sits down, we get the ticket and start making fresh bread,” he said.


Naan, the staple flatbread of Northern-Indian cooking, is made by slapping the dough on the interior wall of the oven.


It cooks in a couple of minutes and can be brought out to the table quickly.


Deffina uses a classic naan recipe, but he changes it frequently, Americanizing it a bit.


For example, he recently made an everything naan with caraway, sesame and poppy seeds and garlic, like an everything bagel.


He serves the naan with a dip such as hummus, or slow-roasted tomatoes and olives.


“It’s a great alternative to bread and butter, and people feel like they’re getting an appetizer for free,” Deffina said.


The opposite is true at Harvest in Louisville, Ky., which charges $6 for its daily bread board — usually four pieces of whatever bread pastry chef Patsy Knight decided to make that day.


Currently, that means scones with oven-dried cherry tomatoes, grilled onions and Norwood cheese, served with a side of squash-blossom butter.


A recent popular item was hog-jowl muffins with sorghum butter.


The smoked jowls are diced, cooked like bacon, and then folded into the muffin dough with some maple syrup.


“It was definitely a favorite,” said Knight, adding that she got about 70 to 80 bread-board orders each week in the 70-seat restaurant. 


Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@penton.com.