Bread is the thing on a diner plate nobody looks at. It arrives as toast next to the eggs or as the roll around a sandwich, and if it is fine, you do not think about it. If it is bad, you notice, but usually you blame the sandwich. So most diners buy it from a bakery truck, because it is cheaper and nobody complains.
We bake ours, every morning, before we open. Here is what we bake and why we bother.
What comes out of the oven
- Baguettes. Under the Eggs Benedict, the Eggs Chesapeake, and the Veggs Benedict; around the Steak Sandwich and both Meatloaf Bombers; and sliced thick for the Vegan French Toast.
- Bagels, plain and sesame. On the Bagel & Lox Platter, on the fried egg sandwich if you ask, and on their own with cream cheese.
- Rolls. The toasted rolls under the smash burger, the pulled pork, the haddock sandwich, and the seafood patty.
- Rye, white, and wheat. The toast next to your eggs and the griddled rye around the Reuben.
- Garlic toast. Made from the baguette, for the Philly-style burger and the Bombers.
What it changes
The Benedict holds
A poached egg and a spoon of hollandaise are a lot of liquid to put on bread. A day-old English muffin from a bag goes soft in a minute. A baguette baked that morning, split and griddled in butter, has enough crust to hold up until the last bite. That is the main reason our Benedict is on a baguette, and it is not a small reason.
The Reuben crisps
Griddled rye is only as good as the rye. Fresh-baked rye has a real crumb, so when it goes down on the buttered flat-top it toasts into a crust instead of steaming into a sponge. The Reuben and the Rachel both depend on it.
The toast tastes like something
Toast is most of what people remember about a diner breakfast, even if they do not know it. Toast from a loaf baked that morning tastes like wheat and butter. Toast from a bag tastes like toast.
The bagel is a bagel
A bagel is boiled and then baked, and that is the difference between a bagel and a round roll with a hole. Ours are boiled. The lox platter is built on them, and a lox platter on a soft bagel is a sad thing.
If the bread is bad, you blame the sandwich. So most places stop caring about the bread.
The Buffalo roll that is all about the roll
We are a breakfast-and-lunch diner, so we do not make Buffalo's most famous roll, which belongs to dinner and to a bar: the kimmelweck, the salt-and-caraway-crusted kaiser under a beef on weck. It is the one sandwich in America named after its bread rather than its filling, which tells you where Buffalo's priorities are. Our sister restaurant across the parking lot serves the sandwich after four and explained what weck actually means better than we would. Read that, then come have a bagel here in the morning and a weck there at night, and you will have a full education in Western New York bread.
Why it's worth it
Baking adds a couple of hours to the start of every day and a person to the schedule who does nothing else. It is not efficient. It is the same reason we make our own vegan bacon and cure our own ham: at a diner, the basics are the whole menu, and there is no such thing as a basic that does not matter. Come to the counter early and you can smell it. Everything on the menu starts there.