Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Give us this day our daily ... wrap?
Larry Bly
Larry Bly runs an ad agency and does freelance writing in the Roanoke area.
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I don't know whether you've noticed it or not, but a "side" of bread for lunch is getting to be more of a rarity. I started noticing this some time back, especially at the big franchise operations, such as Applebee’s and others. You want bread with lunch, you'll have to special-order it — if you can do even that.
I'm from the South and we Southerners have always loved our breads. They may be ordinary compared to Northern cities (especially New York, which has the best breads in the world), but we love our biscuits for breakfast, sliced breads for lunch and yeast breads and rolls for dinner. When I was growing up, no meal went without bread of some sort.
Not today. You likely won't be offered bread, hot or cold, when having dinner at a friend's house. Bread has fallen out of favor for many. It's not politically correct these days. I'm hoping that's just a bad fad.
Speaking of bad fads (and I've mentioned this before), we owe much of this dearth of bread to the low-carb mania that's swept our nation lately. Bread has fallen into great disfavor with the low-carber crowd, though they'll tell you that bread is one of the first things they miss.
No doubt about it, we bread-eaters pay a mighty price with our waistlines for the enjoyment of those fabulous hearty biscuits and other breads. But bread is the staff of life, or so I've been told.
I cannot prove this, but I suspect that many restaurants are using the low-carb craze as an excuse to stop serving bread as a side these days. Bread adds to the cost of a meal, and by eliminating it, you can slightly increase the bottom line.
Local restaurants are always having to deal with the bread issue. One of our most favorite local Italian/Brazilian restaurants tried a cheaper lunch bread for a while. No one, including the restaurant, seemed pleased. So they went back to a nicer quality for lunch and dinner, rather than cut it out completely -- much to their credit.
Eventually the restaurant owners went to their current hot bread, which is delivered unbaked and finished in their kitchens. The result is a bread that's so good and yeasty that you could make a meal off of it alone. I've been known to do that.
By going to flat breads and wraps, many restaurants have been able to placate both bread eaters and non. These do little for me, but they're better than nothing. They have to be cheaper to make from the restaurant's point of view.
Sometimes bread should be REQUIRED: A new restaurant here serves Cajun/Creole fare offers no bread whatsoever with beans and rice. Sorry, but beans and rice, jambalaya and gumbo DEMAND a big old slice of corn bread, or garlic bread. I ordered it separately after my meal arrived and waited for it to be delivered to my table.
I guess if I'm a restauranteur and lots of people are letting sides of breads go uneaten, then I have to look at eliminating it rather than wasting the bread and money.
Dinner's still a different matter for most restaurants, and few offer dinner entrees without an accompanying side of bread. It's funny. I seldom allow myself the indulgence of bread for dinner, but I still expect and enjoy it when I’m for lunch; or at someone else's house.
It's interesting that at the very time people seem to be shying away from our daily bread, there are increasingly better products on the shelf at Kroger for making quick homemade-tasting breads right in your kitchen. Sister Schubert's is so good that I knew a restaurant (now closed unfortunately) whose chef admitted to secretly using it as their house bread. It was better than most commercial restaurant hot breads.
Pillsbury has some very respectable "canned" garlic sticks that get me raves when I use it at home. And the dry-packaged ones for beer bread and herbed breads are hard to beat from scratch. Even the lowly biscuit (probably my favorite) has become pretty darned good with those bags of little frozen hockey-puck-like things that turn into fluffy, buttery biscuits. We've come a long way from those canned "biscuits" of the past that weren't really biscuits at all. Or the "heat and serve" rolls, which probably still sell pretty well. They're still stocked heavily at the store, though they pale in comparison to today's newer "bake at home" products.
But I digress. Furthermore, I've made myself hungry. Where's bread going? To our waistlines, I suppose. The South may rise again, but I'm afraid it's looking more like the bread will not rise with it.
Bly for now.
