Dining Out: Five London Breads I've Known and Loved

Let's get that bread etc. etc.

Bread: often overlooked and yet frequently the best bit of the meal. I am always, always the guy who is like “aaah I don’t wanna fill up on bread,” and who then enjoys the bread so much that I end up asking everyone at the table if they would in fact go in on more bread.

As you might have read in Dining Out last Thursday, I had a very positive bread experience at The French House recently – great bread, beautiful bread, brought over abundantly and enthusiastically – which got me thinking about what a crucial bit of the meal it often is. Bread is usually the first thing that comes to the table, and so it sets the tone. The type of bread (sliced, flat, roll, for example) and its accompaniments tell you a lot about what you’re about to eat: not just in terms of the cuisine, but regarding style and touch and priorities, too. Is it an oily bread? Is it thickly, heartily sliced? Does it come in a big round shape for you to rip up yourself, like a dog at a load of Christmas wrapping paper? The bread possibilities, obviously, are endless, and if I really thought about it I could probably recommend about 20 different places for their breads, for different reasons. That would be annoying to read, however, so here are five that I like for you to be getting on with:

Brat

The charred anchovy bread, along with the Basque cheesecake browned in the wood oven, is probably the “signature” dish at Brat in Shoreditch – it comes to the table puffed up like a lad offering you out at the pub after five pints. It has luscious, fat anchovies laid across the top, and is finished with a little Salt Bae sprinkling of neat, chopped chives. I mention this bread because I think, like I said above, it’s a good indicator of what’s to come with the rest of the meal – seafood that is extremely easy to like; an absolute bastard of a wood oven – but also because it’s really really tasty, and you will absolutely need to order one per person.