If you spend time in certain circles, it may seem that all anyone can think about is the best free restaurant bread in America. (Or maybe that’s just my specific corner of the internet.) Caity Weaver’s extensively, sometimes hilariously, reported feature is on the cover of this month’s issue of The Atlantic.
It first arrived in my inbox in an email with the subject “I found the best free restaurant bread in America,” thanks to the magazine’s One Story to Read Today newsletter. Days later, a stand-alone email from Weaver gleefully declared “I can’t believe they let me do this!” The May issue promotional email came next, and before long I found myself listening to PJ Vogt interviewing Weaver on “Search Engine,” one of my favorite podcasts.*
You could argue that this article is indulgent, as one of Weaver’s sources seems to imply when he demands she explain the point of her crusade. (“Fun article for people to read,” Weaver responds.) It’s lengthy and not an earth-shattering subject, sure—though it has me reflecting on my favorite free restaurant bread. But I’ll also argue that there are threads of something more woven through this piece. And one of them is the reason we’re gathered here today: grief.
Weaver’s quest results in 555 votes for the best free bread; numerous celebrity rejections (except the great Stephen King, who indulges her); visits to restaurants in Nevada, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Pennsylvania and more; major. beef with a once-favored restaurant due to its soda refill policy; and numerous conversations with her dad.
Those conversations surprise Weaver. She thought she’d heard all her dad’s stories during the portion of his 81 years they shared. But when he recounts his one particular memory of free restaurant bread, it’s of the Four Seasons, a restaurant Weaver had no idea her father had visited.
These treasured comments from her dad dot Weaver’s article, providing a glimpse into her life while reporting. One day she visits her father’s Santa Fe apartment and, immediately upon opening the door, smells Red Lobster’s The Ultimate Feast. Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits get a lot of ink in this article, and this scene is poignant.
“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.
Days later, Weaver’s dad is dead.
“I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America” is a meandering article with a cast of characters that kept me laughing. It’s also a picture of a woman who is forced to say goodbye to her father as time and life march forward. Weaver didn’t expect her father’s death to come in the middle of this reporting. Restaurant visits remind her of the different ways her late mother and her father approached dining. When she visits the restaurant she ultimately decrees to serve the best free bread, she longs to recount the experience for her parents.
Does this article relate directly to Weaver’s grief? I can’t know, though her Search Engine interview seems to suggest a correlation. No matter; it’s relatable. Whether in the throes of grief or anticipating a loss on the horizon, finding a project, a trip or something else to fixate on can keep a person from drowning in sorrow. Besides, have you ever had a comfort carb? I’ve had a few lately.
Grief wends through everyday life, showing up in places as unexpected as a hilarious, detailed article about bread. My own father’s death was accompanied by a lot of laughter. I often think of Margaret Renkl noting in “Late Migrations” that what we’ve dubbed a life cycle could as easily be called a death cycle. Death, and therefore grief, are part of our experience. Thank you, Caity Weaver, for incorporating your own loss into this article about bread. And for making me crave a thick slice of the good stuff.
*If you’re just not going to read an 11,000-word article about bread, consider the podcast episode. It may not make you cackle the way I did at several of the magazine story’s revelations. But you’d get the Cliff Notes along with some behind-the-scenes insight.
Today Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow” received the Pulitzer Prize for memoir. I’ll bump this up my to-review list for The Grief Library; it was one of my 2025 preorders and the rare preordered book I actually dove into as soon as it arrived.
