Complimentary Bread at Restaurants: The Real Cost

There’s something undeniably magical about that moment at a restaurant when a basket of warm, complimentary bread arrives at your table. It’s a simple gesture, but it feels like a little celebration: a soft roll, a crisp heel of sourdough, maybe even a golden square of focaccia, all arriving before you’ve even ordered anything. And yet, believe it or not, there are people out there who eye that bread basket with deep suspicion. To them, “free” bread is anything but—they see it as a stealth charge, baked right into the price of everything else. And while their skepticism may sound a bit crusty, well… they’re not entirely wrong.

“It’s all basic math at the end of the day,” explains Chad Colby, the head chef and owner of Antico Nuovo, a rustic Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. “Whether it’s free bread in a French or Italian restaurant, or free chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant, there’s an expectation of certain things. And a lot of places are having to rethink that.”

First introduced as “Antico,” the 55-seat restaurant endured its fair share of identity changes since debuting in 2019. A few months into operations, the pandemic hit, and Colby—who previously worked with 1990 F&W Best New Chef Nancy Silverton, cutting his teeth at the beautiful, storied Campanile, as well as Mozza and Chi Spacca — was forced to refashion Antico from the ground up. 

Focaccia, first served as complimentary bread service, was at the center of the rebrand. “It was one of the best bites of the meal,” Colby says, while recounting Antico’s first days. And although the restaurant’s pandemic-era pizza and ice cream project certainly received plenty of buzz, for Colby, the free bread model didn’t pay the bills. The decision was clear: the restaurant had to charge for bread. “It requires over three hours from the top chefs every day,” says Colby, of the bread currently. “[The focaccia] is one of the more technical, labor-heavy things we do. If we’re going to charge for it, you’ve got to make it great. That was the mindset.”

The result? A sublime $11 Pugliese-style focaccia, served with a variety of add-on accompaniments, including whipped ricotta, beautifully shaped like a ribbon and dotted with pistachio pesto, or duck liver pate, one of Colby’s personal favorites.

The pandemic was rough for restaurants. Many had to close, scramble, or pivot. For Tavernetta, a beloved Italian restaurant in downtown Denver, that meant its complimentary bread service no longer factored into the restaurant’s equation.

“Costs were the main reason,” Ambyr Owens-Hayes, Tavernetta’s general manager, when asked about the decision to switch from complimentary bread to charging for it. “We were spending tens of thousands of dollars in labor and ingredients to make something we were giving away.”

Beyond the immense costs, it also became impossible to anticipate demand, resulting in a volatile back-and-forth relationship that vacillated between extreme waste and 86-ing the restaurant’s focaccia before noon. “Some days we wouldn’t go through half of what we produced, and others, we would go through three quarters of the day’s supply by the end of lunch service,” Owen-Hayes recalls.

However, the path forward was far from simple. The change wasn’t easy, like switching on a light bulb. It evolved over time. “The logistics of plating the bread and what to serve it with were a lot more complex than we anticipated at first,” says Owen-Hayes. Today, for $7, Tavernetta offers an upgraded focaccia bread service with all the fixings: high-quality olive oil, red wine vinegar, and grana padano, a delectably mellow, nutty, and slightly sweet cheese.

Some restaurants still continue the grand tradition of complimentary bread, however. Take for example, Gwen in Los Angeles and Kindred in North Carolina, where their bread is a true olive branch; a butter-slathered peace offering of the highest quality.

Unlike other operations, where there could be an entire department, 100 different pairs of hands are responsible for baking the restaurant’s daily bread. At Gwen, it’s a very personal process. “It’s all hand-made,” explains Curtis Stone, chef and co-owner of the European-style butcher shop that transforms into a svelte Michelin-starred fine dining destination at night.

Here, each meal starts with stecca bread, which means “stick” in Italian: a traditional, slender loaf that somewhat resembles a free-form baguette: light and airy, with a crisp, golden crust that radiates warmth, like summertime on the Amalfi Coast. “The dough is first mixed by hand, then we let it sit overnight for up to 16 hours,” Stone says. “We stretch each portion to the width of the table, then use a bench scraper to cut them down.” It’s served with buttercup yellow Normandy butter. Considering the amount of work that goes into it, would charging make sense? “Never,” replies Stone. “It’s too popular.”

Meanwhile, near the shores of Lake Norman, in Davidson, North Carolina, Kindred serves a complimentary milk bread — a Southern take that land somewhere between the region’s ubiquitous yeast roll and Japanese-style shokupan — that’s emblematic of husband-and-wife duo Joe and Katy Kindred’s ethos about how guests deserve to be treated.

“You’re breaking bread, you know? It’s the first thing that hits the table, before we even pour water,” says Katy, who co-owns the eponymous restaurant, as well as the Kindred’s growing empire, including the fast-casual Milk Bread, Mediterranean-inspired Albertine, and Hello, Sailor, a sunny restaurant known for its spectacular lakeside views. “It kind of disarms people a little bit, and endeared us to the community pretty quickly. We really wanted it to be an extension of our home and for people to feel that right out of the gate.”

Kindred’s milk bread has a feathery, pull-apart texture. It’s salty-sweet, like a chocolate-covered pretzel or a cherished partner in a funny mood, and is served in a perfectly sized metal tin, found by Katy. Slathered in a butter cultured in-house, Kindred’s milk bread has become so beloved, that although Katy believes that “so much about hospitality is inefficient,” it’s the very thing that’s allowed the restaurant to flourish.

Have they ever considered charging for it?

Joe says, “I think there was a conversation during COVID, but…”

“We just stuck to our gut,” Katy finishes. “Kindred is a really special place to a lot of people, and so it meant a lot to us that our community showed up for us. So, we really wanted to show up for Kindred.”

“Now more than ever, with pretty much no profit in restaurants these days, I’d rather take Kindred to her grave than start charging for the milk bread,” Joe agrees. “It’s just what we’ve done. It’s the right thing to do.”