This post originally appeared in the July 17, 2024 edition of The Move, pro tips and advice from Eater’s dining experts, direct to your inbox. Subscribe now.
Not long ago, the Eater team went for lunch at the sceney New York City restaurant Raf’s, where I encountered a dying breed: the bread basket. Though a fixture of the suburban chain restaurants of my youth, they’ve become a rarity at the types of restaurants I now tend to visit. Raf’s shows, however, that this is beginning to change slightly; as Rachel Sugar has reported for the New York Times, restaurants that are taking their bread programs more seriously have shifted to a more premium “bread course.” The bread course at Raf’s, a restaurant that also emphasizes its bakery, offers focaccia, rolls, and slices of sourdough.
The selection of breads certainly is good, but it does prompt the question: What to dip them in? Olive oil feels right for focaccia and fine for sourdough, but wrong, for some reason, for rolls. (Is that just me?) Butter would then win out as the best bet, but is that boring, especially when butter has been having even more of a moment than usual? Raf’s skirts the issue by serving both with its bread basket. And while this would not be notable in the slightest if the restaurant had served the two in separate containers, it didn’t — instead, it put the softened butter and the olive oil side by side in the same vessel, like a yin and yang of light gold and dark green.
The effect was that you could get a little of each at the same time. Swiping a knife through the butter necessitated running it through a little olive oil, and though the arrangement would have allowed you to dip some bread into the olive oil alone, if you were careful, why would you be, when the butter was so tantalizingly close and soft? Against the olive oil’s bitterness, the butter — the good Rodolphe Le Meunier stuff — seemed sweeter and grassier. Where the softened butter felt thick and dense, I found myself appreciating the looseness of the olive oil by comparison.
I’d never considered that you could do this, and the absolute indulgence of it (on a weekday, no less!) felt casually revelatory, not unlike how I imagine the inventors of the KFC Double Down must have felt. It felt like permission to be extra — to go all the way, and not just part of the way, in terms of enjoying myself.
Inspired by Raf’s, this is the move. It’s a simple one: Serve your bread with butter and olive oil, ideally the nicest you have of each. Make sure the butter is soft and make sure they’re in the same container. It doesn’t have to be like this all the time, but it’s an easy way to make a pairing that you might take for granted feel special and quietly luxurious. Sometimes you need those kinds of reminders on a random Wednesday.
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