On Saturday a week or so ago we had our first meeting of the apprenticeship program. I thought I ought to begin it with a dinner at my home and Kera Carpenter, author of the program brought champagne to lubricate the event. We sat at the dinner table and discussed what will be done and […]

We chose a general contracting company a couple of weeks ago. The process took more time that I had expected. Our architect, Peter Hapstak and his associates had candidates in mind and my friends, Ashok Bajaj, Washington’s premier restaurateur, and Saied Azali, the city’s senior restaurateur, had some suggestions too. We asked five firms to […]

Baking education in the U.S. began in the twenty-first century. Doesn’t that seem odd! Baking, after all, is a very old craft. But even in those countries with deep bread traditions, formal education in baking began only after World War II. The U.S. has a bread tradition of sorts. European immigrants opened bakeries here in […]

I told people that I would be out of town this week taking a baking class.  Nearly everyone to whom I said that heard me say, “teaching a baking class.”  That amused me. Some people choose their professions early in life and grow into them.  Doctors, it’s always seemed to me, are comfortable in their […]

Kera Carpenter had an idea and so I spent much of last week talking to strangers. Kera is the owner of Domku, a little Eastern European/Scandinavian restaurant in Petworth with wonderful food.  She is a Midwestern liberal, a throwback who believes in citizen action to promote community development.  That’s why she opened a restaurant in […]

In fact it didn’t come, thank goodness; but last week everyone expected our local government, the city government of Washington, D.C. to shut down as it is highly dependent on Federal funding that had stopped of course. A month ago, the Bread Furst development group had agreed that October 11th would be the day on […]

I am sitting in the US Airways waiting area of the McCarran Airport.  (Few reading this will remember what a horrible man Senator Pat McCarran was.) I have been in this city before.  I was here at the Bellaggio Hotel on September 11, 2001 attending the same bakery equipment show that brought me here now; […]

I am having a crisis of nostalgia as we discuss a logo for Bread Furst. Help us, please. When early in 1990 I decided to open Marvelous Market I stumbled upon a graphic artist to whom I confessed my favorite food code words – traditional, simple, rooted; and he produced the sparse logo of a […]

We held our opening meeting, the beginning of Bread Furst. Everyone called it “our kickoff.“ I didn’t because I dislike sports metaphors. We spent nearly two hours in the building, 4434 Connecticut Avenue, that in about six months will be our store, walking around and exploring, talking, raising questions, and making tentative decisions. Jack Revelle […]

I am flying across the country to bake. Not a celebrity chef going to a James Beard Foundation fund-raising dinner, I am instead on my way to the San Francisco Baking Institute to select a bread-baking oven. We may learn in a couple of weeks that the electrical upgrades we must make to the little […]