Why This New $18 Plate of Bread Might Just Be Worth It

Everyone should have an art. That is to say, something they care about enough to dedicate hours to, distract one's mind from the inevitability of death, the pain and suffering that is the stuff of life, and New York Times trend pieces. But no one, and we repeat "no one," should play any role (or shall we say roll?) in putting to market an $18 plate of bread.

But that is what the twee-masters at Bruno Pizza in the East Village did. $18 bread. But what else would you expect from two clowns who named their fancy pizza joint for Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in 1600 for his curiosity about the world? (See what they did there? Wood-fired oven...burned at the stake. Cute!) Just as you would carefully work on a bread starter, read slowly so your anger does not boil too-too fast:

This bread itself, which will hit the menu on October 1 as a composed $18 dish with fermented Caputo Brothers mozzarella, buttermilk and "ambrosia" honey complex (a mixture of the honey propolis, pollen, and royal jelly), has been in the works since before the restaurant's opening earlier this summer. It's the brainchild of chef de partie Phil Marokus, who previously had no bread-making experience. "After I left my previous job, I had two and a half months before Bruno started up, and I was just super bored," he says. "I'd done a lot of research online and read Tartine Bakery's books to learn about how naturally risen bread works, but this has been a real headache! Why is the bread doing this, and not this? What do I have to fix to make that happen?"

Did your anger rise like the dough for the majestic $18 plate of bread? Take a thirty-second breather and read on from aspiring society page subject Sierra Tishgart (who sounds like she could be an exotic appetizer of baby lentils and Komodo dragon tongue):

The dark, seedy bread is rich and satisfying on its own, but Bruno's chefs also serve it with a bone-marrow-and-herb-infused compound butter. They also add pine oil, nasturtium flowers, and Jacobsen salt (and that's before plating it with the cheese). It's a nice accompaniment to vegetable-forward dishes like the fairy-tale-eggplant appetizer with black-cashew paste and blistered shishito peppers (and the pizza with smoked ham, Pawlet cheese, and peaches, for good measure). 

"When we started, none of us had any pizza experience," Marokus says. "But making the pizza dough helped me with the bread: I can see how adding more or less water or flour makes an impact. We've all worked together to figure it out."

Can you hear the mellifluous notes of self-satisfaction? They worked together for a year, folks, to design a plate of a few pieces of bread that would cost, after tax and tip, $20. Like NASA engineers or Supreme Court litigators devising legal strategy, they got together to figure it out. Someone had to, right? And we thought a $20 burger was still the ne plus ultra of the excesses of the New York food scene. We delight in being proven wrong but we're gonna stick with this one for now.

Cheaper than your co-pay