Rye Faces, Tasty Currants Run Through D.C. Bread Line
Bread lines are forming in the streets of Washington these days. But this isn’t a story about poverty--it’s about people who, to their own amused astonishment, are willing to wait an hour to lay out $3.75 for a two-pound loaf of rye.
“It’s bizarre,” exults baker Mark Furstenberg, surveying people streaming hopefully into his Marvelous Market, even though the sign on the door proclaims, “Sorry--no more bread.”
Furstenberg, 52, started selling bread on Connecticut Avenue eight weeks ago: traditional French baguettes, boules and brioches, fragrant rosemary bread, pungent sourdough full of black olives, sweet fig and currant loaves, coarse-grained, slightly bitter ryes and multigrain loaves. Handsome, hefty, old-fashioned loaves of bread that cost $1.25 to $7.50.
Initial production was 300 pounds a day. Now that the local press has taken notice, the oven works from 11 p.m. through the night and into the following afternoon, producing 1,200 pounds daily. It still can’t meet demand.
Most days, the bread line forms an hour before opening time. The overnight production is gone within a few hours.
People who ordinarily would fuss about a five-minute wait in a supermarket hang around for the fresh production. Satisfied, some break off their first bite on the way out.
The State Department, putting on a banquet, asked to buy an entire day’s output. Furstenberg refused; he wouldn’t deprive his neighborhood customers.
Suburbanites drive in for the bread. The bakery rations sales to two loaves per customer. Some make extravagant appeals for a third loaf--”for my pregnant sister who can’t come in.” They beg to have bread air-expressed to distant relatives.
“Who are these people?” Furstenberg asks in mock despair. “After all, it’s only bread.”
But he knows who they are. For 30 years, he said, he’d heard people say the same thing: “You can’t get good bread in Washington.” He said it himself.
So he invested $80,000 in savings, borrowed more from a bank, studied baking in France and traveled this country to sample loaves.
He imported an oven from France and dispatched two employees to spend a month in Los Angeles learning the craft from Nancy Silverton, proprietor of famous La Brea Bakery, whose bread Furstenberg most wanted to replicate.
One morning recently, Sylvia Mulhauser, a visitor from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., was asked if she ever thought she’d wait 45 minutes for bread.
“No,” she said, “and I never thought I’d pay $3.75 for a loaf, either.”
Asked why she’d do it, Mulhauser spelled out her reasons: “Crunchy. Chewy. Flavorful. Good texture.”