To Butter, or Not Butter, Your Bread
Image credit: www.sweet-and-savory.org
Dining recently at a swank new restaurant, I enjoyed dipping some crusty bread into a pool of olive oil spiked with a bit of vinegar. And though my arteries may prefer this healthful stuff-tasty though it was-I was craving a slather of old fashioned butter.
This got me to wondering: How does a restaurant decide whether to offer olive oil or butter with its bread? Considering a few places I've visited recently, it seems Italian places tend to serve olive oil for dipping, while French, or French-influenced restaurants seem to veer toward buttering their bread-or letting us do it, anyway. Specifically, Serafina and Machiavelli offer oil, while Le Pichet and Boat Street Cafe serve butter.
When restaurants don't fall into either of these two major culinary camps, how do they decide what to serve with their bread? It is about price, or does the decision have more to do with a certain unquantifiable feel of expensiveness? Not that a fancy olive oil is necessarily any less pricey (or rich) than good butter, but perhaps it's more about that feeling of indulgence that comes with butter.
Maybe it is because we know that butter is less healthful than olive oil, so butter is even more of an indulgence. And if fancy restaurants trade in this idea, offering butter may be a way to up the spoiling-oneself-with-a-fancy-dinner-out factor.
But then, do you know anyone who dips bread into olive oil at home?
4 comment(s)
Jason Truesdell says:
I remember at Lampreia being offered a $12 add-on bottle of organic olive oil, with enough leftover to take home, and \"of course, if you prefer to have butter, we can bring that.\" Although I sometimes seek out fancy butter, considering the olive oil I tend to buy for use at home, olive oil seems more luxurious to me.
Greek restaurants in Chicago always seem to bring out the butter, even though there\'s a lot of olive oil in Greece. In Seattle, olive oil is everywhere, at every kind of restaurant, sometimes with a splash of not very good balsamic vinegar.
For French and Italian cuisine, I\'d think there would be regional variations on the preference. But Italian restaurants in Seattle don\'t get very regional...
Posted On: Monday, Jun. 25 2007 @ 1:13PM
Jess says:
Um, yeah, I use olive oil at home.
Posted On: Monday, Jun. 25 2007 @ 7:11PM
sara says:
have you been to BOKA? They serve butter with a balsamic vinegar gel. Brilliant. I agree with the above poster too though. If you don\'t think of olive oil as luxurious, you aren\'t buying good olive oil.
Posted On: Monday, Aug. 27 2007 @ 2:52PM
River Elderholly says:
Butter, a wonderful healthy food when from cows that have not been feed corn, soy, wheat, rice at all or any grain that hasn\'t been silaged. Wheat in cows is the same as wheat in humans - it creates toxiuns that go directly into the milk and Butter and produce gluten reactions or toxicity because the cows are sick. Talking to Mexican beef and dairy farmers trying to get into the american markets I was informed that the UsGovernment told them to feed the cows wheat, corn, and soy but they had to kill them before they were 22 months old or they would be too toxic to eat. Organic butter does not eliminate these toxic products from the diet of cows and ultimately humans - demanding grass fed dairy and beef products and silaged grasses will keep toxins from dairy products.
Posted On: Friday, Oct. 5 2007 @ 10:32AM