Big on bread: 7 top Dallas restaurants with great bread service - The Dallas Morning News

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If you’re wondering, “Why would I go out to eat at a nice restaurant and order bread and butter?” There is at least one simple, two-word answer: potato focaccia.

Maggie Huff, the longtime Dallas pastry chef who is internally known as the Carb Department at Homewood restaurant on Oak Lawn Avenue, tried real sourdough for the first time on a road trip. It knocked something loose in her kid brain, and by age seven she was baking things at home from scratch. She’d make little clouds of cream puffs and recreate the tried and true recipes printed on the boxes of pantry staples. (Think: chocolate pudding from the back of a box of corn starch).

Today, as the master of carbohydrates at Homewood, she’s dreaming up corn custard with summer-fresh blackberries. She’s also forever tinkering and pampering an outrageously good appetizer, the potato focaccia, which is served with a smooth, creamy globe of butter.

“It’s very near and dear to my heart,” Huff says. ”I’ve been tweaking it on and off for 15 years.”

The Focaccia Pugliese begins as loose, drippy dough that seems to defy a single state of matter: It is both a smooth liquid that cascades in waterfalls and a solid that absorbs pokes and prods like Nickelodeon Gak. Once poured into the pan, her focaccia gets an absolute deluge of olive oil.

Once it’s done, five thick slices arrive at your table in a small cast iron dish. Sharp and noisy crust gives way to a warm, tender middle jeweled with chopped herbs. It doesn’t need butter, but your brain urges you to spread it over the face of the focaccia anyway. There is crunch from the rough, clean salt crystals showered over the scoop.

Related:La Casita has become one of the biggest bakeries in D-FW, and it’s just getting started

The Focaccia Pugliese at Homewood comes with butter.(Rebecca Slezak / Staff Photographer)

It’s part of a bread-making revolution in Dallas over the last few years. During the pandemic, stuck-at-home bakers erupted in literal cottage industries. Almost overnight, North Texans could pick up the kind of goodies you could find in the French storefronts or the Tuscan countryside. We were more inclined than ever to pay for a cloud of Japanese milk bread or a real deal baguette with ends as pointy as a bayonet. To put it another way: Life was too short to eat bland bread.

And more and more, real bread and good butter are on the menu at Dallas’ finest restaurants. The time of the thoughtless free basket of French bread — at least the one that’s got as much flavor as an Office Depot — is over.

The new food castle of Carbone offers a kingly bouquet of breads just after you’ve been seated. It’s a feast of buttery garlic bread and tomato sauce-smeared focaccia. Gemma’s steaming, crusty scones, the flavor roaming between salty gouda and tangy-sweet fig, are as famous as their rabbit bolognese. People come back to Georgie for the housemade brioche alone, and at National Anthem in the East Quarter, the hot bread service with whipped butter is a must.

Head baker and executive pastry chef David Madrid has mentored lead baker Yonathan Bustillo for nearly a year in the ways of baking at The Village in Dallas.(SHELBY TAUBER / Special Contributor)

At Meridian in The Village, it’s entirely likely that David Madrid never stops thinking about bread. The restaurant, where Madrid is the head baker, has a deceptively simple and stupendous bread course. It changes a few times a week, never too long and always too short before some new laminated star streaks through the restaurant. Anyone who sees the order wants one, too, like the twisty maze of brioche, woven like something Elvish in a Tolkien novel. It’s remarkable without anything at all, and something deep, dark, and special with the grassy and creamy butters and spreads.

Coming up, Madrid is experimenting with Oaxaca green corn, lemon zest, handfuls of herbs, and castelvetrano olives.

Related:Baking buddies: Meet the mentor and protégé behind Doughregarde’s Bake Shop in The Village

Karen Montero is the new breadmaker at Lucia.(Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer)

Over in Oak Cliff, similar tinkering is going on in the bread kitchen.

The first day that Karen Montero was behind the wheel of the bread-making at Lucia, her sourdough starter collapsed. She’d been training with outgoing baker Matt Ramirez in her first weeks on the job, learning the ways of the flour — in this case, polenta folded into the bulk of a semolina sourdough. They scrambled, and Montero obsessed over fixing the problem. Since that fateful day, she’s taken to bringing the starter home and nurturing it like a pet. “I don’t want to risk it happening again!” she says.

It’s part of a philosophy at the restaurant that she embraces: “You have to be comfortable making mistakes. You have to be able to give up on an idea.”

Still, you need a protractor and calipers to discover a mistake at Lucia. Their ever-changing, ever-evolving pan au lait and cultured butter menu offering is timeless. Paired with a bottle of wine, you’ll feel like you’ve been instantly transported across the Atlantic. Rich butter finds the warm blanket middle of the bread. Next up, Montero hopes to work in a toasted barley flour using Seymour, the sourdough starter.

New Lucia bread maker Karen Montero bakes a bread in the kitchen.(Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer)

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