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Caity Weaver, staff writer at the Atlantic, visited Parc a few weeks after her father’s death. It was her first time back in his hometown since his passing.

She traveled to investigate the three varieties of bread tucked into wicker baskets at the Stephen Starr restaurant. Sampling the bread was part of her larger investigation: to determine the best free restaurant bread in America.

After 555 poll responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of “monomaniacal research,” Weaver determined Parc’s cranberry-walnut loaf to be the winner.

“If you were going to design a restaurant bread specifically intended to appeal to 21st-century Americans, you might well create this exact foodstuff: It is a very chewy sourdough, with a thick, crispy crust that is chocolate brown in color,” she wrote. “In fact, the bread has an Everlasting Gobstopper–ish ability to harmoniously convey the sensation of eating an entire meal, with dessert, in every bite.”

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Weaver’s quest, fueled by poll responses and interviews with experts, led her to eat free restaurant bread everywhere from national chains like Red Lobster and The Cheesecake Factory to restaurants in Foley, Al., Townsend, Tn., Las Vegas and Atlanta.

But her answer arrived when dining in Rittenhouse Square.

“I am seated near a family: a mother, father, and college-age daughter,” she writes. “I can hardly look at them, even as I can’t keep my eyes off them. Veiled by Parc’s low lighting, I allow myself to sink into a luxuriant, tear-flooded sadness … Before my check arrives, I request a to-go box of just cranberry-walnut bread, and am floored by the quantity of pieces I receive in a swish brown bag. I wish I could tell my parents about it. Just knowing it was possible to receive so much bread for free would have delighted them.”

According to Weaver, Parc turns out about 1,500 loaves a day — 200 of which are the cranberry-walnut variety — to give away slightly less than half a million dollars in free bread every year. The free bread costs the restaurant about 60 cents a bread basket, Starr tells her.

The goal, Starr shared with the writer, was to create a breadbasket that was so good diners didn’t have to spend money.

“From a financial standpoint, it was the dumbest move we ever made,” Starr told Weaver. “It costs so much and people eat so much of it.” But he tells her while he comes close to charging for it, “the moment I think I’m going to do it, I go, ‘I can’t do it.’”

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Luckily, Parc’s bread remains free and beloved.

“The best bread — at least the best free restaurant bread in America — is the aforementioned cranberry-walnut loaf,” Weaver concludes. We agree.