04/30/2026
Oy we’re gonna miss this place.
We’ve been using the bread since James Caputo reached out 14 years ago, just after hurricane Sandy, when all of our other bread bakeries were unable to make deliveries. He got us bread immediately and was just about the sole reason we were able to reopen. We were long time retail customers, and we loved the bread. When he asked why we didn’t use any of it, we told him that we hadn’t put any heroes on our menu because we hadn’t found the particular bread that we’d imagined them being on. “Well, what does that bread look like?” he asked. We told him, and a couple days later he came back with a 1/4 barrel kraft paper bag filled with exactly the thing: sesame seeded, cottony crumbed, club ended, thin/crackly crusted sandwich rolls. In the ensuing 14 years, they’ve made us literal millions of these rolls, regularly checking in to make sure they came in ok, making tweaks as our tastes changed. James has always been eager to help us work through a challenge or to bail us out of an ordering mistake even though we’ve been inimitably awful at paying our invoices on time. It’s no coincidence that all these years later, our most popular sandwiches are built on this bread. We’re certain we’ll figure out how to get bread we love for our sandwiches, albeit maybe not as much. The sad truth though is that our neighborhood will never be the same without Caputos in it. We’re just hoping that somehow this groundswell of love for the place and its people will result in their somehow reopening. Despite what some people are saying on these social media whatnots, we don’t feel slighted or injured by this loss. It’s not hyperbole when we say we just feel fortunate to have had this real, human, neighborly relationship for all of these years. And of course, we feel lucky we got to use that bread, from those ovens, made by those people. Any success we’ve had has been intertwined with theirs.
We very much wish this wasn’t the circumstance, but man do they deserve a break. Ok, Sorry for rambling.
