8 SF Restaurants with Out-of-This-World Bread and Butter

The term "bread and butter" is an idiom for everyday or basic fare, and diners gobble up that hunk of partially-sliced sourdough bread served with pats of foil-wrapped butter served by many classic San Francisco restaurants without giving it much thought. At some places, though, the bread and butter is anything but basic; it’s so incredibly good, it demands your attention.Pardon the pun, but artisanal bread has been on the rise in San Francisco since the Gold Rush, when miners and prospectors needed a way to bake bread without yeast. Our obsession with butter is more recent. According to Lisa Pike Totah, marketing director for California's leading butter producer, Challenge Dairy, per-capita butter consumption reached an all-time record high of 6.8 pounds per person in the U.S. in 2024. "Over the past few years, butter has moved from supporting player to a hero,” she says. ”Once considered little more than a companion to toast, it now commands as much attention as the bread itself. Tod