Sullivan street bakery

Pizza pomodoro is the fastest way into Sullivan Street Bakery: a Roman-style flatbread cut into rectangles and sold by the piece, tomato and not much else. Jim Lahey started the bakery in 1994 after eight months in Italy learning to make the crusty breads he could not find at home, and the counter still leads with dough.

Roman bread at New York volume

Lahey was a sculptor before he was a baker, and he came back from Italy to experiment in a Williamsburg garage between other jobs, selling at street markets. One of those early sales was near Houston and Sullivan Street, which is where the name comes from. The first shop opened in SoHo with help from the restaurateur Joe Allen, and the operation moved to Hell's Kitchen in 2000.

His definition of good bread is exact: crunchy and soft, moist and dry, tangy and sweet, with pronounced wheat flavour. That standard now runs through roughly 22,000 pounds of flour a week and supplies about 300 New York restaurants, alongside the public counter. Before opening he had studied cookbooks by Anne Willan and Carol Field, cooked for groups in Italy and shaped bread at Amy's Bread.

The bakery that taught America to make bread

In 2006 Lahey's no-knead method reached home kitchens through Mark Bittman in The New York Times and turned a professional technique into a national habit. He later described it as simple enough for a four-year-old, not as a lowering of standards but as a way to widen the conversation about bread.

The teaching impulse continued in his books, My Bread in 2009 and My Pizza in 2012, and in Co., the pizzeria he opened in 2009 to take the same dough into a communal-table room. Opinionated About Dining ranked the bakery number 242 on its Cheap Eats in North America list for 2024.

What to order

Lead with the flatbreads. Pizza pomodoro is the house's clearest single statement, and the rest of the savoury counter, sandwiches and Roman-style loaves, follows the same logic: long fermentation, real crust, wheat flavour left intact.

For bread to take home, the Truccione Sare is the loaf to ask for. On the sweet side, the bomboloni are the counter's soft, filled counterweight to all that crust. Order simply, choose bread, flatbread or a sandwich, and let the dough do the arguing.