OK,I know I said on Friday that Y&H was finished with our short hymn to a mother's influence on chefs, but late yesterday, Mark Furstenberg, a man of some renown, wrote a moving tribute to his mum and her kitchen skills. You need to read it, and not just because it's a 71-year-old chef praising his mother, who's nearing her 100th birthday. This is a missive from another era:

My mother will reach her 100th birthday on May 20th and she is in very good shape. That fact alone would seem to vindicate her cooking (as well as her genes and her will and her energy).

I was one of six children. We were an eating family. We ate dinner together; we even ate breakfast together. And although our food was influenced by my father's having been born in Sweden (herring and knaeckebrot for breakfast), my mother made the food decisions.

She came from a somewhat aristocratic German-Jewish family and her mother didn't cook. Her family's meals were prepared by Miss Hen (one generation out of Slavery) followed by Bobbelee who started working for my grandparents when she was 15 years old. (She lied about her age.) My mother may never have turned on a stove until the War.

But in 1942 my father was assigned to Florida and my mother had to learn to cook. Happily she had an aptitude.

Our family dinners were simple — it was a time of simple food. I have memories from the War when rationing demanded from even experienced cooks a level of ingenuity that our affluence today has made entirely unnecessary. We didn't have meat very much; we certainly didn't have butter. But even without ingredients easily obtainable now we ate very well.

It was in the Fifties that my mother's cooking flourished. She used to describe meals as "the flower of my art." Scallops, pot roast, Swedish meatballs, Beef Stroganoff, always vegetables simply cooked, nearly always potatoes that my father loved, salads, and desserts. We ate well. The dinner table was chaotic. Six children, all eaters, my father trying to tell stories from his workday, my mother trying to gather our attention for my father. She was the cook; she was the mistress of ceremonies.

"Mom," someone (usually me) would say, "We just had lamb." And my mother would bolt from her chair and bring back from the kitchen her notebook, look through it to say, "We haven't had lamb since March 10th."

It's sad that what we have exists so little now. Dinner wasn't always joyful. My sister (Carla Cohen, owner of Politics and Prose) regularly knocked over her water glass and, in anticipation of my father's disapproval, would begin to cry.

But whether joyful or not, stormy or not, our dinner was a family time, the most important family time. And always my mother was in charge.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Saturday afternoon at Marvelous Market, Capitol Hill.

Samuel Fromartz, if you'll recall, was the surprise winner of Y&H's debut baguette competition last year, beating out breads from local icons like Marvelous Market and Breadline, even national big boys like Le Pain Quotidien and La Brea Bakery.

Well, good news travels fast, or semi-fast. Last week, Fromartz got a call from the office of a celebrity chef. Not just any celebrity chef, but one of the biggest in the history of celebrity chefs. She wanted him to bake bread for her charity dinner on Sunday.

Fromartz picks up the story here on his blog, ChewsWise:

I was leaving the gym when I checked my messages. Alice Waters' office at Chez Panisse was calling — yeah, right. Who was this really?

When I called back, it turned out Waters was calling and looking for a baker for her charity dinner in Washington, to replace one who had dropped out. Barton Seaver, a friend and chef at Blue Ridge, suggested me. "We hear you make the best baguette in DC," said Sarah Weiner, Waters' assistant. "Well, yeah, I won a contest," I stammered, "but I just bake at home. The most I've baked was for Thanksgiving dinner."

They needed to feed 40 — at a $500 a plate dinner at Bob Woodward's house. Could it be done in my home ovens? I said I'd call back. I went home to figure out how much bread I needed to bake and realized I could probably do it — 5 big loaves and several baguettes. I then called Peter Reinhart — the renowned baker and author I've known for a couple of years — to see what he thought. "That's not a lot of bread," he said, and he encouraged me to give it a whirl.

So began my first gig as a professional baker — at an Alice Waters' dinner.

You can read the rest of the story over on Fromartz's blog, including how his breads turned out.

Photo courtesy of Samuel Fromartz

The Amy-eos at Dean & DeLuca

Or just visit your favorite bakery instead. Assuming you have one other than Teaism, that is.

Earlier this week, I asked the Y&H Nation, via my twitter account, where they might like to pick up a good cookie for National Cookie Day, which is tomorrow. The vast majority of the responses (OK, three of them) were the same: the salty oat cookie at Teaism, which no doubt explains its appearance on the D.C. Dish Hall of Fame leaderboard. Two folks even mentioned the salty oat at Marvelous Market, but I'm hoping that was just a case of simple confusion over the home of the real thing.

Others offered up more original choices:

• The rugelach at Marvelous Market (via grassfedmedia)
• The oatmeal cookie at Buzz (via robynwebb)
• The pignoli at Vaccaro's (via mrf100)
• The cookies at Cafe Phillips (via isitdinneryet)
• 'Bee Stings' bars at Baked & Wired or the cookies at Castro's Bakery for their childhood nostalgia (via HelenaHimm)

Y&H has a few to throw into the mix, too:

• The manhole size chocolate chip cookie at Le Pain Quotidien
• The cranberry-coconut cookie at Breads Unlimited
• The POLLYstyle pecan-and-cranberry rugelach at Modern Times Coffeehouse
• The Amy-eo at Dean & DeLuca (I know, I know, I knocked the Amy-eo earlier but only because it can't compare to a real Oreo; on its own terms, it's a very good cookie.)
• And, of course, my mom's homemade chocolate chip cookies, which inspired my essay on crappy foods. You can get the recipe here.

OK, y'all, we've no doubt missed a ton of other good cookies out there? Where else should we turn for National Cookie Day?

Silent Treatment: Loic Feillet knows how to take criticism

Loic Feillet is, without question, one of the area's most skilled bakers. The owner of Panorama Baking Co. in Alexandria has, over the years, sold bread to some of the finest restaurants in the District, including both CityZen and Citronelle. But when Feillet took part in the Washington City Paper's debut baguette competition, his entry finished far down the list.

Feillet's loaf scored only 24 out of a possible 80 points, placing it eighth among the 12 competing breads. The baker, whom I asked to join our contest as a non-voting judge, remained mum as his fellow critics sliced and diced their way through the various baguettes. Some of the judges were not kind to Feillet's bread.

"It looks really good," said CityZen chef Eric Ziebold. "I was surprised. It did not taste good." On his scorecard, Ziebold awarded the baguette only 10 out of a possible 20 points. Mark Furstenberg, founder of both Marvelous Market and Breadline, scored the bread slightly higher, giving Feillet 11.5 points, but his comments were coarser than Ziebold's.

The crust, Furstenberg noted, was "old — should be better." As for the crumb, or the interior of the bread, the baker wrote on his scorecard that it was "dense" and "badly done."

It was only after all the breads were sampled and all the scores tallied that Feillet finally spoke in defense of his baguette.

"I made this baguette not to my personal tastes," Feillet told the crew gathered around the conference room table. "It's made according to the will of my customers."

In fact, Feillet told us, he used to make a baguette based on master baker Eric Kayser's recipe, but when Feillet moved from Florida to Alexandria about four years ago, he learned that his clientele wasn't interested in a classic French baguette. "It was a nightmare," Feillet added. "All the customers wailed, 'What is this baguette?'"

Feillet calls what he makes now "commercial bread," meant for many of the restaurants he serves, not for retail sales. (I should note that the high-end restaurants mentioned above don't or didn't buy Feillet's baguettes, but some of the other breads he produces.)

His customers, Feillet added, "want something very soft. I can't go against my customers."

Upon hearing this tale of woe, Furstenberg offered some advice to Feillet: "Never lower yourself to your customers' tastes."

Perhaps realizing the harshness of his words, Furstenberg immediately changed his tone. "You don't want to fight with your customers, I understand that," Furstenberg said. "I want to fight with my customers."

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Believe it or not, the origins of Mark Furstenberg's forthcoming G Street Food can be traced to a turbulent period in the mid-1990s when the master breadmaker was being forced out of the very business he started — the then-groundbreaking bakery, Marvelous Market.

"When I was failing at Marvelous Market and I was losing Marvelous Market because of my own expansion, I was invited to go on a trip to Apulia (Puglia, Italy)," says Furstenberg, who recently took part in the Washington City Paper's debut baguette competition. "I kept seeing bread eaten on the streets in various forms."

If that trip abroad was the first spark, then every subsequent trip that Furstenberg took, whether to Philly or to France, was just enough fuel to keep an idea smoldering in the back of the chef's mind. Finally, after years of traveling and eating all manner of street food, Furstenberg realized he had the concept for his next restaurant. He thought: "It would be so much fun to do street food in Washington... We don't have real street here."

This summer, Furstenberg's long-smoldering idea will erupt into G Street Food in the former Ecco Cafe location at 1706 G St. NW. To call it "Furstenberg's place," however, is a little misleading. G Street will be owned by the Choi family, who previously operated Ecco Cafe. The Koreans had been serious fans of Furstenberg's Breadline and had approached the breadmaker about working together at some point.  The Chois are "going to run it," Furstenberg says of G Street. "I'm going to do the menu and the food."

"Unquestionably," he adds, G Street "is going to be identified as mine" by most members of the media, not to mention most of the baker's old fans from Breadline and Marvelous Market.

Furstenberg plans to sell a number of dough-based street foods, he says, perhaps samosas or Montreal-style bagels or stuffed Turkish flatbreads or even Chinese steam buns. But make no mistake, G Street will venture way beyond bready things.

Furstenberg is thinking about serving pho, Tunisian salads, kabobs, and even Asian-style congee for breakfast, which G Street will also serve. "It won't be as bread based as the Breadline," he promises.

The chef has been testing recipes, consulting cookbooks, and even making more trips to prepare for G Street's opening. Furstenberg fully acknowledges that he's not familiar with some of the foods he wants to serve, which in part explains why he's not yet settled on a menu. (Well, that and the fact that the opening date is still months away.) But he plans to keep things concise at first.

"I'm not going to open with foods that I don't really know and feel comfortable with," he says.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Note: In preparation for Young & Hungry's baguette column next week (not this week, as previously reported here), we stopped at Marvelous Market, originally founded in 1990 by Mark Furstenberg, to see how the local institution is faring so many years after Furstenberg was essentially forced to sell his much-beloved bakeries.

The heavy wooden beams and exposed red brick at the Marvelous Market on Dupont Circle give the place the kind of warm, rustic vibe that you want from your neighborhood bakery. The spell, however, is broken the moment you open your mouth and ask one basic question: Do you bake your own breads?

Marvelous doesn't. It gets daily deliveries from Baguette Republic, which is co-owned by Dahmane Benabane, who worked as executive chef for Marvelous Market for 15 years. The Republic plies this shop — and every other in the Marvelous chain — with all manner of product, from pastries to muffins to loaves of various shape and size. Many of them, despite their transit from Northern Virginia, are fresh and delicious.

Tops among them is the chocolate croissant, a bronzed buttery purse of puff pastry filled with a thin strip of rich chocolate and lots of air, which helps to create a false impression of lightness. The baguette is decent example of the breadmaker's art — crusty and airy and far superior to that bread wad over at Firehook. The sourdough boule gives you a blast of sour all right — somewhere just south of old wine — but its crust has an off-putting texture that I'd place somewhere between plastic and old cardboard.

The truth is, Marvelous Market has strayed far beyond the European breadmaking traditions of its founder, Mark Furstenberg. It has, by its own admission, morphed into something that blends "Panera, Starbucks, Potbelly, Dean & Deluca, and Seven 11 (sic)" under one roof. As such, it can get pretty crowded in the narrow aisle inside the Dupont store, as customers elbow for fruit-juice blends, pre-made sandwiches, pates, cheeses, coffee, hell even pre-cut flowers. The sandwiches, particularly the fresh-as-a-Mediterranean-breeze caprese, are a fine option for those who want a quick lunch without sacrificing their soul (and their arteries) to the practitioners of fast-food sorcery.

But can you ever expect to wrap your mouth around something as deliriously tasty as the sandwiches that Breadline turned out during its Furstenberg heyday? Get real. Marvelous Market figured out long ago that artisan ambitions don't pay the bills.

A number of experts spent part of the day at the City Paper offices this afternoon to figure that out. Y&H invited two of the heaviest hitters in the local bread-making business to turn a critical eye — and palate — on our area's baguettes: Mark Furstenberg, the founder of both Marvelous Market and Breadline, and fellow baker, Loic Feillet, owner of Panorama Baking Co. in Alexandria.

To round out the panel, we also invited Eric Ziebold, chef at this year's Best Restaurant, and esteemed cookbook author Joan Nathan. We even asked City Paper's resident baker, Jule Banville (also known as our assistant managing editor), to provide more of the lay-editor's perspective.

We'll report our findings next week in Young & Hungry, but in the meantime, let's jump start the debate: What do you consider the best baguette in town?

More pictures from today's competition below the fold, courtesy of staff shooter, Darrow Montgomery.

It's a crumb-y job: Judging a baguette's interior structure.

Furstenberg takes a knife to baguettes.

The judges show off their "bread intuition."

Photos by Darrow Montgomery