Ryan was still leaving the hospital when another difficulty caught up with him. A supplier informed him that the flour variety he preferred would rise in price at the beginning of the next month, and the increase would make his everyday loaf harder to keep affordable. He spent the drive home running numbers aloud, trying to decide what he could change without losing the quality customers had begun to trust. The bakery was not yet strong enough to absorb many surprises, and even success in a small business could feel like carrying water in a cracked vessel.
Eleven days after Lauren's visit, a man named Daniel Brooks came into Fuller Street Bakery without an appointment. He wore an ordinary jacket, carried a small notebook, and looked around with the focused curiosity of someone who noticed the details other people overlooked. He studied the cooling rack, the handwritten menu, the patched door, and the flour that had settled in the creases of the counter. Then he ordered a piece of country bread and a plain roll, asking for neither butter nor a speech about how they had been made.
Ryan wrapped the order and expected the man to leave. Instead, Daniel broke the bread, studied the crumb, and tasted it while standing by the window. He went completely still after the first bite, then looked down as though the piece in his hand had contradicted something he thought he understood. He took a second bite before approaching the counter again.
"Who's your baker?" he asked. Ryan wiped his hands on his apron. "You're looking at him." Daniel asked where he had trained, and Ryan told him the truth: nowhere formally, unless eleven years of quality control and a lifetime of Sunday baking with his mother counted. Daniel looked toward the ovens as though checking for an unseen instructor.
"I've spent fifteen years traveling around the country looking for places like this," he said. Ryan thought he meant suppliers or other bakeries and began explaining that most of his equipment was secondhand. Daniel smiled and handed him a card with the name of a nationally distributed food program. He was a producer who visited neighborhood businesses, tasted their food, and occasionally found something extraordinary enough to share with a much larger audience.
Ryan read the card twice. He had seen episodes of the program while eating dinner at home, usually after Sophie had gone to bed and he was too tired to change the channel. Daniel's show did not concentrate on restaurants with expensive interiors or famous chefs; it followed small operations whose owners were stubborn about one particular thing. Ryan could not imagine why the man wanted to spend an episode in his cramped shop with two unreliable ovens.
Daniel seemed to understand the question. He explained that he had tasted hundreds of carefully marketed products that were beautiful and forgettable, and a much smaller number of ordinary things that made him stop and pay attention. "Your bread is the second kind," he said. "I'd like to come back with a small crew and show people how you make it."