How to Butter Toast
- Kate Lewis
- Jun 20
- 5 min read
Start with butter.
Preferably grass-fed, but do as you please. Leave it out so it’s room temperature: soft, yielding. It should offer itself to the knife with no attachments to what came before.
This is not about hunger. This is about spreading something golden to its edges.
This is the only type of love story I am interested in.
“Did you use the entire loaf of bread?”
“Yes.”
“WHY?”
“BECAUSE THAT’S HOW THE GAME WORKS, DAD.”
We are 8 and 9, and we are in trouble again. This time, for going through an entire loaf of bread in under 2 hours.
The game is Coldwater Creek Café. The name is inspired by a women’s clothing store called Coldwater Creek in our local strip mall, across the street from Panera. The title feels luxurious to us - whispers wealth and fine things. So my sister and I steal the name, tack “Café” onto the end, and declare ourselves open for business.
We’re busy this morning. We’ve got a bar counter with five stools. Plus, a dining room table with full place setting - water glasses, candles, rolled napkins. We don’t cut corners at the CCC.
Our menu is specialized. We only serve one thing: buttered toast.
Option 1: a little butter.
Option 2: a lot of butter.
Served on sliced Pepperidge Farm Potato Bread.
No substitutions.
We run the café like it’s Iron Chef - unreasonably loud and smoky. Our “tickets” are sticky notes, each one scrawled with the same word in Sharpie: toast. We post them everywhere - cabinet doors, chair backs, the fridge.
We take turns rotating between roles with flourish: chef, server, host, patron. B takes the kitchen seriously - insists on diagonal cuts, observes strict butter ratios. I prefer front-of-house. I love the ambiance, the props, pretending I’m somewhere else.
The game ends when our dad discovers stacks of plates and sticky notes scattered across the kitchen. We get sent to our shared room for eating too much bread and wasting food: “People are starving!”
We crawl into our twin beds, under our matching cowboy-print comforters. We stare at the ceiling in silence for a while, until B turns to me and whispers: “Okay… new game.”
Once the butter is velvet and willing, prepare the bread.
The bread is the foundation. Choose something with weight - a slice that can hold the heat of what’s coming. It should be amber. It should crisp at the edges.
Toast it until it hums beneath the fingers. Until it sighs, just barely, when touched.
“Behind!”
I am 21, and it’s my week as General Manager of the Aspen Grille - the only restaurant on CSU’s campus where no one gets paid, but everyone gets graded. I am a Hospitality Management major, and part of our Restaurant Studies program means actually running one. We alternate through different positions every week: runner, sous chef, expo.
I’m hoping my turn as GM makes up for my less-than-stellar line cook scores, which is dragging my average down. Fortunately, I like being GM. I am drawn to the ballet of it - the choreography of service, the way bodies slip through narrow spaces like shadows, the cacophony of: corner, hands, eyes on table 7. It requires full presence.
Amid the chaos, there is a silent stream where hospitality flows, pulsing and alive. You just need to tap into it.
After my shift, Professor F pulls me aside.
“Someone called out next week. Want to be GM again? Extra credit.”
I have been redeemed.
Before the knife, pause.
There’s a narrow window - thirty seconds or so - just after the toast is born from the heat, where the bread must adjust to its new identity.
Too soon, and the butter runs. Too late, and it resists.
The bread must cool, just enough. This pause, unassuming and easily missed, is vital. You must not rush the waiting. You must embrace the stillness and believe, without evidence, that something good is on its way.
Timing, in everything, matters.
“Feel free to close early tonight.”
I am 26, and I am waiting.
For what, I’m not sure - but my mind is processing, combing through patterns, preparing for a shift I can’t name. I work the bar at an extended-stay hotel near Columbus Circle. Guests stay for months. Each room has a full kitchen, so the bar sees little action.
I’m the only bartender on staff. There are long stretches where time barely moves. If five people come in during my 8 hour shift, it’s a busy night. I write poems on receipt paper. I journal behind the counter. Mostly, I think.
These are the searching years - the slow, uncertain stretch of my twenties. Scenic and wandering. The days fold into each other. Time drifts without edges or seams, a necessary passage in which I refine the art of people-watching: the guest who always orders the same thing, the lone patron who stays until close, the couple who spends their date on their phones.
Underneath the habits, we all seek the same thing.
A year from now, I’ll trade dimly lit bars and stainless-steel kitchens for conference rooms and corporate agendas, where everything is measured in quarters: OKRs, KPIs. But the spirit of hospitality lingers within me, never leaves.
After the pause, spread the butter slowly.
Using the flat side of your knife, apply gentle, even pressure. The butter should glide. Start at the center and work outward in smooth, deliberate strokes. Every corner should receive its share.
Watch the butter sink into the porous crumb - a slow fusion of fat and grain. Take your time. This is when it all comes together: where butter and bread alchemize and become something new.
“She interviews well, but she’s not really qualified.”
“What’s her background?”
“She’s coming from Hospitality.”
“Oh, she’s qualified.”
I am 30, and I am hiring for a new role at work. The résumés come in clean - titles, timelines, credentials. They’re the least important thing I look at.
I’m more interested in how someone listens. How they respond.
The word hospitality comes from the Latin hospitalitas, rooted in hospes - meaning “host,” “guest,” or “stranger.” At its origin is an ancient social contract: to provide shelter, food, and care to those on the outside.
This act of welcome is foundational - an ethical responsibility we owe each other. It calls us to hold ourselves to a higher standard: to respect and honor every individual, no matter where they come from.
To be hospitable is to be human. For true service transcends occupation; it’s a way of being - a posture of receiving that requires no further qualification.
Finally, eat.
Lift the toast to your lips while it still holds residual heat. The crust should crack lightly under pressure. The center, still tender, should cradle the butter like earth holding rain.
Sink your teeth in. Taste the chemistry unfolding. Watch the Maillard reaction reveal itself - caramelized sugars, crisped starch. The salt sharpens. The fat lingers.
This final act of consuming is brief, but it’s the culmination of everything that came before. Each step mattered. Each one led here.
Buttered toast is monumental. And also just toast.
At the end of the day, it’s all temporary. It’s all an offering. A single note in the grand symphony of being alive.
In other words, toast is life itself. 🍞
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