About Us

TEXAS FRENCH BREAD

Texas French Bread is a bakery/café at 29th and Rio Grande St. in central Austin, Texas.  Since in 1981, Texas French Bread has made freshly-baked artisan breads, pastries, and desserts from scratch. We also serve homemade sandwiches, soups, salads, deliver box-lunches, and brew first rate locally roasted coffees. Over the past several years we operated a semi-monthly supper club, and in 2009 we have added to our offering and taken our business in a new direction by converting our supper club into a full-fledged dinner service at our Rio Grande & 29th St. cafe.

Currently we serve dinner on Monday through Saturday evenings, beginning at 6pm. Our casual bistro menu combines many of our deepest culinary interests – specifically, the techniques of traditional French country and Mediterranean cooking, and Alice Waters’ dictate to seek out the local, the fresh, the simple, the nutritious, and the beautiful, and to serve these in season at their peak. We regularly post our weekly menu on our home page, but please note that we do make frequent changes based on the availability of ingredients.

BEN WILLCOTT (THE YOUNGER)
Ben grew up here in Austin and attended St. Stephen’s for highschool, where he (unlike his extremely talented and good looking older brother) actually graduated. (Is there a difference between “graduation” and “matriculation”?) He spent time living in San Francisco and New York, and did a year at Yale before graduating with a degree in English from UT. During much of this time, he had very tall, “flock of seaguls” type hair and drove a particularly cool 1963 Buick Wildcat. Oh yeah, he also formed a band called the Larrys, who had a habit of covering Hey Joe, and occasionally launched into spontaneous covers of Sunshine of your Love.

His prior professional restaurant experience was mostly in the front of the house – but he has stepped in as our chef, and done a remarkable job. Over the past several years, he had become more or less obsessed with the traditions of French country cooking. Let’s just say that initially, not everything he tried was a success. There were nights – late nights, in his backyard on Kinney St. – when, many glasses of wine later, the hour would approach midnight, and the promised dinner would turn into… “ok, we can still order pizza”. But in an uncanny foreshadowing of our current roles, over the past year or so, his food just started to rock. He made a mezze plate with lamb meatballs, harissa, and tzatziki for a group of us at his house last summer, and I was deeply impressed – we needed this to be on the Menu at TFB, but how to make it fit? The meals he cooked for me over the next few months convinced me that he was ready for prime time, and that we needed to get open for dinner soon.

MURPH WILLCOTT (THE ELDER)
I grew up in Austin as well. And I also attended St. Stephens, but I dropped out after 10th grade to pursue my interests in TV and uh… “exotic tabaccos” (hey, come on! – it was 1977). Getting it together somewhat, I worked for TFB in its earliest days learning to bake bread and make croissants by hand – activities that did not overly conflict with my other “interests”. But after a year or so, my father kicked me rudely out the nest – with instructions to land in college or find another job. (Seriously, do I look fat in that picture or what? Never mind – don’t answer that.)

I managed to talk my way into the Plan II program at UT, as a legacy, and after graduating, I moved to that liberal bastion, NYC where I worked at multiple overlapping restaurant, catering and bakery jobs. (My favorite of those jobs was at Sam’s Cafe, Mariel Hemingway’s eastside bistro – where I worked for an amazing chef and teacher, Sharon Hage, now owner/operator of York Street – hands down the best restaurant in Dallas.)

Working 2 to 3 restaurant gigs at a time tended to be rather taxing, and so, even though I enjoyed the work a great deal, I figured perhaps I should try my hand at something with a bit more obvious potential for remuneration. With the big bucks in mind, I somehow talked my way into Harvard Law School. I graduated in 1993 and went back to work in NYC doing securities law. It did not agree with me – something about having a boss, I don’t know. Given a chance to jump into something resembling an entrepreneurial opportunity, in August of 2001, I packed the rent car and headed home to Austin. The rest, as they say, is history.

Anyway, as between Ben and myself, I always fancied myself to be the real cook. This was partly because I just figure I’m better at stuff (I did get here first after all), and it’s partly due to being relegated to the kitchen for most of my previous restaurant work. This may have been on account of my personality – it doesn’t seem to take that long for me irritate even relatively open minded people. Oh yeah – I also had that New York restaurant experience. But with Ben doing such a bang up job behind the stove, I found myself in the unlikely position of hobnobbing with our customers out front – wonders never cease. And I have to say, Ben’s has proven himself the better chef. He’s more creative, more nuanced – I think we divided this thing up the right way.