Fill up on bread? At this Jersey City restaurant, that’s the point.

Marian Bull is a writer, potter and editor living in Brooklyn. She writes a weekly cooking newsletter called Mess Hall. In our new series called Dishing, Marian will get the story behind a tasty dish at a local restaurant.

In the introduction to his recently published cookbook, Bread and How to Eat It, baker Rick Easton corrects a piece of advice that parents have long offered children at the dinner table. Despite what you learned at Olive Garden in middle school, Easton explains, you actually should fill up on bread. Instead of ruining your dinner, you’ll enhance it. Bread, he writes, “is integral to the meal, as woven into it as seasonings or herbs.”

This ethos is evident, and encouraged, at Bread & Salt, Easton’s bakery in Jersey City Heights. Here, between Friday and Sunday, you can find Roman-style pizza (available by the whole or half pie), pastries and crostatas, fennel-flecked and sugar-shimmery taralli cookies, house-made gelato, and gleaming rounds of focaccia barese studded with burst tomatoes and Sicilian olives.

While pizza has always been central to Easton’s business — Eater’s Ryan Sutton once called Bread & Salt “the New York-area’s next vital pizzeria” — he began tinkering with this focaccia in 2020. (​​Easton moved Bread & Salt from its original location in Pittsburgh to Jersey City in June 2019.) The pandemic made selling pizza by the slice less desirable, and the bakery switched from a dine-in model to a full-on takeout operation.

The focaccia, served by the slice or the round, began as an offering to the Jersey City community: Easton says there’s a good number of people in the area from Bari, the Italian city where this particular style of focaccia originates.

“We had so many of these customers — older people and younger people — and it felt like a good way to do something that would resonate,” he said. Plus, he knew it would…