On our recent trip up California, we spent an evening with the lovely people of American Flatbread Company in Los Alamos. American Flatbread Company is, mostly, a manufacturer of frozen “flatbreads”. On Friday and Saturday nights, the bakery turns itself into a wonderful restaurant, cooking natural flatbreads over local red oak with farmer’s market ingredients.

At first glance a “flatbread” is a frozen pizza — a woodfired disc of dough with toppings — but upon reflection I came to feel that these folks were, by not using the word pizza, freeing the food from the yoke of authenticity.

American Flatbread Company has an interesting history, which our host Meg shared with us. It was founded in Vermont and originally served only the eastern US. Clark, the owner of Food Remembers, was passionate about the Flatbread Company’s product and asked for the opportunity to manufacture the flatbreads for the western US. The two groups came to agreement, and flatbread America was thusly bifurcated.

According to Meg, the Eastside and Westside pizzas are fairly different. Because, of course, the water, flour, and toppings all come from different places and are touched by different people. I laughed at the thought of people just over a border from one another having completely different flatbread experiences under the same name, though in fact I doubt there are that many neighboring outlets, as distribution is fairly select (in San Diego, try Baron’s, Kiels, or Whole Foods).

Ideally — maybe even eventually — as Meg pointed out, every town would have their own flatbread outpost, and their frozen flatbreads would reflect their location and their people. And have far fewer miles on them, to boot. For now, though, there are just two.

The restaurant itself is sensational, and has quickly become one of my favorite places in the Central Coast. The people are friendly and genuine, and the food is a great and really tells the story of the place and of the people who put it together. Great Central Coast wine list, too.

I’ve previously mentioned their inspirational credo: “From local soil into local hands to our hearth, Food Remembers the acts of the hands and hearts.” The restaurant features many other great lenses onto the possibilites of food. One of my favorite parts of the American Flatbread Company experience is a series of posters on the wall depicting the five faces of food…five needs that food can fill:

- Hunger
- Flavor
- Nutrition
- Nourishment
- Healing

Whenever I see those panels, I think of how often, in the restaurant/diner community, we often focus on just the first two. How often, as a preoccupied eater, it’s easy for me to focus on just the first one. How often, when cooking for myself or planning my diet, I stop at the third. But if we believe in all five faces — and I do — we cheat ourselves out of so much if we don’t experience them all.