The new bakery RYE by Martin Auer has been turning heads both on the streets of New York City and online by offering a $60 loaf of rye bread.
"As a baker myself, I’m honestly shocked. $60 for a loaf of bread is completely out of touch," reads one comment on the SoHo bakery's "opening day" Instagram announcement post on Sept. 10. "At a time when we should be talking about sustainability, respecting food, and making it accessible, turning a basic food into an overpriced luxury item for the wealthy feels deeply wrong," the user adds.
Many have echoed this sentiment across social media, commonly in response to food influencers promoting the place on TikTok and Instagram. All of the chatter has added to RYE's virality and has gotten people curious
about its story and appeal – even if many of the people are just hate-watching.
RYE focuses on one thing – sourdough rye bread. In addition to that $60 loaf, they charge between $6 and $14 for slices of toast with different spreads on it, like jam or brie.
Other products listed on their website include an $80 baseball cap, a $230 knife and a $480 storage container "meticulously crafted and fitted perfectly to accommodate an entire loaf of RYE," according to the listing.
The bakery opened on Lafayette Street on Sep. 10, and it's owned by father and son Martin and Tim Auer. The family's original bakeries are in Graz and Vienna, Austria.
Tim Auer tells USA TODAY that RYE's sourdough starter is 57 years old, and when looking to start a business in New York, he wanted to sell something the city didn't have. "If you walk around SoHo, you're going to be able to find some pretty good croissants, right? And if you keep walking, you're going to find some very decent, or even good, baguettes … But there's one thing that's not in the U.S. yet, or hasn't been in the U.S., and that is real rye sourdough bread."
Tim says that the $60 price point came from a few factors, like importing the flour from Austria and operating in New York City on one of its most expensive streets. "We try to really [not] shy away from any efforts or costs in order to create the best possible space, but also product. So the price is really the result of all the efforts and costs that went into making those," he says.
Martin Auer told Falstaff in 2024 that he wanted to make a "show bakery" with a fully visible workshop. That's come to fruition at the location in New York, where customers can see the bakers baking behind a glass pane.
"We wanted to create this space for people to slow down and experience the bread and the bread-making in the best possible way," Tim says.
@nycfoodfaves Would you pay $60 for a loaf of bread? This new Austrian bakery in Soho specializes in rye sourdough & uses 65 year old starter with a VERY steep price tag. #sourdough #nycbakery
♬ original sound - NYC Food Faves
Sabrina Carey is one of several influencers who've visited RYE and shared their experiences in short-form videos. She tells USA TODAY that she preferred the time she spent visiting over the actual pieces of toast she purchased. "I think they're really trying to make it like an experience. So you're basically going to the rye bread tasting, and then you're going to the toast counter, and then you can see them all making the rye bread."
One RYE clerk she interviewed in her TikTok video told her they only use four ingredients: 100% rye flour imported from Austria, water, salt and 48 hours of time. Simplicity seems to be a key aesthetic. In Carey's video, which now sits at over 1 million views, a grid of round RYE loaves is the only art hung up on a greyish, beige wall inside.
@fooodforfooodies New rye bread shop in SoHo that has $60 loaf of bread and Open face sandwiches aka toast 📍Rye 285 Lafayette #fooodforfooodies #ryebymartinauer #newopenings #foodreview
♬ original sound - Sabrina Carey
"I did not buy a loaf of bread because I think the price of that is crazy like everybody else is saying," she says.
People in her comment sections expressed similar concerns. "As a European, I’m just mad that I didn’t come up with this scam myself," reads one comment on her video with over 36,400 likes.
Her video also gained attention on X, where users sounded off in quote-tweets and replies, boosting the tweet to over 9 million views in three days.
"New Yorkers go into debt to eat what I shove into my piehole when I dissociate in front of the fridge for 10 minutes and haven't found absolutely anything else edible," wrote one X user in their native German, receiving over 38,000 likes.
"There has been quite a lot of noise online," Tim Auer acknowledges. "But it's not like we deliberately aimed for that or tried to push it in any sense. We had an opening where we invited people from the food industry, and that's it."
new yorker verschulden sich um das zu essen was ich mir in die futterluke stopfe wenn ich 10min lang vorm kühlschrank dissoziiere und absolut nichts anderes essbares gefunden hab https://t.co/6r4GgR2UZi
— Jan🤠 (@jandr1810) September 18, 2026
Others have related the RYE craze to the so-called "little treat economy," a supposed trend among Gen Z of buying expensive small snacks to feel luxurious in lieu of other large purchases they can't afford, like a home or car.
But these expensive treat crazes typically spark outrage and skepticism. In 2025, Los Angeles-based grocery chain Erewhon went viral for its $20-plus smoothies, which got promoted by high-end influencers like Hailey Bieber. In July, a $150 chicken tender tower sold in the Hamptons raised eyebrows online.
In 2024, a restaurant in New York's Flatiron District was charging $28 for one chicken nugget with caviar on it. And the same restaurateurs went viral recently when they sold $100 caviar nuggets at the US Open.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A $60 loaf of rye bread is getting a lot of hate online
