Knowing your ale from your elbow
Scotty’s Brewhouse, an Indiana-based casual chain, is now asking applicants for bartender jobs to take a quiz first on beer. The chain wants to gauge potential hires’ beer knowledge before giving them a job, explains PeopleMatter, the company that set up the test as part of its application software.
Will oyster leaf be the next craze?
Using the ironclad Rule of Three (i.e., three instances signal a trend), chefs’ use of oyster leaf by is right on the cusp. During an education session, the gardener for Thomas Keller’s Napa Valley restaurants noted how the celebrated chef asked him to cultivate the green, which tastes uncannily like oysters. Samples were provided in one of the booths featuring micro-herbs.
Innovation may be the biggest theme of the show
Traffic on the show floor was particularly thick yesterday afternoon in the Technology Pavilion and the American foods aisles, all of which feature smaller booths frequently manned by entrepreneurs. That dynamic fits what was stressed in everything from education sessions to meet-the-chef presentations in the World Culinary Showcase: Innovation is the key to success in the current economic environment.
Rolling 'bout The Rapture
The fallback for comedic material during the show has been The Rapture, originally predicted to hit on Saturday afternoon, as some of us were having an extra Nathan’s sample just in case the holy rollers were right. An example: Chef Barton Seaver opened his comments on seafood sustainability during an education session by noting The Rapture is already here for the nation’s oceans.
Showing posts with label Food trends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Food trends. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Wake up & smell the pizza
Many, many years ago, a publicist tried to convince me that breakfast salads would be the Next Big Thing for restaurants. “Hey, why not pizza for breakfast?” I sniffed. “Or a quarter-pounder? Or breakfast beer?”
For the record, the correct answers proved, “Yes, why not?,” “Definitely,” and “Not yet.”
With breakfast providing one of the few areas of sales growth for restaurants, places have been scrambling to differentiate themselves with new morning selections—ideally, additions that promise flavor, distinction and portability.
So, yes, why not breakfast pizza?
No reason at all, places of all stripes have responded. They’re propelling a.m. pizza to Choco Taco status—the one-time standard for Mexican fast-food places that wanted to offer something for dessert. When you’re known for a product that’s seemingly locked into certain mealtimes, sometimes you have to go with the obvious variation for expansion purposes, however kinky it might seem at first.
Like a hamburger cross-dressed as a breakfast option, with various a.m. staples used as the makeup. Chief among them is a fried egg. As BurgerBusiness.com points out, a slew of burger specialists are using their spatulas for double-duty, sliding the egg atop the patty and then adding such extras as cheese, bacon, chorizo or even home fries.
Speaking as a consumer, it works for me. Then again, on my list of things I have to try is a local bakery’s spaghetti and meatball cupcake.
It's listed right above breakfast beer.
For the record, the correct answers proved, “Yes, why not?,” “Definitely,” and “Not yet.”
With breakfast providing one of the few areas of sales growth for restaurants, places have been scrambling to differentiate themselves with new morning selections—ideally, additions that promise flavor, distinction and portability.
So, yes, why not breakfast pizza?
No reason at all, places of all stripes have responded. They’re propelling a.m. pizza to Choco Taco status—the one-time standard for Mexican fast-food places that wanted to offer something for dessert. When you’re known for a product that’s seemingly locked into certain mealtimes, sometimes you have to go with the obvious variation for expansion purposes, however kinky it might seem at first.
Like a hamburger cross-dressed as a breakfast option, with various a.m. staples used as the makeup. Chief among them is a fried egg. As BurgerBusiness.com points out, a slew of burger specialists are using their spatulas for double-duty, sliding the egg atop the patty and then adding such extras as cheese, bacon, chorizo or even home fries.
Speaking as a consumer, it works for me. Then again, on my list of things I have to try is a local bakery’s spaghetti and meatball cupcake.
It's listed right above breakfast beer.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Getting hives from all this buzz
Years ago, a foodie friend complained that chefs were hounding him for liquid nitrogen, the prep aid any kitchen wanting to be hip at the time just had to try. They figured a guy as haute as him would have plenty at his disposal, my bud explained, letting me know how plugged-in he was.
I wonder if he’s being pressed these days for clover blossoms or live honeysuckle vines. To be on the current culinary edge, you have to be thinking about high-craft fresh honey, preferably from bees working just for you.
Having your own hive is a new phenomenon, embraced at present by only a few truly avant-garde restaurants, hotels and other feeding establishments. Right now it's still riding the coattails of other trends. Some of the converts have incorporated hives into their rooftop garden, a more noticeable manifestation of urban farming. The Fairmont lodging chain, for instance, has buzzing boxes atop at least three properties.
Beekeeping is also catching on as a component of student gardening, a veritable trend unto itself on college campuses. The University of Connecticut, for instance, uses some of its campus-produced honey as a sweetener in foodservice operations, with the balance sold in the college bookstore to visiting parents.
But the movement is clearly picking up some velocity. In what’s shaping up as its ongoing coverage of the bee boom, Epicurious.com reported two weeks ago that a British company is now selling an urban hive kit that produces up to 50 jars of honey a year. It sells for about $760. The supplier, called Omlet, is already known to urban farmers as the seller of a self-contained chicken-coop kit.
Meanwhile, if you don’t want to get your hands all sticky (or stung), you can pay to have a hive managed for you in New Zealand, with the output going exclusively to you. If private reserve honey is still too much of a commitment, you can buy into a syndicate arrangement, where the hive is owned for a year by up to 10 parties.
As interest in “estate” honey moves in from the fringes, beekeeping is certain to generate considerable buzz (ugh) in the restaurant community. And that’s going to be a good thing, given how fascinated patrons will likely become with propriety hives.
The process is indeed intriguing. I grew up on a estate, owned by a millionaire and superintended by my father. That meant he took care of all the gardens, which were far more extensive than a single family could use, even with their extravagant dinners and parties.
Toward the end of my father’s tenure, back in the early 1980s, the family decided that it wanted to put some bee hives on the 200-acre property. My father had to learn about it, and passed on a little of what he absorbed to me.
Not that I ever touched the hives. A worker was designated to be the beekeeper, largely because he had to foster a relationship with the bees. They had to come to trust him, if you can believe it. He wore gloves and a pith helmet with netting, but expected to be able to go bare-skinned once some familiarity had been established.
When this whole beekeeping thing started to get some attention from chefs who were interested in sustainability, I started looking into buying myself a hive kit. I never got around to it, largely because of the cost, but it did give rise to a memorable laugh.
I told my wife that I wanted to get a beehive. She looked at me a long time, her eyes darting upward for a second, then back down to meet mine. “I don’t think you have enough hair to make that work,” she said.
I wonder if he’s being pressed these days for clover blossoms or live honeysuckle vines. To be on the current culinary edge, you have to be thinking about high-craft fresh honey, preferably from bees working just for you.
Having your own hive is a new phenomenon, embraced at present by only a few truly avant-garde restaurants, hotels and other feeding establishments. Right now it's still riding the coattails of other trends. Some of the converts have incorporated hives into their rooftop garden, a more noticeable manifestation of urban farming. The Fairmont lodging chain, for instance, has buzzing boxes atop at least three properties.
Beekeeping is also catching on as a component of student gardening, a veritable trend unto itself on college campuses. The University of Connecticut, for instance, uses some of its campus-produced honey as a sweetener in foodservice operations, with the balance sold in the college bookstore to visiting parents.
But the movement is clearly picking up some velocity. In what’s shaping up as its ongoing coverage of the bee boom, Epicurious.com reported two weeks ago that a British company is now selling an urban hive kit that produces up to 50 jars of honey a year. It sells for about $760. The supplier, called Omlet, is already known to urban farmers as the seller of a self-contained chicken-coop kit.
Meanwhile, if you don’t want to get your hands all sticky (or stung), you can pay to have a hive managed for you in New Zealand, with the output going exclusively to you. If private reserve honey is still too much of a commitment, you can buy into a syndicate arrangement, where the hive is owned for a year by up to 10 parties.
As interest in “estate” honey moves in from the fringes, beekeeping is certain to generate considerable buzz (ugh) in the restaurant community. And that’s going to be a good thing, given how fascinated patrons will likely become with propriety hives.
The process is indeed intriguing. I grew up on a estate, owned by a millionaire and superintended by my father. That meant he took care of all the gardens, which were far more extensive than a single family could use, even with their extravagant dinners and parties.
Toward the end of my father’s tenure, back in the early 1980s, the family decided that it wanted to put some bee hives on the 200-acre property. My father had to learn about it, and passed on a little of what he absorbed to me.
Not that I ever touched the hives. A worker was designated to be the beekeeper, largely because he had to foster a relationship with the bees. They had to come to trust him, if you can believe it. He wore gloves and a pith helmet with netting, but expected to be able to go bare-skinned once some familiarity had been established.
When this whole beekeeping thing started to get some attention from chefs who were interested in sustainability, I started looking into buying myself a hive kit. I never got around to it, largely because of the cost, but it did give rise to a memorable laugh.
I told my wife that I wanted to get a beehive. She looked at me a long time, her eyes darting upward for a second, then back down to meet mine. “I don’t think you have enough hair to make that work,” she said.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
What the Millenials are eating
Chef Robert Harbison, executive chef of Princeton University, provided a rundown during the New York show of Gen Y-ers’s dining preferences, as indicated by what his 7,000 customer-students want or don’t want to eat. Here are what he identified as the new favorites of that younger generation, along with a few comments:
--“The biggest trend right now? Authentic Indian cuisine is huge. It is taken off to the point where we’re having a hard time in keeping up.”
--“Flatbreads are the new pizzas. What’s good about it? It’s a very inexpensive product, much less expensive than a dough ball. My margins are great. You can’t put a lot of stuff on there because it has to cook fast. You put a little bit of stuff, with intense flavors.”
--Authentic street foods are big, he said, citing crepes in particular. The students went crazy when he tried them, Harbison recounted. “There again, the margins are great.”
--Noodle bars, despite the execution challenges.
--Sliders. “I do a lot of slider desserts. I’ll do a strawberry shortcake slider. A gelato ice-cream sandwich. I can get a pretty good dollar for these, and they cost us nothing.”
“We don’t use ‘tiny’ or ‘small,’ we use ‘flights,’ or ‘tapas.’ Or ‘sliders.’ We want to say this is something different,” not something that’s been trimmed or skimped down.
--“Functional food is hot right now, and will continue to be hot. But we’ll be looking at the origins of these foods. They’ll prefer to take foods with natural characteristics instead of artificial ones.”
--Aromatic herbs, not reductions, sauces and other flavor maskers.
--“They’re buying coffee at a younger age. It’s amazing to see someone who’s 12-years-old buying a mocciatta.”
“Why is this happening? They’re not drinking as much alcohol. Cigarettes aren’t as cool as they were for us, and they need their stimulants.”
-- “Wrapped over all of this, and I can’t stress this enough, is sustainability. We’re using local cheeses, local breads, using organic deli meats.”
He also provided a few heads-up about what the so-called Millenials don’t like:
--“Genetically modified organisms—that is a huge topic. It’s going to be a mess. That is a big can of worms. These kids today are pretty freaked out by it.”
--Reductions. “Kids don’t know what a reduction is.” If you have a good flavor in the basic ingredients, like the chicken you’re using, a sauce isn’t needed, he explained. The students are accustomed to those clean yet pronounced tastes.
--“The biggest trend right now? Authentic Indian cuisine is huge. It is taken off to the point where we’re having a hard time in keeping up.”
--“Flatbreads are the new pizzas. What’s good about it? It’s a very inexpensive product, much less expensive than a dough ball. My margins are great. You can’t put a lot of stuff on there because it has to cook fast. You put a little bit of stuff, with intense flavors.”
--Authentic street foods are big, he said, citing crepes in particular. The students went crazy when he tried them, Harbison recounted. “There again, the margins are great.”
--Noodle bars, despite the execution challenges.
--Sliders. “I do a lot of slider desserts. I’ll do a strawberry shortcake slider. A gelato ice-cream sandwich. I can get a pretty good dollar for these, and they cost us nothing.”
“We don’t use ‘tiny’ or ‘small,’ we use ‘flights,’ or ‘tapas.’ Or ‘sliders.’ We want to say this is something different,” not something that’s been trimmed or skimped down.
--“Functional food is hot right now, and will continue to be hot. But we’ll be looking at the origins of these foods. They’ll prefer to take foods with natural characteristics instead of artificial ones.”
--Aromatic herbs, not reductions, sauces and other flavor maskers.
--“They’re buying coffee at a younger age. It’s amazing to see someone who’s 12-years-old buying a mocciatta.”
“Why is this happening? They’re not drinking as much alcohol. Cigarettes aren’t as cool as they were for us, and they need their stimulants.”
-- “Wrapped over all of this, and I can’t stress this enough, is sustainability. We’re using local cheeses, local breads, using organic deli meats.”
He also provided a few heads-up about what the so-called Millenials don’t like:
--“Genetically modified organisms—that is a huge topic. It’s going to be a mess. That is a big can of worms. These kids today are pretty freaked out by it.”
--Reductions. “Kids don’t know what a reduction is.” If you have a good flavor in the basic ingredients, like the chicken you’re using, a sauce isn’t needed, he explained. The students are accustomed to those clean yet pronounced tastes.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Twice as many predictions of food and flavor trends
The value trend has apparently seeped into the Institute of Prognostication or wherever it is the crystal ball gazers congregate at this time of year to spit out forecast after forecast. The first sets of predictions to reach Restaurant Reality Check both disregarded the conventional list approach to cite two trends where one might’ve sufficed for each ranking in past years.
The McCormick spice company’s Flavor Forecast, for instance, predicts 2009’s Top 10 Flavor Pairings rather than merely the flavorings that will come into vogue. And Epicurious.com’s New Food Trends cleverly cites what’ll be out as well as in.
Here they are in their entirety.
From Epicurious.com:
From McCormick:
The McCormick spice company’s Flavor Forecast, for instance, predicts 2009’s Top 10 Flavor Pairings rather than merely the flavorings that will come into vogue. And Epicurious.com’s New Food Trends cleverly cites what’ll be out as well as in.
Here they are in their entirety.
From Epicurious.com:
1. Peruvian is the new Thai: You thought Peruvian cuisine was all about seviche, maybe? Guess again: Peru boasts culinary influences from Spanish, Basque, African, Cantonese, Japanese, Italian, French, and British immigrants. Pisco Sour, anyone?
2. Noodle Bars are the new sushi joints: With some seafood being suspect or overfished and raw fish prices high, noodles make complete sense. If there's no ramen, udon, or soba shop in your neck of the woods,there probably will be soon.
3. "Value" is the new "sustainable": These days, the economy dictates our cooking and shopping decisions. Bargains are in, no matter where they come from.
4. Ginger is the new mint: Move over, mojitos. Ginger beers and ginger cocktails (like the Ginger Rogers, Gin-Mule, and Ginger Smash) are bubbling up at places like the Violet Hour in Chicago, the Clock Bar in San Francisco, and Matsugen in New York.
5. Smoking is the new frying: You know how everything tastes better fried? Well, almost everything tastes better smoked, too, and that includes cocktails. Bartenders (Eben Freeman at Tailor in New York, for example) are smoking their bourbons, and chefs, recognizing the national craze for BBQ flavor, are smoking more than just salmon and ribs: nuts, salts, even smoked steelhead roe (at Chicago's Alinea). Who says smoking's bad for you?
6. Regional roasters are the new Starbucks: It's come full circle. What started as a local coffee phenomenon migrated to other cities and turned Americans into java junkies. Then the chain overexpanded, and the little neighborhood coffee roasters thrive again, like Stumptown (Portland, Oregon), Blue Bottle (San Francisco), and La Colombe (Philadelphia).
7. Portland (Maine) is the new Portland (Oregon): Abundance of great chefs, restaurants, and local foodies? Check, check, and check. Want examples? Visit Five Fifty-Five, Hugo's, and Fore Street to start.
8. Rustic food is the new molecular gastronomy: Wacky weird-science cuisine that requires fancy-schmancy equipment doesn't necessarily make food taste better, and more often than not it adds needless complexity (there are exceptions). Most importantly, no one really wants to do this at home. Expect to see comfort food stage a comeback again.
9. "Top-Rated" is the new "Critic's Pick": Power to the people; single critics are a dying breed. Why believe what one person says when you can read and reflect on what hundreds think?
From McCormick:
1. Toasted sesame and root beer: An iconic soda is rediscovered for its versatility as a cooking ingredient, paired with the bold nuttiness of toasted sesame seed.
2. Cayenne and tart cherry: The flavors of two superfoods -- the heat of cayenne and sweet-sour tang of tart cherry -- pack a multi-layered punch.
3. Tarragon and beetroot: The hip pair creates a sensory feast that is anything other than predictable or restrained.
4. Peppercorn melange and sake: Japan's notable rice wine finds a new partner in the quintessentially French unison of multicolored peppercorns.
5. Chinese five spice and artisan-cured pork: Hand crafted artistry merges with a harmonious Asian blend to create an innovative taste sensation.
6. Dill and avocado oil: Mild avocado oil finds an elegant partner in clean, minty dill -- reflecting the healthy goodness that comes from pure, natural ingredients.
7. Rosemary and fruit preserves: Fresh-picked fruit flavors fuse with aromatic rosemary for a progressive interpretation of sweet and savory.
8. Garam masala and pepitas: A beautifully matched global combination of an intoxicating spice blend from India and a prized seed popular in Latin America.
9. Mint and quinoa: Nutritious, whole-grain quinoa is taken to new heights when paired with the exhilarating, cool taste of mint.
10. Smoked paprika and agave nectar: Smoky sweetness from the purity of nature celebrates a union of Spanish and Mexican ingredients.
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