My good friend Jeffrey Hyman, he of the Food & Drink Innovation Network, sent me, last week, Baum & Whiteman’s ‘Hottest food and Beverage Trends for 2014’……
In case you are not aware (and I certainly wasn’t) Baum and Whiteman are the restaurant design team who created the very first Windows on the World in New York at the World Trade Centre, the Rainbow Room at the Rockefeller Centre, the Food Court at the Sheraton in Chandigarh in India, and restaurants in innumerable world famous museums, art galleries and up-market hotel chains around the world. (Take a look at the projects page of their site if you want to get an eyeful!) And for some years now they have produced a much respected ‘trend’ report each year on what they think will be the hottest restaurant trends in the upcoming year.
Do feel free to follow the link and read them all for yourself, but if you fancy the whistle stop tour, here we go.
Diners at Ultraviolet in Shanghai during a “picnic,” with an AstroTurf-covered table and projections of an early-spring meadow on the walls – see ‘Fiddling with your senses’ below. Courtesy of the NYTimes blog here – which is also worth a read!
1. The good old department store restaurant (where you used to meet Aunt Edith for tea) is back! Store managers have suddenly twigged to the fact that in-house food shops can ‘double the customer’s dwell time’ and ‘anchor’ customers not only in shops but in hotels, museums, airports – or anywhere you wish to keep your customer on site in the hope of selling them something else!
So, in Tommy Bahama’s in NY you could be offered hamachi crudo, coffee-crusted ribeye with marrow butter, and fish tacos with Asian slaw – which generates two-and-a-half times the sales per square foot of another sweater counter! In the women’s department of Nordstrom’s in Washington you will be offered blueberry lavender martinis and watermelon-jalapeno margaritas, in Outfitters’ Terrain, scallops with preserved lemon, and duck with bruleed strawberries.
2. Tasting only menus are all the rage – and even though the food may be bite size, the cost certainly isn’t! $270 at French Laundry with $175 supplement for white truffle pasta is not the most expensive.
3. Chicken has made a come back. Straight haute roast with foie gras ($79 for two), marinated in anchovy-green sauce, cooked sous-vide, buttermilk-fried…. You name it…
4. Food courts are out food halls are in. Upscale, selling artisan food which is fresher, better, tastier – and more expensive. So successful are they that rents in adjoining prperties are sky-rocketing.
5. Also ‘in’ are real fish, with bones. Anchovies and fresh sardines have already made it, mackerel is becoming more popular – there is even a future for the humble herring.
6. ‘In’ drinks. Tea in all shapes and sizes – including as a base for cocktails! Obscure vermouths, ‘sour’ beers, innoculated with wild yeasts and aged in wood, pressed juices (heaven forfend that you should have to eat a carrot or apple when you can pay three times as much for it juiced – and fibre-less) and endless varieties of gin.
7. Creative spreads. Butter is certainly not good enough for your bread when you can get black garlic mostarda, vanilla tapenade, tomato jam, whipped lardo or rosemary hummus.
8. Green is gooood. Healthy green foods have finally moved out of the niche into the mainstream with innumerable ‘green’ chains across the land and upscale restaurants charging up to $185 for an all veg menu.
9. Pop ups are even better. Wacky food creations (Mexi-sandwiches, the ramen-burger, artisan cannolis) popping up at weekend markets all over.
10. Recherché Asian flavours are taking on fast. Gochujang … a sweet-spicy Korean amalgam of fermented hot chili paste and soy; Shichimi togarashi … Japanese seven- spice of sesame seeds, ginger, nori and hot peppers; foul smelling Thai and Vietnamese fish sauce, okonomiyaki and Korean dumplings…
11. Move south of the Mediterranean. Spain and Greece are out. Check out Yemenite dip, Turkish street food and the exotic flavours brought by the families fleeing the chaos in Iran, Iraq, Syrian, Tunisia and Egypt.
12. Fiddling with your senses. Eating is no longer enough. Restaurants want to enhance the dining experience by fiddling with our senses.
‘Avant garde restaurant Ultraviolet, in Shanghai, shanghais ten high-spending diners nightly to a secret room that radically shifts moods with each course … uplights in the floor, 360-degree high-def projectors, swings in air temperature, four smell diffusers, 22 speakers, LEDs, waiters changing customers to suit the food.’
‘David Bouley’s private dining room, called The Pass, contains a giant screen … and guests in New York converse in real time with growers and vintners whose products are on the table … even if the supplier is in Japan.’
Dutch designers are even fiddling with the tableware ‘focusing on the tongue-lips-mouth interface … cups with nipples, ball-shaped spoons, and irritatingly spiky tasting surfaces aimed at flipping or modifying perceptions of salty, sour, sweet, and bitter. Recent research reveals that people perceive round shapes as sweeter and jagged shapes as bitter.’
And then of course, there is dining in the dark, thus stimulating the other four senses….
What else can I say?….. Come back Pizza Express!