Sunday, January 03, 2010

On Trends (or, Lessons from Lot's Wife)


My favorite quote from food-trends-of-the-decade retrospectives, by David Chang via Christopher Borrelli the Chicago Tribune:

Bad trends were usually good trends. They just got watered down into a really bad, overdone trend.
I would have to disagree with the Trib's rankings on some of the purported worst trends of the decade, though.  "Deconstructing" a dish's elements, while annoying and self-indulgent, can hardly be the #1 worst food thing that happened in the past decade.  You can at least put the dish back together again.

I mean, what about stuffed crust pizza? the term "locavore"? high fructose corn syrup? people taking the "eat local challenge" and somehow deciding it's okay to make a special exception for coffee grown overseas as long as it's purchased from a locally-owned coffee house?  hundreds of out of work construction workers taking out big loans to open their own short-lived barbecue joints?  Go-Gurt?

Maybe looking back isn't such a good idea . . .

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Three years ago I treated the family to the Chef's choice tasting menu at 11 Madison Park in NYC. Three of the eleven courses included foams (#4 on the list). We've been laughing about that ever since.

Robert said...

Three of eleven is a pretty good ratio!

The Tribune's comments are priceless: "We guess we taste the kiwi-caramel tones. (Wait, no, we can't.)" I found a while back that the best thing to do with foams is to stir them up a little and let them settle into liquid so you can actually taste the damn things.

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