À la carts table service
Who’d have guessed that old-school dim sum palaces would become models for some of the hottest restaurants in the land? State Bird Provisions of San Francisco got things rolling when chef Stuart Brioza asked his waitstaff to wheel out off-menu small-plate offerings like guinea-hen dumplings. Diners so loved the endless parade of sensory surprises that Gunshow in Atlanta and the Church Key in Los Angeles were quick to join the four-wheel revolution. “The future is here,” said Jonathan Gold in the Los Angeles Times, “and it comes with carts.”
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Prior to 2013, restaurants that forced customers to pay in advance were lonely, often ridiculed outliers. But after Los Angeles’s new Trois Mec announced early this year that it would be serving only customers who’d booked and prepaid online, the ticket system for in-demand tables seemed to go mainstream. From Chicago’s Alinea to New York’s Atera, dinner tickets are winning converts by shielding owners against costly no-shows and diners against overbooking.
Haute vegan
Die-hard hippies and Holly-wood celebrities sat elbow to elbow this year at broodingly chic Crossroads, L.A.’s first vegan restaurant to consciously bury the cuisine’s old chalkboard aesthetic. At Chicago’s Next, chef Grant Achatz managed to keep crowds coming in when he changed the tasting menu to a $250 all-vegan, 23-course affair. And both Achatz and Crossroads’ Tal Ronnen merely represented the vanguard in a surge of chefs suddenly claiming to be -“vegetable-driven.”
Butcher-shop dining
Carnivores won at least one round, as high-end butchers have started serving sit-down meals. At Washington, D.C.’s Red Apron and Chicago’s Chop Shop, customers nosh on rillettes and house-cured “porkstrami” while shopping the display cases for the charcuterie they’ll carry home. Belcampo Meat Co. in Larkspur, Calif., and Walhill Farm in Batesville, Ind., pushed the concept even further, creating vertical operations that humanely raise and slaughter the livestock that they butcher, cook, and plate. “To do it right, you’ve got to own more of the supply chain,” Belcampo’s Anya Fernald told San Francisco magazine.
Cronuts
Dominique Ansel is a pastry chef possessed of genius. Tinkering in his eponymous New York City bakery, Ansel landed upon a holy marriage of croissant and doughnut. Early risers soon lined up by the hundreds for Ansel’s “cronuts,” scalpers started charging $100 apiece, and bakers around the world scrambled to introduce knockoffs. But the mashup food craze wasn’t a one-off: At Smorgasburg, a Brooklyn food market, Keizo Shimamoto started a new mania when he debuted the ramen burger—grilled ground beef delectably sandwiched between two ramen-noodle patties.
Oddball grapes
One sure way to tell if your wine was cool this year: It derived from a grape you’d never heard of. A French négrette? A Hungarian juhfark? The quirkier the better, many diners said, and even critics were surprised. As Eric Asimov told SeriousEats.com:“I don’t think I anticipated the extent to which public tastes, which seemed so monochromatic a decade ago, would become so heterogeneous.”
Imperious cookbooks
Not long ago, empire-building chefs aspired to a Vegas outpost or a cookware line as their crowning achievement. Today, the preferred trophy is a lavish cookbook stuffed with recipes no home cook could pull off. In Daniel: My French Cuisine, Daniel Boulud’s French classics each require a kitchen brigade. In Daniel Patterson’s Coi: Stories and Recipes, the recipes are essay-length and printed in a microscopic font. Forget the cookbook as how-to. Today it’s more akin to a museum -retrospective.
Fusion revisited
From Brooklyn’s Shalom Japan (source of the udon with root chips shown above) to the Korean-Italian creations being served at Piora, New York City became a hotbed of extreme culinary crossbreeding this year. But it wasn’t something in the local water: In Nashville, Rolf and Daughters joined Italian, Bavarian, and American Southern to create what chef Philip Krajeck calls “modern peasant fare.” At Chicago’s Fat Rice, a husband-wife team introduced America to the food of Macau, where the centuries-old marriage of Chinese and Portuguese influences reads to them as “the original fusion.”
The new replacements
The proliferation of coconut flour and quinoa milk signaled that seekers of miracle diets were focused this year on cutting out gluten or dairy—yet weren’t prepared to give up bread or sweets.
Americana 2.0
L.A.’s embrace of Connie and Ted’s—the city’s first New England–style seafood shack—was all the proof you should need that nostalgia cuisine still has legs. Plenty of places chased the market for highbrow takes on deli pastrami and Southern fried chicken, but Minnesota food writer Amy Thielen might have made the savviest move by claiming a whole swath of throwback cooking as her own, with both a TV series, Heartland Table, and a book, The New Midwestern Table. “I have always felt this place is more epic than it gets credit for,” she says.
