A trend indeed. By Matt Preston

The last time we looked at food trends in restaurants around the world we pointed to insects, granny skills like pickling and fermenting, the growing celebration of unique indigenous ingredients, eating for health, the decline of meat, and the rise of Korean as among the trends about to grip this country. And so this came to pass ... but what's the overseas buzz on the next wave of foodie fads, fashions and fixations? After hitting five continents in as many months this is what I've seen and heard.

Trends in restaurants

• The return of techniques
  It's no longer enough to brush the dirt off your heirloom carrots and give them a good roasting - now you'll see restaurants turning them into a custard, candied chips, or even an air. Paddock to Plate is no longer seen as enough.

• Taming the flame
  The trend for cool places to cook using only wood-fired fire pits or the wood oven is gaining pace with some cooler young chefs overseas (and I suspect here) starting to turn their back on the sous vide machine. This fits with the whole fermentation/pickling thing of embracing the old ways.

• Plate revolution
  It used to be that the only debate was what shape your white restaurant plate was going to be - oval, round, square, some strange amorphous shape that made it look like a giant squid attacking a submarine. Now the best places put as much time into sourcing the unique dishes just like the best Japanese kaiseki places always have; as a case in point, Peter Gilmore just tweeted a pic, not of his new abalone dish, but of the new plate for his new abalone dish!

• One-trick ponies
  We've seen a few here but everywhere from San Francisco to Paris and from Singapore to Cape Town we are seeing cafes or restaurants pop up specialising in one thing - whether it's bacon dishes, croissants, rice pudding or hot dogs done various ways. The new trend in London (and Paris to a degree) is for high-end fast food places that offer just two or three dishes - perhaps just lobster three ways or a choice of a couple of "chip butties". In San Francisco, I went to an achingly hip cafe serving only coffee, cinnamon toast and young coconuts.

• Ramen again and again
  This Japanese noodle soup is becoming the new pho or noodle box - the coolest Asian takeaway as seen in places like Ivan Ramen in New York City and Ken Ken Ramen in San Francisco. Ramen is nothing new here - Momotaro Ramen in Melbourne and Taro Ramen in Brisbane have been around for years - but expect ramen's profile to rise here as new operators arrive offering non-wheat noodles, too.

Hot new ingredients

There are also a number of ingredients getting a run on overseas menus, or that everyone is talking about. So what are the "burnt milks", cacao nibs and coconut fat of the next 12 months?

• Roe
  Or "fish eggs" to you and me is increasingly prominent on restaurant menus whether they are fresh, smoked or dried and being used for sauces or as garnish. Golden bottarga on fresh tomatoes and sea urchin under avocado on toast two are stunning examples. Peter Gilmore already has sea perch roe on his scallops at his Sydney newie, Bennelong.

• Leaves
  While micro herbs and sea flora are still there, there seems to be a focus at the high-end restaurants to explore a new range of even more intensely flavoured land-based leaves. Ben Shewry is growing mushroom leaves for Attica (which are shiny, waxy and taste of button mushrooms), Adelaide's Jock Zonfrillo is scouring the bush for interesting indigenous leaves, and Heston Blumenthal had exclusive access to local oyster leaf while the Fat Duck was open in Melbourne.
  In South Africa there is much talk about native spinaches and bacony-tasting "spekboom" and while overseas I tasted everything from slimy Malabar spinach leaves and lightly pickled tiny Giant Redwood shoots to the lemony young leaf of the prickly ash tree on a dish of corn and sea urchin. Purslane is also big news in the US in markets and restaurants.

Eight other trendy things to do in your restaurant

[ 1 ] Make your own cheese or charcuterie in house.

[ 2 ] Make a voluble commitment to low waste or sustainability such as putting enough solar panels on the roof so the "sun cooks all the food in the restaurant" as one chef put it to me on a recent trip to California. [

[ 3 ] Use fruit in salads and herbs in dessert.

[ 4 ] Serve your zest as teeny cubes not grated, zested or even microplaned - are those last two even verbs?

[ 5 ] Providing tasting notes with your oysters that describes them as tasting grassy, like tropical fruit or like the handlebars of an old Malvern Star. OK, I made that last one up but I did have some Yellow Pacifics from Morro Bay in California where I could clearly taste the much-vaunted aftertaste of ripe cantaloupe that the oyster exhibit after rain.

[ 6 ] If you follow Spanish fashion in restaurants (rather than Nordic), embrace Central and South America as a source for new ideas and ingredients whether it's leaves like epazote, creamy tiger nuts ground into sauces and ice cream, moles, or unheard of (here) fruit like the delicious "lulo" that is like a cross between a passionfruit and a mangosteen.

[ 7 ] If you are making a cake, don't use butter, use nutty "burnt butter" instead.

[ 8 ] Forget paleo, gluten free and sugar free, next out look out for Banting and Low FODMAP menu requests.

Source

Taste.com.au — October 2015

Author

Matt Preston