I’ve written before about Paris Restaurant trends. It’s amazing how there are new ones each season but some keep repeating, such as slates for plates and listing a dish like eel with avocado and mango – where the eel is verbally buried in the middle so one sees “Avocado with eel and mango,” which is not at all what it looks like.
June 4th’s A Nous Paris had a feature on what’s trendy in Paris right now and some such trends seem dated and silly to at least one American. They included:
A wrap from Subway©
Tofu Bavarois
Gin not vodka
Sugar snap peas
Fruit & herb ice cubes
Then, Food and Wine had an article in its July issue on Food Trends in America and included:
Lists of food trends (ha, so there!)
Popup restaurants
Fancy chefs making burgers
No-reservation restaurants
Cross-cultural cuisine that’s more than Asian fusion
TV chefs
The death of fine dining
Chefs as sex symbols
And just a few weeks ago I heard a relatively new but terrific restaurant reviewer from Baltimore, of all places, mention:
Small plates vs huge portions
Locavore vs get what you want when you want it
The end of fine dining (again)
The growth of casual dining
Uncomfortable chairs, stools and high tables
Painful noise levels vs able to talk places
However, there are other more mundane observations that I and others in Paris have made on what was hot and what was not this spring and summer:
Eggs, especially on ham with asparagus
Fluff and foams (yet again)
Duck hearts
Grains
Hot (really hot, for the French palate) spices over unexciting espelette
Stools and high tables in the best of places
Baba’s on every menu
Chocolate domes rather than moelleux
Marshmallows
Smoke flavor or truffle spray on the most unlikely of ingredients
62 degree eggs
Angus beef
Those silly little tin buckets for the bill/addition.
