trends

We Want Meatballs

Janice | January 9, 2013 - 3:20 pm

What we want: meatballs.
What we don’t want: a meatball trend.

Try as they might, the food press could not shoehorn meatballs into the latest food fad.
Bon Appetit dubbed 2010 The Year of the Meatball; People Magazine went with 2011 for Meatball Mania, and The Food Channel tried again in 2012. But for all the meatball-only boutiques and roving meatball food trucks in all the right neighborhoods, meatballs are not now— and will never be— the new cupcake.

Meatballs are universally and perennially loved; so much so that they are trend-proofed and fad-resistant. They never fall out of fashion or favor. They are rarely stylish but always in style.

That’s not to say that meatballs can’t have their moment.
In fact the added attention meatballs have received makes this an excellent moment. They’re more popular than ever in restaurants where they seem to anchor every small-plates menu ever printed. Meatballs can be Indian (köfta), Italian (polpette), Greek (keftedes), or Mexican (albóndigas), and they speak comfort in any language.

Chefs might want to reinvent meatballs with luxe and modern ingredients, but the best are those that barely tweak the classic recipes and humble traditions. They’re not a vehicle for expensive cuts of meat, but benefit from cheap and fatty grindings. They cry out for filler to add flavor and moisture, and are a perfect landing spot for stale bread and cheese rinds.

Meatballs are simple and inexpensive to prepare at home, and are nearly always a bargain on restaurant menus. They are at home in soup, on a sandwich, atop pasta, or stuffed in rice paper, grape leaves, or dumpling wrappers. They make a fine appetizer, a winning lunch, and soothe our frazzled, modern souls in a satisfying dinner.

Who needs trendy when we can have meatballs?

Posted in cook + dine, food trends, trends | Leave a comment

We Can Pickle That!

Janice | November 28, 2012 - 1:31 pm

image via IFC

Spoofed on TV: It’s a sure sign that pickles have crossed from alternative to mainstream.
The oft-brilliant sketch comedians of Portlandia love to give a ribbing to studiously trendy foods. They skewered the pretensions of mixology with a cocktail of ginger-based bourbon infused with ingredients like charred ice, egg shells, bitters, and rotten banana; ‘green’ carnivores brought us Colin, a restaurant chicken dish served with his local, free-range, heritage breed, woodland-raised pedigree; and the Allergy-Pride Parade celebrated a lactose- and wheat-free world. Now we have the overzealous briners of We Can Pickle That! who enthusiastically pickle and eat all manner of brined matter. “Too many eggs? We can pickle that! Dropped your ice cream cone? We can pickle that! Broke a heel on your shoe? We can pickle that!” Before the opening credits had rolled for the latest Portlandia season, they had pickled an old CD jewel box case, Band-Aids, a parking ticket, and a dead bird.

Can you call a process that’s been with us for thousands of years a trend?
Pickling began as a food preservation technique in ancient Mesopotamia. It’s now practiced globally in a multitude of forms: Indian chutneys, Irish corned beef, herring in Scandinavia, Germany’s sauerkraut, Chinese duck eggs, and Korean kimchi are all regional adaptations of the culinary art. Here in the U.S. the cucumber is king, and the average American eats 8½ pickled pounds of them a year: sweet pickles in the South, where you can get them brined in Kool-Aid; bread-and-butter slices in the Midwest; refrigerated for Northeasterners; and kosher dills for everyone.

What’s new is the way pickles are being reinvented in every color, shape, size, and texture. Chefs are experimenting with everything from apples to sea beans in brines both sweet and savory. They’re adding them to salads, soufflés, seafood, and desserts, and even giving them center stage with entire pickle plates.

The new pickle renaissance was disconcerting to top pickle-maker Vlasic.
As supermarket pickles go, they hold their own with a nice vinegar zip, a touch of peppery heat, and their famous crunch, but with an ingredient list that’s as much laboratory as grandma’s kitchen and an alarmingly fluorescent yellow hue (thank you, Artificial Yellow #5), they were turning off the new breed of pickle buyer. Vlasic recently introduced its new ‘artisanal’ pickle line to compete with jarred upstarts like McClure’s and Brooklyn Brine. Farmer’s Garden™ by Vlasic® eschews Mexican imports for most of the year using Michigan cucumbers in season, and adds whole garlic cloves, pepper strips, whole peppercorns, and carrot slices. With no artificial coloring, they look less like Mountain Dew than Vlasic’s traditional varieties, and you can buy them at Walmart for about half the price of their trendy competitors’ pickles. Indeed, the pickle renaissance has gone mainstream.

Posted in food business, trends | Leave a comment

IV Drip Vitamins: The new health cocktail

Janice | October 31, 2012 - 3:08 pm

Mainline your multi
Instead of popping a multivitamin, a growing number of healthy individuals are opting for an intravenous fix.
The treatment is available to anyone looking for a little extra pep in their step, and ardent wellness fans, over-stressed executives, nightlife mavens, and elite athletes have all jumped on the trend. In Las Vegas, an anesthesiologist cruises the Strip in the custom-fitted Hangover Heaven bus offering on-the-spot infusions touted for their hangover-soothing qualities. In Los Angeles, where there are plenty of celebrity practitioners raising the treatment’s profile (Rhianna even tweeted pictures of herself with the needle in her arm), it’s become so commonplace among the beautiful people that the prodigious community of cosmetic surgeons has adopted it as a service add-on.

Not sick, just kind of meh
The patients are typically looking for a little boost to their energy. They feel run down or they’re not sleeping well or maybe they’re catching a lot of colds. The infusion can be tweaked to address their particular brand of the blahs. Florida-based DefyMedical is trying to establish a national brand and has created a menu of pre-mixed vitamin cocktails for the most common complaints, and it ships them out to be administered at medical offices and clinics around the country. Proprietary blends include an infusion that claims to improve athletic performance, the ‘Alpha’ blend (Replenish, Restore, and Revitalize), and the toxin-removing AfterParty.

Is more necessarily better?
The ‘drippers’ swear that the effects of IV vitamin therapy are vastly different from the results you get from oral supplements. They report feeling a significant sense of well-being within hours or even minutes of the infusion. The clinical evidence is less clear.

Intravenous vitamins are absorbed more quickly and fully than pills, and can kick-start energy production at a cellular level. That’s the reason that for decades the medical community has prescribed intravenous vitamins as a standard medical treatment for a variety of digestive and immune system ailments that can interfere with the body’s natural ability to absorb nutrients from food or oral compounds. But most scientists doubt that they can have much effect on a healthy system with blood nutrient levels already in a relatively normal range.

An IV vitamin treatment usually costs between $50 and $250. Some people choose to have them weekly. There’s a small chance that the cocktail can cause an electrolyte imbalance, and as with any IV drip there is some risk of infection. All factors to consider before you elect to flood your veins with vitamins.

For a needle-free hang over cure, read Gigabiting’s Hung Over? You Need Food!

Posted in Health, trends | Leave a comment

Child Foodies: Even more obnoxious than the grown-ups

Janice | May 2, 2012 - 12:29 pm

image via Supermarket Guru

It seems that kids don’t want to eat like kids; or at least a certain sort of parent doesn’t want them to.

The Prepubescent Epicure as Ultimate Foodie Accessory
It goes beyond the desire of parents to raise an adventurous eater or to share a love of food with their children. It’s a badge of honor for the urban sophisticate; instead of comparing notes on traditional childhood milestones like first steps and shoe-tying, parents claim bragging rights to the child that can handle an escargot fork or requests duck confit in their lunch box. A new tooth is cause for celebration because now the little one can finally have his own artichoke.

Into and Out of the Mouths of Babes
Here are select outtakes from the haute world of kid cuisine:

The Brooklyn Paper explores the coffee culture of the borough’s youngest cafe habitués, ‘tots ditching their bottles and juice boxes in favor of “babyccinos” — mini decaf cappuccinos.

‘Down from heaven came the crab. It was enclosed in the zucchini flower, doused with black truffle sauce, topped with shaved truffles…’
–from the blog of 12 year-old David Fishman, aka the Middle School Food Critic, whose reviews have appeared in GQ Magazine.

Birthday Cake Two Ways in which a food blogger tells of serving a wheel of truffle-infused aged goat cheese ‘with three white candles plunged into its earthy skin‘ in lieu of a cake to celebrate her daughter’s 3rd birthday

C is for Chanterelle, K is for Kobe Beef in My Foodie ABC, a bestselling alphabet primer

A New York Times roundup of kid-friendly meals includes a $32 child-sized serving of spaghetti with butter at the Michelin-starred L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon

Of course there’s nothing wrong with teaching kids about good food. Their young immune systems can’t handle certain raw foods; otherwise, let them experiment. But the notion of tiny, discriminating epicures is a figment of the narcissistic parent’s imagination.

‘Oliver Stern, 3, who lives on the Upper East Side and attends a private nursery school there, won’t eat Chinese unless it’s the $33 crispy beef from Mr. Chow‘
–from Twee-sine, the New York Posts’ look at the twee cuisine phenomenon, as proudly reported by his mother

According to the Monell Chemical Senses Center children have childish tastes that serve an evolutionary function by helping them get appropriate nutrition. They prefer sweet to savory, need higher levels of salt, react powerfully to strong odors, and are more drawn to textures than taste.

A child’s tastebuds are immature. Their palates are just plain unrefined, physically incapable of truly rarefied discernment. There have always been picky eaters and kids who throw temper tantrums over Happy Meals. Thanks to indulgent parenting, now they’re stamping their little feet over a $32 plate of Mr. Chow’s crispy beef.

Posted in kids, trends | Leave a comment

Tap Water: Cheap, Environmentally Sound, and Now Trendy?

Janice | November 1, 2011 - 11:55 am

[image via Pur]

Remember the aha moment when you realized that Evian is ‘naive’ spelled backwards?
It was a moment of clarity, of sanity. You wouldn’t be duped. You wouldn’t be one of those status-seeking suckers out there who were buying into baseless health claims and slick marketing. You knew that the Emperor was just plain naked.

So what happened?
You did become one of them. We all did.
We’re drinking more bottle water than ever—85 million bottles every single day. But there is one bright spot; one place where we have curbed the habit and are going out of our way to specify tap: tap water orders are way up in restaurants. According to the consumer research group NPD, restaurant tap water is one of the fastest-growing beverage orders, increasing annually by nearly a billion servings.

Economic conditions are clearly behind the trend. In the current recession, we’ve barely cut back on the frequency of dining out—just one percent in the past 5 years—but we’re looking for ways to trim the tab. We’re keeping dessert and dumping the bottled water.

Tap water also has a kind of reverse status for the restaurants.
For three decades, beginning with the Perrier days of the 1970s, restaurants were guilty of promoting water elitism. They sent their waiters out to push high mark-up/high margin bottled water menus, and made us feel like cheapskates when we chose the tap. Now they’re shunning bottled water to demonstrate their locavore and sustainability bonafides, and frankly, they owe us this one.

There’s an environmental upside to the down economy. Since 2006, just this little switch to tap water in restaurants has already saved 8.75 billion gallons of water, and all the associated packaging, transportation, recycling, and landfill waste. The challenge is to make this change permanent, and not lapse into our old water habits when the economy turns around.

Posted in restaurants, sustainability, trends | Tagged green, restaurants, water | 1 Comment

Iced Coffee is Hot Hot Hot!

Janice | April 29, 2010 - 12:12 pm

Iced coffee is expected to rack up yet another season of double-digit sales increases.

The big boys are tripping over each other with new product launches as each tries to cash in on our growing affinity for iced versions of our favorite beverage. Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, and McDonalds will be going head-to-head this summer, each with its own frozen-dark-roasted-choice-of-flavored-syrup-blended-ginormous renditions. [...]

Posted in coffee, fast food, food business, trends | Tagged caffeine, coffee, Starbucks | Leave a comment

Raise Your Hand if You’re Sick of the Bacon Hype

Janice | April 15, 2010 - 11:36 am

Let me start by saying I like bacon as much as the next gal.

I get the allure. It’s sweet and smoky and salty and meaty. There is no smell more intoxicating than that of bacon cooking. It is understandably the gateway meat that brings vegetarians back in the fold.

But come on people. Enough with the silly bacon love. [...]

Posted in funny, shopping, trends | Tagged bacon, breakfast, cupcakes | 1 Comment

Is That for Here or To Go: coffee in motion

Janice | March 29, 2010 - 11:30 am

Four Seasons Hotels announced that it will begin offering to go cups with its morning coffee service.

If there is anywhere that cups and saucers should be right at home it’s Four Seasons. The hotels are bastions of luxury and elegance, where mornings have been a time for the genteel hush of dining rooms and lobbies broken only by the sounds of crisp newspapers and the ring of spoons against fine china.

The rest of the world has always considered the to go cup to be a somewhat uncouth symbol of America’s go-go culture. Order a coffee in virtually any cafe in Europe and it is sure to be delivered in a proper cup, frequently on a tray with niceties like a glass of water and maybe a little cookie or chocolate. To go isn’t even an option for most of the world’s coffee drinkers. [...]

Posted in coffee, sustainability, trends | Tagged coffee, green, Travel | 1 Comment

Flavor Tripping

Janice | November 12, 2009 - 10:17 am

yuck

Let’s get some of those miracle berries.

About a year ago synsepalum dulcificum, known as the miracle fruit or miracle berry made some ripples in the food press.
In case you missed the story the first time around, these are berries that rewire your palate so that sour or bitter foods will taste sweet. Dark beer tastes like a chocolate milkshake, goat cheese turns into cake frosting, and ketchup tastes like maple syrup. Tequila goes down like apple juice, vinegar becomes wine, and wine tastes like a melted Popsicle. [...]

Posted in Entertainment, trends | Tagged diversions, food, fruit & vegetables, games | 2 Comments

What recession? A girl’s got to eat.

Janice | October 15, 2009 - 11:27 pm

photo courtesy of triplepundit.com

The economy might be slowing, but not our appetites.
We’re not eating any less, but we have made budget-driven adjustments to what we eat, how we shop, and where we are having our meals. Most of us are eating out less, more often choosing to cook and entertain at home. We still seek variety in our food and dining choices but more often find it in our purchases of prepared foods and specialty grocery items. [...]

Posted in shopping, trends | Tagged artisanal, beer, recession, shopping, supermarkets, wine | Leave a comment

Cupcakes: the clock is ticking for their 15 minutes.

Janice | October 14, 2009 - 11:54 pm

cupcakeclock

It’s a classic tale of American-style capitalism.
A good idea, a new business model. There’s some revenue and a whole lot of buzz. The funding starts to trickle in. There’s critical mass, rapid expansion, and a lot of second-movers hoping to cash in with hype and borrowed capital.

We’ve seen it all before— with housing and hedge funds and technology. And now cupcakes.

The market does seem to be reaching saturation. Cupcake boutiques dot the gentrified neighborhoods of our cities and the strip malls of our suburbs. Booksellers’ shelves are filled with bestselling cupcake cookbooks. Tiered cupcakes have become commonplace at weddings. That annual celebration of extravagance, the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book, this year features a $25,000 cupcake kiddie car. Could we be at the top of a cupcake bubble?

Their appeal is undeniable. Cupcakes nurture us body and soul. They charm us with their diminutive size. They indulge us with their sweetness. They soothe us with their nostalgia. The economy may be going to hell in a handbasket, but for a few dollars you can be transported back to your third grade classroom, licking pink buttercream off your fingers while your classmates regale you with a round of Happy Birthday to You.

There is hope for the longevity of cupcakes beyond the bubble cycle. Their rationale transcends economic shifts; you get comfort and luxury for just a few dollars. They are the perfect treat in good times and bad. And bakers love them. They require no special equipment, skills, or ingredients, and offer limitless creative possibilities. A working oven, a little flair with a frosting knife, and you’re good to go.

Cupcakes have their detractors. They’ve been called “fake happiness, wrought in Wonka unfood colors,” and “the favorite greedy treat of the me-generation.” There are some who are already on the lookout for what comes next. A roundup of “new cupcake” suggestions from the blogosphere found a lot of votes for French macarons, the pastel-colored meringue and ganache sandwich cookies. Frozen yogurt, whoopie pies, and cream puffs all have their boosters. But the largest contingent is urging us to stop looking, that cupcakes are here to stay, and we will be enjoying them in their 16th minute.

Posted in trends | Tagged cupcakes | 5 Comments

trends

Blame Thoreau.