Every new restaurant serves the same 'unique' dishes as every other place
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Version 0 of 1. Eater editor Greg Morabito published “Every Trendy Restaurant Menu” way back in 2014 and I still can’t stop thinking about it. The menu was divided into five sections that began with “tiny stuff you’re supposed to share” and just got better from there: “high-roller bivalves,” “Amish chicken in the big city”, “what a weird uni dish”, “an unconventional riff on Brussels sprouts”. Every single item made me laugh out loud and wince in recognition – and so did the prices, from $9 for “eight olives in a ramekin” to $19 for “burger that’s crazier than it needs to be”. I’m reminded of it every time I eat out at a restaurant and every time I read a cookbook or food blog because, right now, almost all of them evoke an identical ideal: a bistro, basically, but seasonal, and very sensitive to the provenance of its ingredients. It’s a fine ideal – but sometimes it seems like the only one going, and that’s a bummer. I do love interesting new ingredients, and I don’t mind having to ask a waiter what “spigorello” or “nduja” might be. I love having friends over for dinner and I cook at home most nights, so I’m always in search of fresh inspiration when I go out to eat. But the trends that the Trendy Restaurant Menu sends up are starting to seem like the opposite of innovation on the part of chefs and restaurateurs. As quickly as they spring up, they calcify, making what should have been passing fads into de rigueur offerings. A dish – say, the kale Caesar salad – that was once novel now reeks of something that’s graduated from the R&D department of some centralized authority. Dishes like that persist because they maximize profit, not because people love to eat them. The Trendy Restaurant dishes make every restaurant experience barely distinguishable from the next, except if you’re enough of a specialist to parse the fine distinctions between one riff on sprouts and another. Just recently, a new restaurant just opened in my neighborhood in a space that used to be a tattoo parlor and, like a lot of my neighbors, I crowded to its window on the first day its menu was posted. The entrees are $24-$30, putting it firmly in the “splurge” category for me. But I would still have been game to give it a try if everything on its menu hadn’t somehow simultaneously seemed so overwrought and so conventional. The Amish chicken in the big city was there, as was a $10 “snack” of bread, butter and radishes. I learned recently from an article in the Washington Post that “every increase of one letter in the average length of words describing a dish is associated with an increase of 18 cents in the price of that dish,” which explains the poetry that this restaurant employs in explaining a “small plate” of roasted romanesco. (Which, for the record, is that stuff that looks like broccoli on acid.) Overall, there was nothing about the menu that made me hungry. I found myself wishing that something more useful had moved in, like a pet food store or a dry cleaner. Maybe it’s just time for a new set of trends to wash over us. Indeed, there are some hopeful signs on the horizon: I, for one, am ready to celebrate our new kalette overlords, to welcome almond milk to Dunkin’ Donuts and to sup on a cup of takeout bone broth, and to bid farewell to oceans of subpar Momofuku-knockoff ramen, $9 plates of three rubbery deviled egg halves and fried shisito peppers. I’m also boycotting any place that still has truffle fries or pork belly on its menu ... unless someone else is picking up the tab, in which case, I’ll have one of each, for old times’ sake. |