What’s Hot and Not

The National Restaurant Association Published their annual Restaurant Industry Forecast recently, and while I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet (like all industry pubs they ain’t cheap, so it’s better to mooch off a friend) I have seen some of the highlights. The most hotly anticipated new trend is bite-sized desserts, which have indeed been hot hot hot ever since Jean-George Vongerichten’s Vong’s Thai Kitchen debuted them in 2003. The thing that’s neat about them isn’t that they encourage you to eat less (a typical dessert plate includes three to five of them) but that they allow you to sample a spectrum of what’s on offer from the pastry department in one go. I can’t help but think that’s a good thing.

For a chuckle be sure to scan down to the bottom of the article where you’ll find a People magazine-like “what’s hot, what’s not” list. I always get a kick out of those wherever they’re published, since they show me how out of touch I am. I marvel at how many things there are out there that have become passé without my ever having been aware of them in the first place. This goes for food as well as fashion. Just like I have no clue who Lindsey Lohan is, I had absolutely no idea that Scandinavian cuisine was ever popular. And fruit soup, did that really make a comeback recently? Anyway, the only other point of baking interest on the list is flatbread, which will apparently be all the rage this year. I’ve had lavash on my weekly project list for quite a while. I’d better underline that one in marker.