Restaurant Trends: a Menu for Success

Restaurants have always held a certain romance for most of us. Besides the allure of food preparation that is beyond the skills of most home cooks, restaurants are the venues in which we celebrate life's milestones -- anniversaries, new jobs, birthdays, and reunions with old friends and family. Of course, we also patronize restaurants simply because we don't feel like cooking, but the fancier and more innovative the restaurant, the more likely we are there to be a part of something special, the same reason one would attend a theatrical event. It's about drama, it's about what the newest thing is, and ultimately, it's about what heights food can be taken to (sometimes quite literally as seen in architectural pieces montees that often appear on our plates). Curiously, a schism has traditionally existed between the restaurant world and that of retail. Up until rather recently -- say twenty years ago, but even as recent as ten years ago, many chefs and cooks in the restaurant realm knew very little about what was being offered in specialty food stores beyond the ingredients obtained from restaurant suppliers who overlapped with the gourmet world. For all the talk now about cheese courses and aging rooms, I remember talking to chefs only a few years ago who were fairly clueless about cheeses except for the most common cooking ones like Gruyere, Mozzarella, goat cheese, and Cheddar, but even then only on a superficial level. And yet in what amounts to a chicken-or-the-egg kind of argument about where trends develop, retailers and restaurateurs both think they have influenced the other. Who's right? In the end, they may both be right, and it's time they started paying more attention to one another.

Food as Fashion
To be fair, for the first 70 or so years of the 20th century, grocery stores were none too inspirational except for small ethnic markets and roadside produce stands, and so of course, all the glitz emanated from restaurants. In fact, many of the fanciest foods were simply not available to the general public. Why? Because the general public would probably not have known what to do with them. Since then, as the specialty food business has expanded and spread across the country, there has been much more parity in who's influencing whom. Still, with some exceptions, for a long time one could divide the innovations neatly in two, with cooking styles, multicultural fusions, and the art of presentation emerging from restaurant kitchens, while knowledge about ingredients and food was clearly coming from retailers. Today, however, it seems that the two have grown together somewhat, with chefs routinely attending the trade shows and some even opening their own markets, and retailers serving prepared foods and opening cafes.
Still, the trend that could well be the most interesting facet of the food revolution of the past 25 years, and one that is not unique to our time, is that of food as fashion. This has to do with certain foods going in and out of favor, mostly spurred by restaurants trying to cater to a public with a short attention span and fickle tastes. These food fads range from signature dishes and presentations to full-blown concepts upon which the entire restaurant is based. Recent examples have been the raw food movement such as that exhibited in Roxanne's in Northern California (now closed) and more recently, Tartar in San Francisco where various versions of steak tartar are served. Perhaps the height of silliness can be experienced at several new restaurants that serve dinner in beds. These trends, silly as they often are, give food magazines fodder for filling their pages, and often result in lists of what's in and what's out food-wise. Highly subjective, these lists reduce the importance of food to that of the current popular boy bands.
This idea of food as fashion was recently brought to its apex in a special magazine section of the Sunday New York Times ("Living, Fall 2004"). Primarily focused on food and food trends, the issue also featured layouts in which fashion models clad in sumptuous silk, velvet, and jewels were juxtaposed with slabs of meat, artisanal cheeses, and seasonal produce. The issue also included the now-ubiquitous in/out list. Among the items that the list casually dismisses as being "so last year" are artisanal cheeses (how something so passe made it into their fashion shoot is a mystery) and New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. Amusingly however, screw-top caps for wine are listed in the "in" column, even though Sauvignon Blanc from the land of Middle Earth has been at the forefront of using screw-top caps. Oh well, no one ever said fashion shoots had to make sense.

A Star is Born
Restaurant lovers owe much to the French Revolution. Although there were versions of restaurants before, it was the dismantling of the aristocracy and the royal houses that sent heretofore royal chefs and cooks into the streets to ply their trade among the citizens. In his fabulous new book on the world's first celebrity chef, Cooking for Kings, The Life of Antonin Carême, Ian Kelly relates the following:
"The French Revolution is often credited with having given birth to the restaurant. Although there had long been taverns or chophouses in France, Parisian 'restaurants' before the Revolution did not serve food. They served only soups -- bouillon and potage -- to lift the spirits and relieve the pervasive respiratory ailments of the fashionably 'sensible,' as coffee had done for an earlier generation. Going to a restaurant was considered, literally, a restorative (restauratif) act."
He goes on to relate the breakup after the Revolution of the guilds that governed who could serve food and where, and how the original cordon bleus, the former chefs to the aristocrats who were now out of favor, were out of work. Consequently, many of them, presumably the clever ones, opened dining establishments that they called restaurants. Soup remained central to these new eateries, although the menus quickly broadened to include other foods as well. After peace 'broke out' with England and the City of Lights began to see an increase in tourism, these newfound restaurants were popular indeed. In fact, as Kelly elucidates so well, "Before the Revolution, there were less than 50 restaurants in Paris. By 1814 the Almanach des Gourmands, a sort of food and restaurant guide written by Grimod de la Reyniere, arguably the world's first restaurant critic, was listing more than 3,000. Even Marie Antoinette's thatched hermitage at La Petit Trianon had been turned into a restaurant, with a dinner menu boasting hothouse peaches and costing six livres (or five shillings) a head."
And so the French model -- both in the kitchen and the dining room -- would come to be the de facto mode of operation in restaurants from Paris to Singapore up to and including such novelties as lunch (dejeuner a la fourchette, conceived as a result of dinnertime getting later and later) and serving in courses. Ironically, it would be service a la russe ("Russian style") that would come to be the preferred method of serving, in which all the food is individually plated (in service a la française, the food is presented on platters from which guests are either served or help themselves like a buffet), a fashion that Carême himself is said to have preferred. French food would also hold sway over the gourmet food scene for the next century and a half until we all discovered pasta, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar.

Who's Influencing Whom?
Giorgio DeLuca, one half of the legendary team that would help spur a food revolution and change the grocery business in America, is credited with introducing balsamic vinegar to American consumers. It wasn't long before this curious condiment was appearing on restaurant menus across the country, usually in the form of a vinaigrette or a reduction. Perhaps it was the spark, along with what was going on in general at Dean & DeLuca in New York's Soho district that caused serious chefs to start looking to retailers for new products they could use in their dishes for an increasingly demanding clientele. By this time, the seminal restaurant Chez Panisse was gaining fame by, among other things, establishing relationships with farmers, ranchers, fishmongers, and various other artisans and no longer relying on single-source purveyors who provided even some of the best restaurants with institutionally packaged foods in what amounted to one-stop shopping.
From tiramisu to tuna carpaccio, restaurateurs and chefs have continually sought to offer something new to their diners, and to be on the cutting edge of food. This is no less true for retailers and manufacturers who each season must try and introduce new products and outdo the competition. If balsamic vinegar and other Italian specialty products (artisanal pasta, extra-virgin olive oil, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and prosciutto, for example) represent the first real crossover from the retail world to that of restaurants, then surely it was professional-grade cookware and other tools of the trade that would be the first major crossover from the restaurant kitchen to retail shelves as consumers began their fascination with chefs and wanted to cook like a professional. In fact, the 1980's ushered in a decade in which chefs were viewed as rock stars. The skills, creativity, and reputations of chefs such as Jeremiah Towers, Mark Miller, Jonathan Waxman, Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Trotter, and Larry Forgione were enough to open the purse strings of investors to open lavishly themed restaurants, many of which are now long gone due to personal excess, poor management, and the fickle nature of the dining public.
If chefs were the rock stars of the 1980's, they are the television stars of the new millennium, both figuratively and literally. Many chefs are so busy out promoting their products, their shows, and themselves they spend little or no time in their kitchens, relying instead on a well-trained staff to execute their creations. Fortunately for them, the level of training available today from the nation's culinary schools produces an army of highly skilled cooks to carry on at the stoves of some of the country's most famous restaurants. Whereas in the past a chef could trade on the fame of his or her restaurant (or the restaurant in which they worked), today more often than not the restaurant trades on the fame of the star chef. Many American TV viewers would be hard pressed to name one of Mario Batali's restaurants, but they know Mario and they buy his books. They welcome him into their homes daily for his compelling character, his great skills, and his expertise on Italian food and cooking in general.
Today, chefs -- celebrity and otherwise -- are as much a fixture at the Fancy Food Show as is any well-known retailer shopping the aisles. From book signings and cooking demos to promotional appearances and signature products, chefs are making their presence felt at trade shows everywhere. Increasingly, chef-/restaurant-inspired cooking sauces, salsas, spice mixes, flavored vinegar and oils, and so on are appealing to consumers who try and emulate professional chefs, and consequently, they are appealing to retailers. At the same time, chefs are attending the shows because they want to know what's new from Europe and from artisans around the United States.
Looking back through recent history, it seems that one of the first strong trends that influenced both retail and restaurants, though it began in the stores, was the phenomenal impact of the foods from Spain in the early 1990's, helped considerably by the impending Olympics in Barcelona in 1992 that brought worldwide attention to the Iberian Peninsula. Our collective fascination with all things Italian for the previous 20 years helped set a foundation for American consumers to understand Spanish products such as jamon serrano, sherry wine vinegar, olive oil, and the huge array of Spanish cheeses, to name but a few. Many of these products, like their Italian forerunners, have become firmly ensconced in our pantries and on our store shelves. Likewise, there is a profusion of Spanish-style restaurants and tapas-themed menus, even though the media frenzy surrounding Spain has cooled somewhat.
Some trends start when retailers discover a new food somewhere in their travels. Others begin in the mind of a great chef, reimagining, say, something from his or her past. Still others are a result of reality rearing her troublesome head, as is the case with our current set of health issues that include obesity, rising cancer rates, diabetes, and heart disease, all of which are closely linked to our diets and lifestyles. Dieting eclipsed baseball as the national pastime some time ago, but it reached a fevered pitch in the late 1990's as we teetered on the brink of a new century, and it certainly didn't help when Dr. Atkins threw his culinary monkey wrench into the foodworks. Not since the great fear of fat of the previous decade -- when 'lite' and 'heart-healthy' options were required reading on menus everywhere -- did a diet-related fad cause so much upheaval in the food business. Both retailers and restaurateurs were forced to respond as consumers shunned bread, potatoes, and pasta in favor of steaks, cheese, and more cheese. This craze too is dying out but is leaving in its wake a slew of low-carb products and a general confusion over just what exactly a healthy person should be eating.
Perhaps the biggest trend going into the 21st century is in the form of a crossover between the traditional roles of the store and the restaurant. For a long while, retailers have been putting cafes and full restaurants into their stores, probably stemming from the success through the 1980's of gourmet prepared food offerings. This makes perfect sense when you consider that many Americans are cooking less due to time constraints -- real or imagined -- and lack of experience (most of us no longer learn to cook while holding our mothers' apron strings). But what about when it works the other way around and restaurateurs begin opening marketplaces?
This idea is not necessarily new. One notable example occurred in the 1980's in New York when retailer Steve Jenkins and chef/restaurateur Pino Longo teamed up to create Mad 61 (Madison Ave. at 61st Street) in the newly opened uptown Barney's. There the market hall surrounded the dining area with lavish displays of house-baked breads, traditional cheeses, and an assortment of gourmet foods, most of which could then be seen on one's plate. Another prime example is the partnership of the Pasta Shop and Cafe Rouge in Berkeley, California's famous Fourth Street area. The two separate but adjoining businesses literally feed off of one another, with the cafe's butcher shop being the segue between the two. The latest, and one of the most exciting examples, is the expansion of restaurant Les Halles in New York, a traditional brasserie whose fame was enhanced by Chef Anthony Bourdain's riveting book, Kitchen Confidential. Having taken over the space next door, they plan to offer for sale any dish that is served on the menu, and conversely, sell the ingredients that are used in the kitchen. A new Les Halles Cookbook penned by Bourdain will add further to the marriage of market and brasserie. Owner Philippe Lajaunie, talking about their extensive table-side food preparations such as slicing Côte de Boeuf and making Crêpes Suzette, was quoted as saying, "Customers enjoy seeing the fresh ingredients being prepared at their table -- it's exciting, entertaining, and instructive. Some have told us that they prepare the same dishes at home after 'learning' how to do it at Les Halles."
Trends will surely come and go. This year's tapas could well be next year's communal dining, and one man's bistro is another man's trattoria. Whatever those trends may be, it is vital that both retailers and restaurateurs keep abreast, and not just to be able to leap on every bandwagon that rolls through town, but to also discern which trends are important and which ones are the culinary equivalents of the pet rock. Part of the impetus behind our own "Trade Winds" column is that retailers need to be aware of what's going on beyond the four walls of their stores. No longer is it enough to simply attend a trade show once or twice a year and call it a day. Consumers have become way too savvy, both through their own travels and by way of the increasing attention paid to food in the pages of the nation's newspapers and magazines. So whether or not you actually serve food in your business, it will behoove you to pull up a chair at the big banquet of life and pay attention to what's going on. Who knows, you may find yourself going back for seconds.

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