Tasty Trends and Fusty Fads
The many meals I eat to compile guides to the city’s 50 best restaurants, best new restaurants, and top tasting menus for $100 or less give me a lot of time to notice the tiny details that can set a restaurant apart and the little patterns that emerge at any given moment. Some of these trends deserve to be served up to customers on a silver platter; others leave a bad taste in my mouth. Take a nibble of this season’s trends, listed from sweet to sour.
All Clear!
Clarified coconut cocktails are the hottest way to cool down. Bar Miriam’s People to Cake Ratio mixes clarified coconut milk with lime leaf–infused rum and miso-lemongrass-vanilla cordial. Lenox’s signature drink is a Clarified Piña Colada, and Rob Roy ran an all-clarified coconut milk punch special menu earlier this year.
Fomenting Fermentation
Symbiotic Cultures pushes the fermentation frontier with Toasted Yellow Pea Shoyu and Chanterelle Smoked Kombu Garum, but the improvements of aging are all over town, like the hemp seed miso (with sour plum in onigiri) at Anbai, and jun, the green tea sibling of kombucha from Seeking Ferments.
Sick Burns
Please stop with the undercooked roasted or charred vegetables. I want my brassicas to look like they survived a fire, not like they could be Nicole Kidman’s sister.
