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Our March magazine issue (you've heard of those things, right? Those booklets of glossy paper?) explores how food has become such a thing. Like, the thing. Much of that has to do with the fact that millennials are spending more money eating out than any generation before. So how did we get to this Instagram-fueled, fried chicken-crazed, I-wear-hoodies-to-dinner culture? Read on.
The Rise of the Humble Avocado
Café Gitane, a French-Moroccan café that opened in lower Manhattan in the mid-1990s, was early to both its neighborhood—Mott Street, which is now a favorite daytime catwalk for off-duty models—and its signature menu item, avocado toast. These days, you can find avocado toast just about everywhere with access to avocados and bread, but this may have less to do with Gitane’s cult following than the zeitgeist moment created by the fruit itself. U.S. avocado consumption has spiked more than 300% since 2000, growing from a West Coast treat to a straight-up national obsession. Gitane, though it may be winning the Instagram war, now represents a very tiny portion of that phenomenon. After all, you can add avocado to your toasted sandwich at Subway.
The Endless Glow of the Edison Bulb
There was nothing new about exposed-filament bulbs when Public opened, in downtown New York, in 2003. It was the fact that they were very, very old that made them so appealing. Super-efficient LED bulbs were spreading their soft white glow across the U.S., and interior designers like the ones behind Public needed an alternative—something that could hold a candle (sorry) to the old, industrial loft spaces being repurposed as restaurant dining rooms. Edison bulbs, as they’re called, were the answer. And very quickly, they became the answer for just about everyone. They are so ubiquitous that just about the only thing that could put a damper on the fad is the big energy bill restaurateurs receive as a result of their trendy aesthetic choice.
The End of Reservations
In the beginning, exclusive restaurants took reservations. They did this because a reservationist could deftly apply a certain selectivity over the phone. I’m sorry sir, we’re booked that evening. What did you say your name was? You’re calling on behalf of whom? Ah, of course. Then The Spotted Pig opened, in Manhattan in 2004, with a different idea: The door, they decided, was a much better place to apply a filter.
By the time Roberta’s came along four years later, the reservations game had been fully inverted. Was it because Roberta’s wood-fired pizza was so good diners didn’t mind standing around? Or was it that the clientele, having already trekked to a desolate stretch of Brooklyn, had no other choice but to accept the terms? Whatever the reason, it irreversibly normalized the practice of saying yes to a three-hour quote for a table. Today, as a result, we have establishments like Rose’s Luxury (our Best New Restaurant of 2014), in Washington D.C. and Sqirl, in Los Angeles, where the line to dine is practically as famous as the food itself.
The Triumphant Return of Reservations
Of course, even disruption is prone to re-disruption. The No-Reservation Wave eventually broke against the rise of Reservation Neoclassicists, who were bolstered by tech innovation and, to an extent, an impenetrable, dogmatic insistence on fairness. Where eschewing reservations blatantly favored pretty people, smooth-talkers, and name-droppers, the backlash stripped a diner of his aesthetic advantages and left him with just his email address and his credit card. Case in point: Momofuku Ko turned booking a table into a game of who-can-click-fastest. Next, in Chicago, sold tickets for its tables. And then Resy and Reserve came along, offering to let a diner simply pay a premium to get the table and timeslot he was after. (Currently, this still does not work for a table at The Spotted Pig.)
The Tyranny of Communal Tables
Party for 50? No, just a couple dozen of two-tops squished together along the same stretch of wood. Other restaurants certainly borrowed the beer-hall dining floorplan first, but Publican, in Chicago, made an art form out of it when it opened in 2008. The dining room featured a giant walnut communal table designed to allow 100 people, almost all of them strangers, to sit with each other and break bread. And Eveleigh, in L.A., forces diners into long, central farm tables. Is it particularly comfortable? No. But it gives the restaurant more geography to play with, and you might hit it off with a neighbor.
The Drink With Dinner
A decade ago, there were great restaurants and great bars, and the wares of one would be hard to find in the other. Great restaurants served wine pairings; bars served bar snacks. It took the rebirth of Eleven Madison Park, in 2006, to prove how absurd that separation was. Chef Daniel Humm and then-GM Will Guidara tasked E.M.P. bartender Leo Robitschek, a year into his employment there, to come up with a cocktail menu that suited the lofty aspirations of the kitchen (and the grandeur of the dining room). Robitschek delivered, and other restaurants followed suit, thus banishing watery Manhattans and tooth-rotting Old Fashioneds to the dustbin of restaurant history. Robitschek, Humm, and Guidara perfected the practice at The NoMad, where there are not one but three bars near the main dining room. In Chicago, Grant Achatz has built destination bars both next to and beneath his restaurant Next (next to: Aviary; beneath Aviary: the invite-only den The Office), and chefs at each place partake in the same kinds of post-grad chemistry projects Achatz employs in his kitchens. And in Nashville, The Catbird Seat serves a tasting menu with equal focus applied to a diner’s hunger and thirst.
Your Bologna Has a First and Last Name
God invented the hamburger, but Danny Meyer was the first to slap a nametag on it. Almost 70 years after Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors was founded, Meyer saw the PR value in flaunting the man’s name, locking in a proprietary blend, and publicizing it widely, for his first Shake Shack menu, at a kiosk in Madison Square Park, in 2004. Those burgers kicked off a name-brand beef frenzy (Minetta Tavern famously charges $32 for one) but they were just a piece of the larger trend away from anonymized food. If you need more convincing, head to the produce aisle at Whole Foods, a $39 billion company built on the principle that consumers want to know a little bit more about what they’re eating. Or better yet, head to Stumptown and ask your neighborhood barista the first name of the farmer who harvested your coffee beans. He’ll know it.
The Momofuku-zation of Everything
Even if David Chang hadn’t built an empire on the back of the pork bun, Ippudo would have done it with its cultish ramen. And if neither dish had made its mark on New York, Danny Bowien’s (Mission Chinese Food) Sichuan-style catfish would’ve still lit a fire in San Francisco (to say nothing of the New York branch’s kung pao pastrami). And Andy Ricker’s fish sauce wings would’ve taken over Portland (and New York.. and Los Angeles...), and Roy Choi would have conquered Koreatown in L.A. But the fact that all five things happened roughly in tandem—five disparate slices of cheap Asian street cuisine simultaneously reimagined for the American foodie—may well have have changed the landscape for adventurous eating for good. Suddenly, obscure eastern spices, rejiggered ramens, and pork belly-filled buns were not just easy to find, they were culinary gold mines. As Bowien, Chang, Ricker, and Choi made clear, the market for Asian deep cuts—both authentic and cleverly adulterated—is neither temporary nor cheap.
The Magnetic Pull of Food Courts
In retrospect, it makes sense that food courts were the future. The overhead on a stand in the middle of a room is much lower than renting a storefront, and the foot-traffic quotient is likely to be higher. Put the court in a rehabbed old warehouse within walking distance of a big ad agency and you could practically print money from noon to two p.m., Monday through Friday. But what happens if the food is also—well, great? That’s what’s happening at Ponce City Market in Atlanta and Grand Central Market in Downtown L.A., two destinations that are less food-court and more giant, sprawling mash-up restaurants, magnets for everywhere in their respective cities that a discriminating eater might want to venture for lunch. Think ice cream, sandwiches, pizza, tacos, and sushi. If there’s a major city that isn’t actively planning its own high-end food court, they had better start now.
The Oven Goes Old School
Ah, the humble oven. Is it proof of our collective fetish for nostalgia that, at least when it comes to pizza, we have flat-out rejected any form of heating that involves a technical innovation less than 2,000 years old? Or is it just that the wood-fired oven happens to be the perfect tool for evenly heating a flat disc of dough? Whatever it is, the past decade has seen dozens of great restaurants built around their epic—and in many cases ancient—wood-burning beasts. The phenomenon is coast-to-coast—look at Pizzeria Mozza in L.A. or Flour + Water in San Francisco—but it has more than flourished in pizza-drunk New York. Lucali, Motorino, Franny’s, Marta: It’d be hard to throw a ball of dough without it landing in somebody’s 800° oven.
Food Gets a Driver’s License
Every once in a while, a few things spiral into place at exactly the right moment. For Roy Choi, those things were Twitter and tacos. In 2006, right before Twitter was becoming a national pastime for bored office-dwellers, Choi was rolling out his food truck, Kogi BBQ, where he was putting his Le Bernardin pedigree to good use making delectable Korean barbecue tacos. Choi used the nascent social network to let his fans know where Kogi would be parked, thus freeing himself up from any sense of geographical permanence without sacrificing findablity. Wherever he parked, a long line appeared. Ludo Lefebvre, another classically trained chef, did roughly the same trick with Ludo Truck in 2007, and the entire city of Austin, Texas seemed to follow suit. By the time Twitter began to lose ground to Instagram, Choi and Lefebvre had settled into a few brick-and-mortar locations each. Austin, meanwhile, carries the food truck torch: There are more than 1,400 in Travis County alone.
The Chef Plays Host (and Judge)
Anthony Bourdain’s memoir smashed bestseller lists in 2000, but that was less a culmination of a chef’s career than the very beginning of star’s. (Can you even remember when Bourdain was just a writer? How about when he was an actual, working chef?) He hosted a short-lived Food Network show before hopping over to the Travel Channel with No Reservations in 2005, and then landed at CNN, with Parts Unknown, in 2013. Bourdain might be the most recognizable chef to trade up into television stardom, but he’s far from alone. Tom Colicchio has been a judge on Top Chef since it debuted in 2006, and Mario Batali has guest-starred on a dozen cooking shows and hosted ten seasons of his own, Molto Mario. To food snobs, Grant Achatz, Daniel Boulud, and Thomas Keller may be the reigning kings of cooking. But to the average American? It’s Anthony, Mario, and Tom.
The Question Du Jour: Is this Gluten-Free?
Short answer: Probably not, and it doesn’t matter unless you have an actual medical issue.
The Increasing Absence of the Added Tip Line
The European aversion to tipping has been bubbling up Stateside for a while—Amanda Cohen of Dirt Candy got rid of tipping when she moved locations and Per Se and French Laundry included gratuity in their pricing as early as 2005—but it took another ten years for the practice to expand beyond the hollowed ground of foodie pilgrimage destinations. The restaurateur who tipped the scale (sorry) was Danny Meyer, who announced in October that he was phasing out tipping at every one of his 13 establishments. His big stand was met with a chorus of appreciation within the restaurant world, as well as its share of dissenters, but there’s no denying the impact: Meyer was the perfect man to pick up the torch, not least because the phenomenally successful owner, with establishments across a number of price points, is beloved and respected by his employees and competitors alike. The no-tipping practice is currently rolling out through Meyer’s restaurant group, and a number of restaurants have already followed suit. It’s spreading slowly, and steadily, and few people in the industry aren’t watching closely.
The Hard Press of Cold-Press
What was once a new-agey, L.A.-centric fad is now a multi-billion dollar-a-year industry, with tentacles throughout that city and just about every other big one. New York has Juice Press. San Francisco has Pressed and Project Juice. L.A. has Moon Juice. In each city, it’s hard to walk a block, or traverse a grocery store aisle, without encountering an array of cold-pressed blends. Though “juicing” seemed to proliferate as part of the cleanse trend, healthy living turned out to be little more than a Trojan horse. For just nine dollars a pop, you can pretend your midday snack is good for you. Who could resist?
The Disappearance of the White Tablecloth
If one were to rank the signifiers diners rely on when trying to judge the tone of a restaurant, you’d have to place the tablecloth near the top. If it’s white, and there’s one draped over every table, you know you’re in for an expensive—and possibly even good—meal. Or at least you would know that, if hip, youngish restaurateurs, proud of their thrifted oak tables, hadn’t collectively ditched the tablecloths altogether. Though it’d be hard to trace this practice to a particular establishment, think, for a second, about Husk, in Charleston. Widely considered one of the best restaurants in the country when it opened in 2010, and not particularly inexpensive by anyone’s standards. Can you imagine Sean Brock’s dining room without the wooden surfaces exposed? That’s a good thing: Along with the white tablecloths, we’ve begun to do away with all sorts of fine-dining signifiers. Finally, a good restaurant doesn’t have to look like anything at all.