Some More Trends in Paris Restaurants

I’ve written before about Paris Restaurant trends.  It’s amazing how there are new ones each season but some keep repeating, such as slates for plates and listing a dish like eel with avocado and mango – where the eel is verbally buried in the middle so one sees “Avocado with eel and mango,” which is not at all what it looks like.

June 4th’s A Nous Paris had a feature on what’s trendy in Paris right now and some such trends seem dated and silly to at least one American.  They included:
A wrap from Subway©
Tofu Bavarois
Gin not vodka
Sugar snap peas
Fruit & herb ice cubes

Then, Food and Wine had an article in its July issue on Food Trends in America and included:
Lists of food trends (ha, so there!)
Popup restaurants
Fancy chefs making burgers
No-reservation restaurants
Cross-cultural cuisine that’s more than Asian fusion
TV chefs
The death of fine dining
Chefs as sex symbols

And just a few weeks ago I heard a relatively new but terrific restaurant reviewer from Baltimore, of all places, mention:
Small plates vs huge portions
Locavore vs get what you want when you want it
The end of fine dining (again)
The growth of casual dining
Uncomfortable chairs, stools and high tables
Painful noise levels vs able to talk places

However, there are other more mundane observations that I and others in Paris have made on what was hot and what was not this spring and summer:
Eggs, especially on ham with asparagus
Fluff and foams (yet again)
Duck hearts
Grains
Hot (really hot, for the French palate) spices over unexciting espelette
Stools and high tables in the best of places
Baba’s on every menu
Chocolate domes rather than moelleux
Marshmallows
Smoke flavor or truffle spray on the most unlikely of ingredients
62 degree eggs
Angus beef
Those silly little tin buckets for the bill/addition.

Comments

[T. Tilash]

I'm not really sure about this, but I had a dessert with olive tapenade at "Le Cinq", I thought it was very interesting how the saltiness and earthiness from the olives balanced the acidity and sweetness of the "fraisier with sheep's milk curd ice cream", however I think I read somewhere that a bunch of places are starting to add olives to their desserts, and I'm sure that's a trend that could get old really fast...

Concerning the 62 degree eggs, in the last issue of "Lucky Peach" there is an article by Harold McGee stating he doesn't like them and prefers the firm consistency of the whites when soft boiled the regular way, which is... you know... ironic.

And I wouldn't have commented just to say that, but since I've already mumbled a bunch of nonsense, I thought I'd just add "ditto about the silly little tin buckets" !