food world | chef

As a food columnist for Esquire magazine and author of The Encyclopedia of American Food & Drink and The Dictionary of Italian Food and Drink, JOHN MARIANI has been around the culinary block. Who better to dish out opinions on the current state of cuisine for Celebrated Living’s 10th anniversary issue?

Food fads come and go -- remember la nouvelle cuisine, the Sugar Busters Diet, blackened redfish, and foam sauces -- but culinary trends seem to surge more and more quickly these days, when the same ingredients are available overnight to every chef in the world and the media are constantly vigilant as to what the next big thing in food will be.

As someone who for more than 25 years has been traveling the world to eat what’s new and exciting, my enthusiasm has only increased at a time when so many cuisines are so easily influencing each other, so that you’re as likely to find an exotic Asian fruit on a plate in Paris as you are foie gras at dinner in Tokyo.

From what I have seen, here are the top 10 trends in the food world right now, most of them likely to endure or become standards for dining out in the future.

Slow Food Movement
It began in Rome as a protest against the encroachment of fast-food franchises in Rome’s center, but has now grown into a worldwide advocacy group zealously trying to preserve food traditions and culture, lobbying against the use of pesticides, and inveighing against large-scale agribusiness. With more than 100,000 members in 132 countries, the Slow Food Movement’s actual effect on restaurant dining has been more to make cooks and diners aware of the essential goodness of food farmed and cooked from scratch, while educating the public about the concerns of toxins, pollution, contamination, and commercial preparation of the foods we eat every day.

Farm to Table Eating

A corollary of the Slow Food Movement, this easy-to-understand idea has become a mantra for chefs who believe that the closer the ingredient sources are to the restaurant, the better the food will be. For while any chef can ship in white asparagus from Belgium, it is far more rational to buy green asparagus, corn, and tomatoes from local farmers. As Alice Waters, owner of the pioneering Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, told USA Today about picking fresh herbs, “You smell these flowers and lemon verbena and basil -- it’s intoxicating. You don’t need the rhetoric. You just need the plate of food.” In turn, Waters has gotten Michelle Obama to plant a vegetable garden at the White House. At Luce at the InterContinental San Francisco, chef Dominique Cranny offers a meat-and-seafood tasting menu and a vegetable tasting menu that is created each day on the basis of what’s best and freshest in the seasonal market. Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York, has trademarked the term “Know Thy farmer,” and executive chef Dan Barber draws his fruits, vegetables, poultry, and hogs from the farmland around the restaurant and from a vast greenhouse.