Dining Trends adn Observations
A personal bugbear of years has been the often mindless usage of certain premium ingredients, as if luxury cachet alone is sufficient to elevate a dish with little thought given to just how well it works with othre components.Good caviar is utterly delicious, on its own or with other comparatively bland textures and flavours serving the star of the show, such as the classic pairing with sour cream and blinis.
This year,though,it was turning up everywhere like some class of masticatory masonic signifier of exclusivity,most commonly to cap a dish that frequently enough didn’t need it or even overwhelmed it entirely. Upmarket crisps, a caviar ‘spoon’ I encountered too often this year are pointless; crunchy texture distracts from the pleasing ‘pop’ and salty lab-produced flavours entirely distort caviar’s subtle complexity of flavour.
Either go all out and serve the stuff on its own at accordingly hefty prices, shrugging off any accusations of elitism, or employ a bit of culinary creativity to conjure up an innovative choice.
Truffle shavings were everywhere, too, sometimes several times in a single meal as an afterthought grace note. One of nature’s finest flavour bombs, give it more room to really strut its stuff.
The use of synthetic truffle oil should be criminalised. gold leaf is used solely for aesthetic reasons. In a year when hospitality is running to stand still in the face of rising costs and the general dining public is doing something similar, it came across as little other than crass and egregious excess.
The aforementioned fiscal pressures,on both hospitality and its customers,continue to impact on dining. The soaring price of beef has seen steak vanish from many menus, some restaurants avoiding beef altogether.
Mind you, I frequently enough prefer the alternative, cheaper cuts, brilliantly cooked.
For economic reasons, Irish menus in general have become much tighter, often reduced to just three or four dishes per course, even the finest of fine dining, yet my experience of this new found brevity has been entirely positive, seeing a new clarity of focus from the kitchen.
We lingered so long in Soul, on Cork’s Washington St, that tables around us were turned twice, even thrice, yet we were seemingly the only table to order a full bottle of wine.
The in-house mark-up on the wholesale price of wine is a crucial part of any restaurant business plan but sales in hospitality are sliding ever downwards.
Reduced consumer spending power is certainly a big factor but there is also a general decline in alcohol consumption amongst younger diners for health reasons or taste preferences – cocktails, alcoholic and non-alcoholic, are vrey much on the rise. Whichever way you pour it,the glass is increasingly half empty for hospitality bean counters.
The amount of pop-ups and chef collabs ramped up like never before, now very much part of the annual culinary calendar. Cork on a Fork food festival saw over 20 chefs of MacCurtain st and its environs knock it out of the park at the Long Table dinner, while