Food trends are a fickle business
Food fads: the glorious, not so glorious, and the downright annoying.
Food trends are a fickle business, perhaps nowhere more so than in Australia, where our polyglot cuisine and sometimes affected cosmopolitanism make us particularly vulnerable to gimcrack marketing and advocates with a barrow to push.
But there’s no use denying that Australia’s food culture sits on shifting sands, open to constant change. Not for us the European approach, which knows that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things, and will take up arms if someone suggests otherwise. In 2016 tensions between France and Italy reached a height not seen since Louis XII seized Milan when a French food website suggested spaghetti alla carbonara could be made by boiling down farfalle in the same pot with bacon and seasoning and then plopping creme fraiche and a raw egg on top. (The website prudently took the offending video down before the Papal States could raise an army). We in Australia are happy to embrace the new, even if it’s barmy.
So with these caveats ringing in our ears, allow us to look at ahead what may be coming up for Australians who like their tucker : the good, the bad, and the ugly.
TRENDS WE’LL SEE MORE OF (LIKE THEM OR NOT)
Turning Japanese. We haven’t yet seen Italian food twinned up with other cuisines in the same way a generation of French chefs have embraced the Asian. That resistance is breaking down, however, and we are starting to see Italian done with a Japanese twist (or is it the other way around?) at diners in Sydney such as Zambo in Surry Hills and the sublime LuMi Dining in Pyrmont. Count this strongly in the “we like” category.
Ready-to-cook meals, and things that give you the illusion that you’re cooking when you’re not. No futurologist has ever gone broke starting a prediction with “our increasingly busy lifestyles mean that ...”. In the kitchen, this thought is generally finished with a suggestion that no one has any time to cook and that people are perfectly happy to hand over the money for glorified airline food they can shovel into their gobs while binge-watching Netflix. This has been building for some time but got a shot in the arm when Coles launched its own line of “readymade” meals last year, offering “healthy takeaway-style cuisines” ... well, you can guess the rest. But as the bumper stickers seen in the American south say about prayer, if you’re too busy too cook, you’re too busy. This all feels too bomb-shelter or seat 54E with a toddler kicking us in the back for comfort.
Supermarkets masquerading as gourmet shops. Call us ambivalent on this one. Naturally we do all our food shopping at the most artisanal markets we can find. You know, the sort of places where the apples were free to roam and the chickens come with little tags that inform us that “Betty had a passion for knitting and spirituality”. But, you know, we need to buy toilet paper and dog food too, and compared to the state of supermarkets a decade or so ago, we’re thrilled to see good cheeses and duck breasts and all sorts of goodies on offer. All they need is to update their jingles: “Down down, Roquefort is down ...”
Ramen bars. Ramen has been a big thing in Sydney ever since David Chang rated it a few years back, but look for more and more proper ramen bars to spring up in the style of Prahran’s Yoku Ono (please forgive the name) as well as riffs on ramen such as that seen at Sydney’s Rising Sun where, bizarrely, a motorcycle workshop and a ramen bar share equal billing.
THINGS WE’D LIKE TO SEE
Fishmongers to take up where butchers have left off. Carnivores who cook are spoilt for choice these days, particularly in Sydney (Hudson Meats, Victor Churchill) and Melbourne (Meatsmith) but sometimes we like a spot of fish, too. Not everyone can get to the Sydney Fish Markets — and if they can they may not want to brave the parking and coming redevelopment — and it would seem there is a hole in the market for, well, a celebrity fishmonger type to offer really premium product of the sort normally snagged by restaurants.
Service please. Honestly, it becomes harder and harder to complain about the service in Australian restaurants. In the regions, what’s missing in professionalism is more than made up for in enthusiasm, and at its best in the cities, Australia has developed a personable and knowledgeable class of first-class waitstaff (even if that very Nordic thing they like to do where different people bring different things and it all gets confusing after a few glasses of wine is perhaps less successful). That said, there are black spots that need attention; we recall one meal in a high-end seafood place on the Sydney Harbour foreshore where a dropped fork spent 35 minutes on the ground and a query about just what sort of oysters were in the mixed dozen were met by a shrug and the tossing of the kitchen chit on the table.
Proper wineglasses. Yes, they’re expensive, but so is the Gaja Barbaresco we just ordered, and we’d like to drink it out of something less plodding, thick, and fat-lipped than Anthony Mundine after hitting the canvas for a 10-count. We invested in a set of Zaltos for home use recently, and while not cheap, they’re real last-a-lifetime gear — simultaneously light and flicky and robust and durable as hell, happy to be knocked over in enthusiastic dinner party debate and run through the dishwasher with nary a scratch or cloud.
Knife sharpening. The joy of cooking with a really proper knife is half the fun, but maintaining high-end blades, particularly those from Japan, is as much art as skill. Those who share this obsession will surely be happy to see more of the likes of Chef’s Armoury, the Japanese cooking equipment gurus with outlets in Melbourne and Sydney who not only sharpen your knives for you, but will teach you how to do it yourself with special Japanese stones, as well as Tanto in QT’s Melbourne laneway.
THINGS WE’D LIKE TO SEE THE BACK OF
Burgers. The burger — particularly in its simple, classic, American-style one-hand form — is one of the great creations of all time. Yet in its relentless march it destroys everything in its path, meaning celebrity chefs run the numbers and shut their fine diners in favour of fast-food stands, and people who should know better queue for hours when a California chain decides to do a pop-up.
Farm to table. Are there three more meaningless words in the entire food world? Think about it: everything you eat, unless you’re eating food synthesised in a lab while sitting on the floor because your partner left with all the furniture when you couldn’t stop banging on about sustainability, has made the journey from farm to table. And with it can we please get away from restaurants making you wade through a cult-like manifesto about their relationship with the earth, particularly when they’re just a refashioned bistro in an RSL?
Natural wines. Yes, all wines are natural, but to borrow a phrase, some wines are more natural than others. And while we love the idea of standing back and letting the grapes do the talking, we are sick of restaurants pushing these very hip, very echt artisanal swamp-waters that practically have aqua dragons and trimmings from the winemaker’s lush beard swimming in them. We gave five stars to the Italian sommelier the other night with whom we had the following exchange:
Us: “And can we get a bottle of this such-and-such nebbiolo?”
Sommelier (scrunching his nose): “Ah, sir, you know is ... is natural wine?”
Us: “Oh, so ... stuff floating in it?”
Somm (pointing discreetly to another wine on the list): “Si, si, some people like, but, perhaps you would prefer ...”
Us: “Done!”