As an aside…if you or any Doper are in Chicago and like Korean food I know a GREAT restaurant for it and would be happy to take you. It’s not a hot pot place or strictly BBQ but it has some BBQ dishes and fried chicken and whatnot.
Amazing food (and drinks too).
Carry on…
Plant breeding breakthroughs, shipping technology improvements, and more people living in cities, traveling abroad, and eating in ethnic enclave restaurants, drive a lot of popularity of novel foods. Almost all of which are not novel in their place of origin. And don’t forget the power of immigration. For many new immigrants, restaurants featuring food from their home countries have been a first business.
Because of the internet, new foods spread a lot faster than they used to.
Poke, in a basic form, has been around forever. But what we know now as poke really developed in Hawaii in the 1990s. It wasn’t until 2012 or so (according to Wiki) that it became popular on the mainland and now it’s everywhere.
About a decade back, there was a mini-craze for newly invented hybrid pastries, like the cronut and the cragel. (Broad City spoofed this with the “churron” - half macaron, half churro.)
Hot honey seems to be a new thing.
Ciabatta was invented in 1982. It feels like a traditional bread dating back centuries, but was invented in my lifetime.
And no ranch dressing. I don’t remember when or where I first encountered ranch, but it doesn’t seem to have taken very long to go from unknown to ubiquitous.
Yeah, when I was young, and visiting Vancouver, the street food thing was chips, served with vinegar, catsup or ?? Anyway, not Poutine. I first had it- gourmet version in The canada Pavilion of Walt Disney land. But from some stories, So-Cal first came out with chili-fries.
Well, in SoCal we had it earlier, and likely along the border So, I think 95% is a bit high.
With Italian, french or Blue cheese dressing only.
No Thousand Island?
Good point. Yep, even as a kid that was around.
Aquafaba is only 11 years old.
Cloud Bread, Butter Boards and Pasta Chips are all TikTok viral foods (that are also surprisingly good, or at least the last 2 are. )
Thousand Island dressing presumably predated Big Mac Sauce….
When I was young, my mother was a very traditional UK meat and potatoes cook.
In university I met people who were more adventurous.
I discovered green peppers! A new interesting flavour!
I’m still waiting to find another vegetable that is as new and exciting… 
I’ve observed a spreading trend of “Dubai chocolate” in the last year or so in both Germany and the UK. It’s chocolate with shredded pistachios and pastry strands in it.
Another one that I’ve observed in various places is pinsa, which is very similar to pizza but from a different region of Italy. I suspect, though, that many places which offer it have just started to call the regular pizza that they’ve been selling forever pinsa instead, to be hip.
I tend to think of modern as anything in the last century. I kind of get a kick out of old comic strips like Beetle Bailey where our lazy soldier has a bad dream and blames it on the spicy pepperoni from last night’s pizza. Pizza is such a common food now, something a lot of us grew up eating every Friday at the school cafeteria, that it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t that long ago pizza was new and somewhat exotic to a lot of Americans.
I’m going to go with coffee. Obviously coffee itself isn’t anything new, but our relationship with coffee sure seems a lot different from what it was when I was a kid. Dedicated coffee shops like Starbucks were not at all common when I was a child and the variety offered by places that did serve coffee were very limited. I don’t know if we drink more or less coffee, but the way we drink it is a bit different.
Cilantro isn’t anything new, but I simply can’t remember it from when I was growing up. One day I woke up and cilantro was everywhere. I love the stuff.
Legalized pot has brought about a new industry dedicated to cannabis infused drinks and foods. I’m talking a bit more sophisticated than Alice B. Toklas brownies or gummies. While these aren’t mainstream, this is an industry that didn’t really exist in 2000.
Quesabirria tacos are a fairly recent addition. According to the wiki article they were being served in Tijuana in 2009 and arrived in LA around 2016. I was in Auckland a month ago and saw several restaurants that had them on offer.
Chicken tenders were allegedly first made at the Puritan Backroom in Manchester, New Hampshire in 1974 when the head chef was looking for a way to use small pieces of boneless chicken that were trimmed from larger cuts.
Chicken nuggets only date to the 1950s invented by a food science professor at Cornell University.
All us cool kids have started eating puffballs cultivated in our own yards. They’re good fried or in soup.
Wait… nope… sorry, it’s just me. Feel free to jump on this and help create a new trend, though. 
Could well be. I’ve never been curious enough to look for pictures of it.
I just bought a bar of that chocolate a couple of weeks ago. It was delicious, but he gave me a break and it was still $16.00 for something the size of a king size Hershey.
I think Ceviche is at least a newish trend. I can even buy it at Costco now.