Agreed. I always taste the smoke (which I hate) and not the chile.
Don’t worry, I don’t see it as an attack at all.
I can understand your consternation, but I do think that gastropubs are a different breed than regular pubs. First of all, there’s a definite price differential. At most pubs you can find beers in the $1-10 range, but in a gastropub, the beers tend to start at $6-8 and go up to about $15/pint or bottle, with the exception of Pabst, which is thrown in to the please the broke hipster types who go for the food. You will never find Bud light or Coors on a gastropub drink menu.
Second, the food quality is just superior in every way. A regular pub generally just throws some sliders, hot dogs, chili fries, pizza on the menu. A good pub will make sure that those versions taste great. However, a gastropub will have exotic meats and spices, handcrafted sodas, and correspondingly high prices to match their ingredients. For example, at a good pub, you can get a good all-beef hot dog with all the regular toppings. In a gastropub, the hot dog/sausage will probably be ground on-site from grass-fed beef or there will be an option for alligator-rabbit mix sausages and 5 types of mustard to choose from. It’s at places like these that you find the half page ingredient lists.
Now if you’re just complaining that gastropub is a stupid word, well, I agree, but it’s succinct and identifies that you’ll be eating gourmet food and drinking craft beer that were specially chosen by the staff to fit their theme. Now, if all pubs were like that, I’d be in total agreement with you on the usage, but since where I live, most pubs are generally places where the food is an afterthought, I think gastropub is a perfectly useful (if dumb) word to describe a subspecies of pubs.
I can see vegan food moving into the mainstream, much like vegetarian stuff did in the nineties.
These days I have a fair chance of finding a vegan pre-packaged sandwich in my local supermarket, which would have been unthinkable even five years ago.
And cider has undergone an extraordinary change of image in the UK - five years ago it was the beverage of choice for tramps and students, now it’s trendy, sippable, served over ice, comes in a huge range of flavours and bottles and strengths, and the cider aisle in supermarkets has exploded with “artisan” varieties.
And yeah, everything these days comes with foam. See also: inexplicable chive wigwams.
Wraps, using tortillas instead of “regular” bread for everything.
Even McDonalds has a snack wrap version of the Big Mac now (that isn’t half bad).
I don’t think I ever even saw a tortilla, let alone ate one, my entire life as a kid in Illinois.
I don’t quite know how to describe it, but presenting the food in the form of another food.
For example, instead of getting a pea soup, you get a pea cappucino, which is basically a pea soup but frothier.
I came in to mention “foam” (or food “cappuccino”), a trend I really, really hate. Yes, Mr Chef, it’s very clever how you’ve done that and I’m sure it imparts some subtle flavor to the dish that other forms of the food do not. But it also looks like the cat’s puked on my plate. Please just…stop it.
Is dim sum not yet big? I’ve been eating it for years.
What’s “bubble tea”?
Bubble Tea. Basically, it’s a drink with little tapioca globes in it that is a little bit odd. It reminds me of a drink they came out with in the mid-90’s that flopped tremendously. It was clear and came in glass bottles but had colored (orange, red, etc.) tapioca in it. I tried it once, never again. I can’t remember the name, though.
Orbitz soda. Blame Canada!
That sort of thing usually falls under the header of “molecular gastronomy”… the idea is to present familiar tastes in unfamiliar forms, and often uses playful presentations by making Food A look like Food B, or by deconstructing Food A into its component parts.
It’s stupendous when done properly (see: El Bulli, The Fat Duck, WD-50, et al), and absolutely terrible when done badly (hence all the complaining about foams in this thread).
Ye, no, yes, and YES! And… maybe. Are you talking about a place near either Porter or Davis Square? I was there about 6 years ago. We were starving and saw a sign for an Afghani restaurant, but it was “coming soon.” Every other restaurant in that neighborhood was Japanese, which I like but none of us was in the mood for.
Oh, you were perfectly clear. I was just trying to make sense of my own cognitive dissonance. When I think of pineapples, I think Dole, which makes me think of Sanford Dole, who ousted the queen in the 19th century. It doesn’t occur to me that old stemaships weren’t putting fresh pineapples on midwestern plates back then.
Speaking of trends – When I watched The Hurt Locker a few months ago, I was a little surprised to see grown up tough guy soldiers drinking juice from boxes with those little straws. I still think of juice boxes as being for small children, and being a relatively new thing. Those came out in what, the early or mid 80s? Definitely not part of my childhood. To this day I don’t think I’ve ever had one.
Last year seemed to be the year of bacon (and to a somewhat lesser extent pork belly in general). Can’t say as I minded this trend at all.
Recently fried eggs seem to be the rage. Again, I can’t say that I mind.
So far, this is the most accurate post in the thread. I would ammend it to say that the meat trends you listed are pretty huge right now.
A lot of the other trends I’ve seen listed were popular 15 years ago.
I loved that stuff! And I had completely forgotten about it.
Yay, glad I am remembering something correctly these days.
It’s just north of Porter Square.
I just googled it, and it is now called Ali Baba Tandoor, though it had a different name a few years ago, but I believe it is owned and operated by the same people and nothing changed but the name.
Someday I’ll get around to going in, but how can it possibly live up to the Helmand?
You have to remember too that it is a great big world and the nature of a trend is to start one place and then spread on to other places. What was popular 15 years ago in your area might just be becoming popular elsewhere. Many places (particularly in the mid-west, I have noticed) are slow to change and slow for things to “catch on”.
The rural area where my husband works still thinks of sushi as “exotic” and no one there has even heard of bubble tea (though I had it eons ago and would think it old hat by now). But that is also a county (that is quite large) that has only one store that takes debit cards as payment. To them even that is a trendy new thing.
I don’t think that’s a trend so much as a necessity. Every “send stuff to soldiers” page I’ve looked at has listed some form of make-water-taste-like-something-powder, because they have to drink so much to keep pace with their environment. The juice bags are just a convenient lightweight way to carry fluid.
I’ve seen the occasional civilian adult drink from juice bags/boxes, but it’s usually a parent at a picnic.
Polenta. That was a trend I was glad to see go away. Polenta *can *be interesting, but bland polenta is like eating paste.
For a moment there I got all excited, because tonight I have to be in…
Ah, Davis Square. Dammit!
Very short walk (less than 10 minutes) between Porter & Davis!