the newest bbq joint where i’m at has fried pickled green tomatoes…
Wow, I was not aware of the fried pickle thing until just about a year ago. Maybe it was slow coming to this area.
Yep, as Labrador Deceiver said, I think this is pretty accurate. We go out to eat a fair bit, and St. Louis actually has a fairly decent food scene for a city of its size and type (smallish, midwestern, etc.). For a while now the “foodies” have seemed to have an infatuation with stuff like menudo and tripe from one of the “authentic” mexican places I frequent, and lately at the really “nice” places (in multiple cities) I’ve been seeing more and more things like sweetbreads, tongue, liver and liver terrene (I actually really like liver, but the terrene wasn’t so great), pork belly (which was fantastic) – basically upscale places using what might be considered “unglamorous” ingredients. Not quite as unglamorous as the chicken feet and beef knuckles at one of the Chinese places I visit (I haven’t had them). 
I’ve only skimmed the thread, but I’m going to add a (to me) even more recent twist to the chipotle trend: smoked paprika. The first I heard of it was a cauliflower recipe in Mark Bittman’s NYTimes column maybe a couple years ago. Since then I’ve seen it called for quite a few times in magazines and so forth. I gather it’s traditional in some regions of Spain? I like it, but a little goes a long way.
Deep fried tarantula spiders, deep fried scorpions, and other weird items.
I never even heard of fried pickles until I was in Fort Worth, Texas for business about ten years ago. Now, I’m starting to see them here. But they’re not as good as the ones I had ten years ago in Texas. 
Does any place still advertise a mesquite grill? I seem to recall they were very popular back in the mid-1980s. Places would advertise “mesquite-grilled steaks,” for example. Mesquite charcoal apparently provided much more heat than regular charcoal. But now, I see nothing about them at all. I guess they were a passing food fad, but if not, what happened to them? Are they still around?
Fiber – fiber in yogurt, fiber in splenda…
Also the gourmet doughnut thing is in right now. I am really hoping that bacon goes “out” a little bit, because bacon chocolate (tried it, shudder) and bacon maple doughnuts are really unnecessary.
Are you in Alabama? Is it run by Idige and Ruth?