Recent threads about Mac n cheese and Arugula got me wondering about how some things start popping up on menus all over town.
Couple more examples I have noticed:
Aioli. The gourmets among us might differ, but it is flavored mayonnaise. I don’t like mayonnaise. At the height of the Aioli craze, I order some sort of new special sandwich at Arby’s and ask for no mayonnaise. I complain that there is mayonnaise on it. They inform me that , No!, that is Aioli.
Sweet Potato Fries. I liked this development (as long as it wasn’t served with Aioli). They would often be presented in some sort of carafe inside a paper cone or some such thing. Maybe even sprinkled with fresh herbs.
Does one chef come up with an idea and everyone just copies them? Or did Big Sweet Potato orchestrate the whole thing?
As for Arugula, I like them in a “mixed greens” salad, but not so much on their own. Either way its an improvement over iceberg lettuce with a dollop of 1000 island on top.
Mac n Cheese? No brainer. Kraft might be the worst example, but Pasta and real Cheese? Gift from god.
What other things have you seen suddenly show up all over the place?
Taco in a bag. I don’t know if this is a regional thing but I only noticed it a few years ago.
To the uninitiated, you have all of your regular taco ingredients (meat, lettuce, cheese, tomato and so on) but you don’t assemble it in a taco shell.
Instead, you take the small size Doritos bag -the red Doritos incidentally but I’ve heard tell that some do this with the blues- crumble up the Doritos, dump all of the taco fixins in the bag and then consume the mixture with a plastic fork. It’s relatively popular here in Maryland but, I don’t remember this being a thing growing up.
I’m meh on the aioli-mayo thing. Lots of stuff is just mayo with something else mixed into it. Tartar sauce is essentially just pickle relish and mayo. Thousand Island dressing is just mayo and ketchup and some other shit. A trained French chef would definitely balk at all of that, but laymen don’t care about the differences if the mayo+whatever tastes close enough for them and they don’t know any better.
I only discovered this when I moved to Ohio and had kids. This “walking taco” thing was already in school lunches and sold at little league games and pools when my kids started school and activities around 2005. They use fritos, though.
re: mayo and aioli, instead of getting into pedantic arguments over fast food, just say you want “no sauce.”
Bacon has always been a thing, but when did Bacon become the meme it is today? Bacon Salt or the Baconator were when it really started to go overboard.
Avocado. If it’s not in the form of guacamole, I don’t really care for it. And what is this “smashed” guacamole all of a sudden. What the hell is that?
I think it started in the 1990s. According to The Baltimore Sun in 1996, restaurants were buying 55% of the nation’s bacon supply. I don’t remember a whole lot of bacon outside of breakfast when I was a kid and I’m having a hard time pinpointing by memory when bacon suddenly started appearing everywhere. But restaurants use it as a relatively inexpensive way to enhance flavor and charge their customers more.
I’ll bite. Cilantro. I don’t remember ever hearing of cilantro until sometime around 2005. It may have been more common before that but I don’t exactly get in on trends too early. I absolutely love the stuff and will happily put it in my tacos and burritos even.
I assumed the popularity of Thai restaurants was the result of highly publicized studies in the 1990s declaring Chinese restaurant food to be really unhealthy.
No, I think Terminus_Est’s article nails it. Living in Thailand for 25 years, I am familiar with their government’s push to promote Thai food abroad. There was a whole bureaucracy set up for it.
I haven’t noticed bacon getting more expensive because my wife has become a bacon snob in recent years. We’re in Arkansas but she orders our bacon from Nueske’s Applewood Smoked Meats all the way in Wisconsin. It’s more expensive than any bacon I can buy at the supermarket but it’s really good bacon.
