Bread, you will be thrilled to hear, is back in fashion again.
It is possible you missed that whole part where it went out of style. Where anyone who was anyone would refuse to eat it, would shun it as if it were a plate of dessicated crickets.
Dessicated crickets, incidentally, are out of fashion again after brief but persistent efforts to get Americans interested in eating them as a vital and nearly inexhaustible supply of protein, which unfortunately leaves tiny little insect legs stuck in your teeth.
Sorry. I got carried away there for a second. I was talking about bread, and how it is back in fashion. We know this because of a restaurant review in the New Yorker.
In a review of the Standard Grill, Rocco DiSpirito's new restaurant in the hip meatpacking district of Manhattan, Hannah Goldfield wrote about how nearly every dish on the menu was gluten-free.
"But hasn't DiSpirito heard that bread is back?" she wrote.
Her point was that DiSpirito disappeared as a celebrity chef sometime around 2004, when a reality show called "The Restaurant" revealed him to be an insufferable jerk and the cook of food that, when he bothered to be in the kitchen at all, didn't appear to be particularly interesting.
Sorry, I got carried away again. Her point was really that he had disappeared as a celebrity chef and that the menu of his new restaurant shows he has been "playing catch-up on some of the trends he missed."
So the restaurant offers short ribs that are cooked sous vide and finished with cold applewood smoke. That's three separate fads from bygone days right there, the writer notes with a sneer, though she also acknowledges that DiSpirito himself helped popularize both sous vide cooking (using precisely controlled hot water to slowly cook food) and short ribs as an entree.
In the world of highfalutin' restaurant reviewing, the latest trend is always to be craved. Better still is a restaurant that jumps on the next fad before it appears. The fads of yesteryear _ or, like, three months ago _ are comically antediluvian and antiquated.
Our own critic Ian Froeb, I am happy to say, keeps abreast of the latest fads but does not worship them. And that is how I think it should be.
If a fad was genuinely delicious in 2015, why shouldn't it be delicious now? Avocado toast may be considered as stale as last month's bread, but it is still good to eat. Short ribs, which once were served only in soup, make a hearty and satisfying entree.
This is not to say that every fad is worth keeping. Remember the way high-end restaurants tried to stack an entire dinner into an impenetrable tower in the '90s? That's a fad that needed to go away. Gelatin molds of the '50s were never any good for anything. And some of the early excesses of the molecular gastronomy craze seem to be, gratifyingly, dwindling away.
I tend to stick with the tried and true and maybe occasionally try something new. But we should always remember that what we love now was once a fad.
At some point in history, somebody covered pasta with a tomato sauce, and it became all the rage. Somebody else, presumably, thought that french fries might make a good accompaniment to a hamburger, and before you knew it everybody was doing it.
The New Yorker review writes admiringly about a dish being served at a completely different restaurant across town, a dish that is more up-to-date and faddish. It is "a bowl of Hakurei turnips ... Some were al dente, some softened until silky, all bathed in a luscious green sauce and topped with crunchy chorizo-fat bread crumbs and tart coins of rhubarb."
No thanks. I think I'll stick to something less au courant, like maybe green beans with butter and almonds. That suits me just fine.
