Stupid! These 13 trends we really don’t want to see again in 2021
Nothing is as fickle as trends—and food trends are no different. Food trends come and go. We enthusiastically embrace some food trends (loaded fries! Japanese sandwiches!), but we are completely done with other food trends. “Let’s be honest: instant coffee with 4 tablespoons of sugar is actually a really stupid idea, isn’t it?”
Dry January
Not drinking for a month so you can go all out guilt-free for the rest of the year? What nonsense. Especially now that it’s corona, we actually want to treat ourselves to a nice drink now and then in January. Dry January? Meh, no; we’d rather drink a little more mindfully every day.
Vega Beef Wellington
In the weeks before Christmas, we saw Beef Wellington everywhere. A difficult dish, but ‘fortunately’ there were also all kinds of vegetarian versions: stuffed butternut squash, stuffed beets, stuffed aubergines, and they are all called Wellington too, because they are wrapped in puff pastry and then baked.
Where did this trend come from? And can Vegan Mushroom Wellington and the other Wellingtons please return to the eighties soon? Thank you.
Bowls
We said it before, but who decided that serving food in a bowl makes it hip—or even healthier? Get rid of those Vegan Buddha Bowls and Poké bowls, which are on practically every menu. It is often an easy dish for chefs to make and also often a stone-cold disappointment of (too much) rice with (too few and much too cold) things on top, and that’s it. “Here you have a pound of ice-cold rice, packed down nice and hard, topped with five blobs of half-frozen raw salmon and six edamame beans for 15 euros, enjoy.” And there you sit, sportily and supposedly elegantly hacking away at it with chopsticks while your stomach cries and you actually need something with melted cheese and bacon.
Fake meat
Vegetarian smoked sausages, vegetarian schnitzels, bleeding vegan burgers, vegetarian chicken pieces or other meat substitutes. If you don’t want to eat meat, which is absolutely great, then don’t pretend otherwise either—make a tasty dish with other products.
Fake everything
The same goes for courgette spaghetti, cauliflower couscous and cauliflower pizza crust. Pure is the most important word for 2021. Everything on our plates should be recognizable, because we’re leaving the era of fake news behind us.
Concepts
If we hear the phrase ‘are you familiar with our concept’ one more time in a restaurant, we will never eat out again as punishment. A restaurant’s concept should be simple: you sit down, order food, eat it and pay the bill.
Dining out at home
We did enough of that in 2020. With all the great takeout meals and chefs at home, it was tastier than ever, but how we long to eat out again!
Eating one and a half metres apart
And when we eat in restaurants again… away with the one-and-a-half-metre trend! We want to be able to peek at what people at other tables are eating (and then decide whether we want that dish too—or definitely not). Ordering with QR codes can disappear along with corona too; contact with people is part of the hospitality industry. And while we’re on the subject: eating in shifts can leave along with corona too. We have to rush all week already; when we’re out, we want to relax and go with the flow, without feeling rushed for the next shift.
Dalgona coffee
Yes, we reported on Dalgona coffee so you would stay up to date with what’s happening in the culinary world. But let’s be honest: instant coffee with 4 tablespoons of sugar is actually a really stupid idea, isn’t it?
Shared dining
We no longer want to eat from the same plate together. We’re not at summer camp! We just want our own plate of food that we ordered ourselves again. Tough luck for all the restaurants that want to make a profit from the fear that you’ll get far too little if you have to share.
Soufflé pancakes
Made for the gram and made big by the gram, but nobody is waiting for this fried air. Bad for your body, especially when you also throw sweet toppings on top of this inflated nonsense.
Instagrammable food
That automatically brings us to the next point: food is meant to ensure you get nutrients, not to be photographed as attractively as possible. Next year we’ll enjoy our food again, and the phone can stay in your pocket. Bad for the gram, but very good for your company and the chef in question.
You can unlearn fermenting
We used to call fermenting rotting, but suddenly we’re being flooded with kefir, kombucha, kimchi and other fermented bites and drinks. Because it’s supposedly healthy, but that has never been scientifically proven. Fresh is the new rotten!
Read also:
