Maybe I'm just too bohemian or just have no class, but the dog slobber on my food is just UGLY.

Following the picture on the "restaurant preciousness" link is a plate that is simply stupid to pay anything for.

While I enjoy watching Iron Chef and the "wild' things they do with food, I am always brought back to the thought - just because you can, doesn't mean you have to.

Interesting to watch it- no interest in eating it.

I wholeheartedly agree with deconstruction being on the list. Isn't that what restaurants pay chefs for- to construct plates of food?

A few of mine:
The 'baby vegetable' trend was getting out of hand for a while but it seems that it's subsided some. Not that baby vegetables are bad, it's just that I don't want you to justify a $36 entree price because you're using expensive baby cauliflower instead of the grown up variety that tastes almost exactly the same.

Seems like restaurant names are getting shorter, which is more amusing than annoying. Before restaurants would describe what they were in their name- "Bill's Steakhouse", "Stallion Bar & Grill", etc.... Now they're whittled down to one word, one syllable names like "Blue" and "Posh" that tell us nothing about the place. Pretty soon we will have restaurants opening up called "K" and "4".

Foam and molecular gastronomy.

I have a question about baby vegetables. Are we expected to eat the green ends of the baby carrots? I'm seriously wondering cause they are always on there. BTW, I like the baby veggie thing myself, they are much more tender usually than their big counterparts.

Deconstruction and foam definitely get on my nerves but not always. Some chefs just have the talent and the je ne ce quoi to pull it all together. I think Gastro-pub gets on my nerves more.

Lee,

Stay away from the new Vietnamese restaurant, K9.

My least favorite restaurant trend? Noise. Obviously, there are those who believe that stamped metal ceilings, bare brick walls and a total absence of fabric is energizing. Owners hear the din and assume that their patrons are having a glorious time. What they are actually doing is trying to hold a conversation between mouthfuls, which used to be a pretty popular pastime.

From the article: "Then there were those who, like It Boy and New York chef David Chang ..."

"It Boy?" Am I supposed to understand that? What am I not paying attention to?

You've heard of It Girls, right? He's an It Boy. EL

The 'cupcake only' bakery/restaurant. I mean really, how much innovation can one muster to sustain itself for years to come?

MAG - I totally agree with the noise factor.

Another vote with MAG about the noise (raising hand and voice simultaneously).

Just a couple of weeks ago we offered to take a friend to Salt, but she said, "No, it's almost as noisy as Petit Louis." (Although neither place seems to be suffering ...)

rusty- that was funny! a vietnamese restaurant named K9, I wonder if the chef uses the cookbook, "101 ways to wok your dog".

Rusty and barkeep77 - That reminds me of the time where I was walking behind a chinese take out, and heard a dog barking. I asked the person I was with if they think that is the chef's dog or the chef's special...

Canon,
I, like you, was puzzled by the "It Boy" reference.
I have a book titled "A Boy Called It". It is the first in a trilogy of non-fiction about a boy who was locked in a cage for a good portion of his life. He was practically starved to death.
That is who/what I thought of when I saw the reference.

youre all troubled by the "it boy" because you dont know that david chang has multiple restaurants in manhattan that are pure gold, like most things he touches right now.

The 'cupcake only' bakery/restaurant.

Driving down Boston Street yesterday, we passed Cake Love ("Cakes From Scratch") where Happy Hour is advertised, (didn't get the specifics since my request to Stop! was ignored) which raises the question: Isn't any hour during which one eats cake a Happy Hour?

Foam=yuck. Reminds me of cat sick. No thanks. I'm glad I'm not the only person who does not get this.

Eve -- not if they are Cake Love cakes.

I'm not enjoying the casual racism in the comments here.

Josh, is it lonely up there on your pedestal?

Anyway, is the foam trend still out there? It seems to me that technique went from innovative to tired in about three month span. It is such a joke now, that I'm not sure where it is being used.

Is it really so crazy to call out the "ASIAN PEOPLE ALL EAT DOGS!!!" thing? I didn't think that put me up on a pedestal.

Josh, it would have helped if you'd said just what you were calling out. I went back, closely read the thread, and came up with 3 small things that could have been construed as racist, none of them the dog comment (some Asians do eat dog, as have some Anglos, trying to get to the South Pole and such).

I'm usually pretty quick to pull the trigger, but if you are calling someone out, you should say what and why. There is so much casual every day racism that it can help to confine call outs to slightly more egregious offenses.

Well, as long as Lissa didn't find anything...

Jay C. nice to see you fancy yourself a coffee guy.

Okay, since I am obviously one of the commenters, I do apologize for my unintended offensive remark. I would hope that most visitors to this blog know that I would never purposely attempt to disrespect or slander anyone or anything...Oh, and I do believe she prefers "Elizabeth" over "Liz".

That's OK. Jay C.'s comments mysteriously disappear now that I've asked him not to post here anymore. :-) EL

Not to worry, Trixie. Some folks might have had a little too much magnesium, I guess.

reading about bad trends somehow makes me look more kindly upon my mother's frequent comment during the early years of her being the head chef at a decent bmore restaurant, "the customer is always wrong." my dad always refers to things as "fru fru" whatever that means, but i think it applies to many of the worst trends. i like my brother's descriptor that came to mind reading this, "gucci" it boils down to this for me: you can have class or do something pretty or inventive with food, but its WHAT WE EAT TO LIVE so if you don't keep it real WTF
check out the new blog i am helping my mom to make, hopefully we can avoid any worst list stuff
http://blackolivecuisine.tumblr.com/

Andreas,

How is the lunch spot/catering service in the Frederick Douglass Museum working out? I love that project and the motivation behind it.

Maybe we can all agree to make fun of the Swiss instead:

"According to the November 21, 1996, edition of the Rheintaler Bote, a Swiss newspaper covering the Rhine Valley area, the rural Swiss cantons of Appenzell and St. Gallen are known to have had a tradition of eating dogs, curing dog meat into jerky and sausages, as well as using the lard for medicinal purposes. Dog sausage and smoked dog jerky remains a staple in the Swiss cantons of St. Gallen and Appenzell, where one farmer was quoted in a regional weekly newspaper as saying that 'meat from dogs is the healthiest of all. It has shorter fibres than cow meat, has no hormones like veal, no antibiotics like pork.'"

You just can't trust those neutral, socialized-medicine-loving, dog-eating, aplhorn players.

I'm offended.

Success!

Heidi was not from Appenzell or St. Gallen, if memory serves.

I suspect there has been more than one Heidi in Switzerland.

Swiss carnivores!

Swiss carnivores!