What are the trends of best restaurants of the world in 2017?
While Lithuania votes in the Švyturys-initiated project “30 Best Restaurants 2017”, “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants” were selected in April. New York-based restaurant Eleven Madison Park was selected to top the list. At the same time, a heated discussion has started about this year’s restaurant trends.
Traditions and local character
On the menus of restaurants, like in fashion, certain ingredients come and go, while others will always be included in the restaurants’ dishes. For instance, an overview of the menus of famous restaurants in 2017 shows the domination of exotic products prepared in a traditional, authentic manner.
However, the majority of the world’s restaurants continue to focus on local character and seasonality of products. Increasingly more visitors want to know wherefrom fish, meat or seafood travelled to their table. It is even better if they are told not just the geographic location but a particular farm as well as the conditions under which it was grown and how long.
In addition, there is another striking trend – physics and chemistry used several years ago to transform taste and texture are replaced by the said traditional ways of preparing dishes, such as fermentation, slow boiling, toasting, etc.
Environment-friendliness
In 2017, the preparation of restaurants’ menu focuses a lot on sustainability. Protecting nature, promoting consumers’ responsibility and using their imagination, chefs look for various ways to use the entire animal or plant. This ever-stronger ideology is called from head to tail or from root to leaf.
Another trend popular in the world’s restaurants – vegetable products are prepared like meat or instead of meat. While meat-lovers are offered dishes dominated by vegetable or dairy products. This confirms the phenomenon of healthy eating which has been popular for a number of years already. However, this also promotes a more responsible approach towards the environment.
Multiculturalism
Another striking insight of 2017, when looking at the menus of the world’s best restaurants – migration. This trend is linked, in particular, to the political situation in the Middle East and migration of the region’s population. Currently, Afghan, Syrian and Persian gastronomic culture reaches more parts of the world and becomes an attractive fashion for those looking for new tastes.
By the way, as traditional methods of preparation of dishes become popular again, classical restaurants of the French cuisine also experience a renaissance. For instance, in the after-war United States of America, the French cuisine, which experienced a high boom, was overshadowed for a while by the global gastronomic revolution. Currently, in the same USA, restaurants of the French cuisine experience a renaissance.
“Photogenic” dishes
In fact, the growth of social media has not bypassed gastronomy, and especially the restaurants’ business. According to a last year’s poll by BBC Good Food, as many as 40% of users of social media have uploaded, at least once, a photograph of a dish on to their profile on Facebook or Instagram. This also encourages chefs of restaurants to create dishes as visual as possible, in order to attract new customers.
The environment – less industrial
If we talk about the world’s restaurant trends, we should not leave out the restaurants’ environment. The interior of a place that visitors choose for tasting special dishes is a very important part of the entire experience.
According to Amy Morris, who is the founder of currently one of the most popular design studios The MP Shift in New York, in 2017, Thomas Edison’s light bulbs as well as other details of the industrial interior should gradually lose their popularity in the restaurants’ interiors. This fashion could be replaced by light and somewhat bohemian interiors inspired by the seaside.
Her opinion is reiterated by Michael Dolatowski, creative director of Deft Union studio, who maintains that increasingly more restaurants wish tropical modernism dominated by pastel colours, light space and bohemian furniture. By the way, another obvious trend is plants in restaurants, which is closely related to healthy nutrition, the need for a natural environment and return to nature.
Restaurant trends in Lithuania
Whether these trends will be reflected in this year’s rating list “30 Best Restaurants” will be known very soon. Currently, members of the Good Food Academy visit restaurants and vote for the best assessing food and the environment as well as service and the wine list.
The project “30 Best Restaurants” will be crowned by a ceremony of awards of the best restaurants in Lithuania in 2017 to be held in June. The voting is organised by the Good Food Academy together with the Lithuanian Association of Hotels and Restaurants, the Lithuanian Association of Restaurant Chefs and Confectioners and the magazine Geras Skonis. For a second consecutive year, the project’s initiator is Švyturys.
