Hungry For What’s Next?
From shorter tasting menus to the return of the reservations book, Ben McCormack places an order for the food trends about to be served up near you.
The Future of Fine Dining
Nothing occupies the minds of a certain type of foodie (and chef) more than the future of fine dining. Financial Times critic Tim Hayward recently undertook a grand tour of gastronomic classics – Le Grand Véfour in Paris, Kadeau in Copenhagen and The Ritz in London – before concluding “I can’t rekindle a love of fine dining because I can no longer think of it as a meaningful category.”
Meanwhile, chefs are increasingly turning their back on that totem of fine dining, the tasting menu. At The Pompadour in Edinburgh’s Caledonian Hotel, director Dean Banks has launched an à la carte for the first time in the restaurant’s 100-year history, while chef Michael O’Hare relaunched the 14-course, tasting menu-only Man Behind the Curtain in Leeds as Psycho Sandbar, with both a tasting menu and à la carte.
Yet are tasting menus themselves the problem, or the style of restaurants offering them? Psycho Sandbar closed in October, owing almost £1m, which suggests the issues ran deeper than the style of cooking. “Tasting menus are strong and will be for a long time,” Michelin-starred chef Paul Foster told The Daily Telegraph in August. “But they should be niche, and the right places should be doing them.”
Foster offers a tasting menu of six courses, not 16, a trend echoed by the 2025 Future of Food report from Marriott International. It cites a movement to quality over quantity and shorter, faster experiences as fine-dining trends to watch for the year ahead, in addition to restaurants elevating prices, limiting covers and introducing membership-based access. Sometimes, less is more.
Our daily bread
Is there anything more emblematic of eating in a hotel than ordering a club sandwich? Any old bread simply won’t cut it, however. The Whole Foods Market Trends Council has identified ‘Sourdough Stepped Up’ as one of the The Top 10 Anticipated Food Trends for 2025, thanks to customers who developed a taste for making sourdough during the pandemic but no longer have time to make their own.
But why stop at a sourdough club for your daily bread? Mexico City’s most famous bakery, Panadria Rosetta – the world’s second-most popular independent café, according to a recent Betway survey – recently popped up in New York for three days. On the menu? The endlessly photographed rol de guayaba (guava pastries), washed down with coffee from Danish roasters La Cabra.
Meanwhile, Dominique Ansel, the inventor of the cronut, is opening a new venture next year in Manhattan’s Union Square. Papa d’Amour will be a French/Asian bakery inspired by Ansel’s Taiwanese wife and their two young children which promises to pay homage to Asian baking culture with steamed buns, milk breads and egg tarts. After the cronut achieved world domination, could milk bread be the next big thing in baked goods? With Ansel behind it, it’s likely to be the best thing since… well, sliced bread.
You Are What You (Don’t) Eat
One of the biggest food stories of the past 18 months has been what people are not eating, thanks to the explosion in the use of weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro. Eating less, however, does not mean eating nothing at all, and 2025 will see an increased emphasis on healthy eating when dining out.
Clear labelling for allergens, dietary requirements and calorie content are already commonplace, as are plant-based alternatives to meat. For those meat dishes that remain, “the question is now where meat production makes sense, and which geographical and climatic zones are less suitable,” according to nutritional scientist Hanni Rützler in her annual Food Report. Diners will also expect an added emphasis on the taste, consistency and sensory aspect of meat. In other words, cheap imitations – whether unrealistic meat replacements or poor-quality versions of the real thing – will not be accepted.
As for diners on Ozempic and the like, Mintel’s 2025 Global Food and Drink Trends asserts that ‘the focus will be on food and drinks that help consumers, especially weight-loss drug users who have reduced appetites, get the best nutrition from what they eat with easy-to-understand claims about protein, fibre and vitamin content.’ Expect the rehabilitation of those previously demonised macronutrients, fat and carbohydrate, too. You are what you eat, and for an increasing number of diners, food is now a form of medicine.
OK Computer
Yet if health-conscious diners are prizing the natural, the world of hospitality is embracing the artificial, in the form of AI. Popeyes, the US fried chicken brand, has been successfully testing AI-powered drive-thru restaurants in the UK. During the trial, the technology learned to recommend meal combinations based on a customer’s preferences and explain the ingredients in every product. As more orders are processed in the future, the Popeyes AI will adapt to more difficult questions, while the brand is investigating future developments in Voice AI such as forecasting customers’ orders.
Not everything runs as smoothly, however. McDonald’s the US has ended its AI drive-thru trial following mistakes with customer orders such as bacon being added to ice cream (and not in a Heston Blumenthal way). The shelved technology, which was developed by IBM, employed voice recognition to process orders, but McDonald’s says it remains confident that AI technology will be part of the company’s future.
And no wonder. AI is set to revolutionise everything in hospitality, from forecasting customer numbers by studying historic patterns to offering menu recommendations and creating the menus themselves. Computer says yes.
Get personal
The flipside of this is a desire for a return to an age where restaurants were not governed by screens. Louis, a new Italian-American in Manchester, has banned mobile phone use. “Enjoy the company that you’re with and live in the moment – like people used to,” is how co-founder Drew Jones explains an approach that has proved so successful that a second Louis is opening in London in 2025.
But it’s not just the glow of screens in customers’ hands that is beginning to fade. At 2023 opening Eulalie, a cosy TriBeCa bistro, co-owner Tina Vaughn only takes bookings with a pencil and telephone, with any preferences noted down in a Rolodex for future reference.
Some restaurants have adopted a middle ground. The fine-dining Café Carmellini in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Nomad, and East Village French restaurant Claud, both take online reservations before the details are transcribed into a physical book.
Either way, it’s all about the optics: diners arrive to find their name written by hand, rather than popping up on a screen. “People are almost starving for that human connection,” Eulalie’s Tina Vaughn told Eater New York. As ever, the future of dining has one foot in the past.
Ben McCormack is a London-based journalist who writes about food and drink for titles including The Daily Telegraph, The London Standard and Wallpaper*. Connect with Ben on Instagram at @mrbenmccormack or connect with him on LinkedIn.com
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