Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

So can someone do a list of the 10 worst catering trends? #1 Everything as a lolly pop. I believe David Burke started this with his cheese cake lollly pops.

When are we going to find a replacement for soup sips?

I agree wholeheartedly with the critique of "foam." WTF???? I ordered only one dish in my life that had "foam" on it, and it looked like the chef (or maybe the waitperson) spat on my dish. It was hideous. I hope this trend dies as quickly as "vanilla lobster."

Chef as Media Whore - and who did they throw up as the photo? Rocco DiSpirito. This dude was a great cook and that ONE BLUNDER he committed called "The Restaurant" cost him about 5 years of productivity. After The Restaurant, I wouldn't pay to watch DiSpirito boil an egg. I'm sorry to say restaurant "reality" shows have not improved much. It's still drama, insults, distractions - with little attention to what the contestant is actually cooking.

Communal tables don't bother me - try getting into Joe's Shanghai in Chinatown at high lunch hour and see if you don't relent and sit at a communal table.

I think "knee-jerk" reviews are only a small problem, compared to a) inflatedly positive reviews written by the restaurant owner's brother-in-law and b) exaggeratedly horrible reviews written by someone who couldn't get a timely reservation - or worse - someone who has NEVER dined at the establishment whose food he or she is reviewing.

LBNL, the first category "onion blossoms," and the "proudly obnoxious" categories could be combined. It's all about vulgar amounts of fat and calories - and pokes fun at gluttons who go in for this sort of thing.

BangieB, you're totally right about that. Isn't it sad that the poorer, working classes of our country are forced to subsist on such unhealthy food because of cost. Fresh, whole food should be available to everyone at a price which makes it reasonable. But that whopper is still disgusting.

Regarding community tables... they have their place. I don't want to go to a sit down restaraunt and eat at a communal table. Hell, I don't want to go to most places and sit at a communal table, and certainly not one that seats 20 people on each side. A deli is a reasonable spot for a communal table, maybe 6-8 poeple deep. Anything more is absurd.

I find molecular gastronomy to be kinda gimicky. It's good and fun here and there, but not something I'd actively pursue more than once or twice a year.

foams are just horrible. Give me a sauce over bubbles any day.

In another threat I said deconstructed everything was my pet peeve.

I'm not sure if bloomin' onion is really a trend though

I find it ironic that the paper that (rightfully) swoons over all things Rick Bayless would complain about celebrity chefs. I love the Trib, though I admit to having worked for a number of years at the Sun Times. But I think this particular gripe is more indicative of the Second City mentality: "We hate celebrity chefs...EXCEPT FOR OUR OWN, of course."

Meat guy,

I would never complain about packaged food products using the same ingredients as MG chefs.

Transglutaminase, Sodium citrate, Calcium Chloride, Xanthan, Gelatin, Sodium alginate, and Lecithin all have their place.

And sure, the industry figured out the uses of a lot of those things (but not all) before hand. What exactly is the problem with that? Just because a technique was invented by science doesn't mean it's evil. Brining poultry and pork became popular because of the enhanced meat that the big companies were selling. Does that mean I should just buy the enhanced Butterball instead of brining my own bird? Just because xanthan is used to make a stable emulsion in that horrible bottle of Italian dressing I can't use it to make my home made dressing stable?

Sous Vide was invented for institutional cooking in France, but that doesn't mean that it can't make the tastiest steaks and duck confit I've ever had.

I'm sure cooking potatoes in a water bath to set their starch was invented by the instant mashed potato producers, but that doesn't make my potatoes inferior when I attempt it.

If we set our limits as not doing anything that any industrial producer has done before, our options are going to get pretty limited quickly.

Molecular Gastronomy, Deconstruction and $40 entrees can all be great if you get them in the right place, done by the true masters of the craft.

What's dangerous is any of these things in the hands of undertrained chefs/cooks/restauranteurs looking to cash in on a trend.

Most food bloggers / writers / cooks know the difference between a place like El Bulli or Alinea and inexperienced chefs just throwing foams and dusts on every plate so they can double the prices.

Or the difference between a $50 steak thats really worth it and some mediocre hotel restaurant just turning & burning and raking in the dough.

The problem is that most people don't know the difference, and these places give a bad name to molecular gastronomy, fine dining, and professional cooking in general.

I've eaten at Fat Duck (no, I wasn't paying) and some of it is brilliant and some is nonsense. The chips...I would die for those chips. Dried in a special machine to make them extra-crispy, as we all know chips should be. The turbot was amazing, packed with flavour which the sauces added to rather than masked. I didn't like all the nonsense of the various amuse-bouchee or the silly desserts. Do I want snails in my ice cream? No. No I do not. I don't want snails in my anything, to be honest.

What I find intriguing (scratch that, RIDICULOUS!) about the attitude toward molecular gastronomy is that when I design a packaged food product using the same ingredients these chefs use, it triggers the rants about additives in food. Don't use them in a $2 can of soup, but as an item in a $200 + tasting menu its good eats. It makes no sense to me.

Molecular Gastronomy is Better living through chemistry, to steal an old tag line. The things you see in those restaurants used to be the parlor tricks ingredient companies used to trigger developers of Industrial food products to try their products, only with more trendy ingredients. When I went to Alinea, I could remember which company showed me similar items way back in the 70's. Don't tell me these guys are so creative, good marketers maybe, but they are standing on the shoulders of giants (Dow, Monsanto, FMC corporation etc (good thing they are international so they fit into the buy locally trend)) to succeed in their niche. Sous vide was a food industry practice before chefs made individual entrees using the technology, industrial processors made the equipment reliable and affordable for chefs to use.

@ simon, is there a difference?

This may not be the worst food I ever had but it's a good story. When I was a kid, my grandmother made Thanksgiving dinner. She always has been a very tidy housekeeper. She took extra care about making sure there was never a time when she did not have plenty of mothballs in all her closets. I love her but her house always smells of that awful mothball stench. (She'll be 90 next month!) Where did she stash the extra loaves of bread she bought a few days early for the stuffing? You guessed it. The hall closet. Ah, the aroma and taste of sage, onion and mothball............