The biggest dining trends of 2025, from pop-ups and chef collabs to traditional Irish produce
Joe McNamee: 'The aforementioned fiscal pressures, on both hospitality and its customers, continue to impact on dining. The soaring price of beef has seen steak vanish from many menus, some restaurants avoiding beef altogether.'
A personal bugbear of years has been the often mindless usage of certain premium ingredients, as if luxury cachet alone is sufficient to elevate a dish with little thought given to just how well it works with other components. Good caviar is utterly delicious, on its own or with other comparatively bland textures and flavours serving the star of the show, such as the classic pairing with sour cream and blinis.
This year, however, it was turning up everywhere like some class of masticatory masonic signifier of exclusivity, most commonly to cap a dish that often didn’t need it or even overwhelmed it entirely. Upmarket crisps, a caviar ‘spoon’ I encountered too often this year are pointless; crunchy texture distracts from the pleasing ‘pop’ and salty lab-produced flavours completely distort caviar’s subtle complexity of flavour.
Either go all out and serve the stuff on its own at accordingly hefty prices, shrugging off any accusations of elitism, or employ a bit of culinary creativity to conjure up an innovative alternative.
Truffle shavings were everywhere, too, sometimes several times in a single meal as an afterthought grace note. One of nature’s finest flavour bombs, give it more room to really strut its stuff.
The use of synthetic truffle oil should be criminalised. Finally, gold leaf is used solely for aesthetic reasons. In a year when hospitality is running to stand still in the face of rising costs and the general dining public is doing something similar, it came across as little other than crass and egregious excess.
The aforementioned fiscal pressures, on both hospitality and its customers, continue to impact on dining. The soaring price of beef has seen steak vanish from many menus, some restaurants avoiding beef altogether.
Mind you, I often prefer the alternative, cheaper cuts, brilliantly cooked.
For economic reasons, Irish menus in general have become much tighter, often reduced to just three or four dishes per course, even the finest of fine dining, yet my experience of this new found brevity has been entirely positive, seeing a new clarity of focus from the kitchen.
We lingered so long in Soul, on Cork’s Washington St, that tables around us were turned twice, even thrice, yet we were seemingly the only table to order a full bottle of wine.
The in-house mark-up on the wholesale price of wine is a crucial part of any restaurant business plan but sales in hospitality are sliding ever downwards.
Reduced consumer spending power is certainly a big factor but there is also a general decline in alcohol consumption amongst younger diners for health reasons or taste preferences — cocktails, alcoholic and non-alcoholic, are very much on the rise. Whichever way you pour it, the glass is increasingly half empty for hospitality bean counters.
The amount of pop-ups and chef collabs ramped up like never before, now very much part of the annual culinary calendar. Cork on a Fork food festival saw over 20 chefs of MacCurtain St and its environs knock it out of the park at the Long Table dinner, while Aisling Moore (Goldie), Harrison Sharpe (Elbow Lane) and Pam Kelly (Farmgate) excelled in an after-hours dinner served around the fountain in the English Market.
Robbie Krawczyk and Mickael Viljanen both cooked at the Park Kenmare Hotel while Sheen Falls Lodge Executive Chef Mark Treacy collaborated with Michelin-starred Andrew Walsh (Cure, Singapore) and Vincent Crepel (late of Terre, Castlemartyr).
Once upon a time in your youth, you drank porter and ate chips when the pub or nightclub closed and only saw the inside of a restaurant on a tentative first date. Then the Masterchef generation grew up watching TV chefs from childhood and more than a few star chefs of Irish fine dining kitchens began their own culinary journeys in such fashion.
We now have the TikTok generation who watch food content on their phones, often as not from random amateurs as from professional cooks, and The TikTok kitchen is global, blurring various world cuisines into a homegenised whole requiring little skill and forever in pursuit of the latest hot new flavour or dish.
Those TikTokkers too are growing up and dining out, their preferences informed by this universal culinary Esperanto. Accordingly, online favourites are cropping up on casual dining menus all around the country.
This year that equated to a huge rise in tacos, Mac-and-cheese and croquettes and themed casual dining in general.
Conversely, many Irish restaurants revisited traditional Irish ingredients and produce with a renewed focus and creative approach. Top of the list was beets, requiring more time and effort to truly mine their magic than is seen in transient TikTok cooking.
This year, I rarely bypassed an available beet dish, including a smashing little number with whipped goat’s cheese, chive oil and fresh dill at Goodhood back in March — and Goodhood is a pizza restaurant!
Then there were those who took the Myrtle Allen approach of leaving finest produce to do its own heavy lifting with as little interference as possible from the kitchen. That takes courage, putting a restaurant in the line of fire of the Trip Advisor brigade who insist they could get the same ingredients in Aldi and cook it just as well at home for a fraction of the price.
In Farmgate Lismore, that meant the only ‘cooking’ in a dish of burrata and heirloom tomato was whizzing up basil pesto though plenty of Irish restaurants could take lessons in the sublime sourcing of superlative produce to serve up a dish as delicious.
Finally, oysters. Ten years ago, I consulted with an Irish oyster producer who shipped tons of exquisite Irish oysters abroad each year, including to France, and didn’t sell a single oyster in Ireland. We don’t eat them, he said. This year, raw oysters were everywhere, from casual stalls right up to fine dining.
2025 has been a chaotic year, riddled with fear and uncertainty though the recession or even depression so many commentators feel is imminent has yet to arrive. You’d be forgiven for thinking it already has because the impact of ongoing stress on ordinary citizens has seen the development of a what is being called a ‘vibe-cession’, with consumers acting and spending like a real recession is already in place.
In tough times, we all reach for the comfort blanket of familiarity and I saw a lot of that on this year’s menus, traditional old comforters, both savoury and sweet.
Pick of the bunch was a combo of familiar comfort and canny creativity at Kenmare’s Lagom with playful, joyous takes on old school favourites: Rhubarb ‘iceberger’, a divine ice cream sandwich between crisp gingerbread biscuits, topped with champagne marinated rhubarb; and warm cherry Bakewell tartlet of sweet raspberry and almond in a cracking pastry shell with Longueville Apple Brandy ice cream, bringing adult sophistication to a childhood favourite.
