Food goes retro
I’m a member of the IACP, the International Association of Culinary Professionals, so I’m fortunate to have a network of people from Sydney to LA and from Mexico to Capetown to tap into when I need to find out what’s happening.
In Europe, Spain is leading the avant-garde food movement with Ferran Adria of El Bulli and his acolytes pushing the culinary boundaries. His influence is growing among chefs like Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck in the UK.
The Slow Food Movement continues to gather momentum worldwide. Retro food is back so we’re seeing favourites from the 1970s on many trendy restaurant menus - prawn cocktail, chicken Maryland, scampi, steak with béarnaise, even trifle - but usually with a twist.
Belly of pork and offal are everywhere. I ate beef cheek and meltingly tender belly of pork at the ultra hip Gray Café in the Time Warner building in New York recently. It was fatter than anything even I would dare serve here and was completely delicious.
Cherry Ripe from Melbourne tells me that Wagyu beef is on every menu in Australia. Translated literally, “Wa” means Japanese, and “gyu” means cattle. The meat is deliciously marbled with fat. Wagyu is not one breed but a mix of four. It costs 150 Australian dollars a kilo (as opposed to 35 for pure bred Angus). After a decade of being encouraged to think lean, chefs are in revolt.
Better still, research is on their side. It now appears that while external meat fat is largely saturated, the internal, intramuscular fat is proportionately much more mono-unsaturated.
As much as 50% of the marbling in Wagyu beef is comprised of oleic acid, a mono-unsaturated fat. This helps explain the meat’s perceived greater “juiciness.”
Retro is also all the rage in Australia, Restaurants on Brunswick Street in Melbourne’s Fitzroy are famous for their bohemian food - they serve 2,200 of their “retro brekkies” a week, consisting of bacon, mushrooms, tomato and poached egg on toast with hollandaise sauce.
Street foods are cropping up in restaurants - satés, dosas, grilled panini sandwiches. Spanish food continues to grow in popularity, especially bocadillos and tapas. New Yorkers like small bites. Cheese, particularly farmhouse cheese, which most Americans would scarcely have let past their lips a few years ago, is now a cult food. Picholine Restaurant, Rob Kaufelt at Murray’s Cheese Shop and Steve Jenkins at Fairway are leading the way.
Earlier this year, April Bloomfield, formerly of the River Café, opened New York’s first gastro pub in Greenwich Village which has been a huge hit. New York chefs and foodies are also talking about Fergus Henderson, whose London restaurant, St John, serves everything from the nose to the tail to committed foodies. This is a fascinating turnaround for a country like the US, where it is rare for people to eat variety meats.
California used to set the food trends in the US, but according to Mary Risley of Tante Marie’s cooking school in San Francisco, since the dot com bust and 9/11, West Coast foodies now want to go to neighbourhood restaurants or local French brasseries where they can walk to eat. Steak, pan-grilled fish and, more recently, marrow bones with parsley salad rate highly - a definite Fergus Henderson influence.
Chefs have to be more conscious of where food is coming from and where it’s grown, Mary Risley says. Grass-fed beef is a must (grain-fed gets the thumbs down from serious chefs and foodies alike).
London is really on the cutting edge of the global food scene. Some of the very best food is in gastro pubs like The Eagle and Anchor and Hope, and Borough Market is a mecca for foodies.
Nostalgia for forgotten flavours and skills is also big. Keeping a few chickens in your garden is the fastest growing hobby in the UK. Not only that, but chefs on this side of the world are following the US and hiring foragers so they can incorporate wild foods into their menus.
