New courses
Pandemic-popular gourmet hot dogs and other things we are likely to see more of.
How will we eat in 2021? How can we know? At this time of year, the food media is busy trotting out year-ahead predictions, tech innovations and consumer habits using industry and supermarket data and trend-watching chefs. But none could foresee a pandemic ravaging the restaurant industry as we knew it, so it’s even more like fumbling in the dark.
The legacy of 2020 will linger in restaurant design and customer habits for years to come. Certainly, our embrace of online ordering will remain, as will interest in cooking at home. We’ll continue to focus on food safety while our interest in where food comes from will be fueled by easier access to local farm supply chains.
We’ll remain aware of the people behind our food orders — the servers, chefs, bartenders, baristas and delivery drivers — not to mention the more than 2.3 million restaurant and bar workers left unemployed. We’ll be more self-sufficient, using newly acquired skills in cooking, fermenting or mixing cocktails. That will impact how we shop and might spur interest in the dinner party, whether that be cooking for quarantine pods or plating fine dining takeout meals at home.
Mixing national predictions with what I’ve seen at the local level, here are a dozen trends I expect to see in 2021:
1. More Technology: You know it’s coming. More ghost kitchens, more apps, more cloud-based food delivery with software sensitive enough to remember preferences about curbside pickup and geo-synced to know your time of arrival. In what feels like a mix of the ghost kitchen and last year’s trend for co-sharing space (think Amuse on Broadway, an evening restaurant inside Saratoga’s Broadway Deli), we’ll see businesses like Why Not Burger in East Greenbush running an evening delivery burger company out of a space that’s a bakery and coffee shop by day.
2. Chef Meal Kits: Taking over where cook-at-home companies left off, restaurants will tap the home-cooking revival with their chefs offering online classes, crafting weekly meal kits and monthly cook-at-home meal subscriptions. Other restaurants, looking to fulfill supplier orders, will provide access to their quality producers like the steaks-at-home program from Black & Blue Steak and Crab in Guilderland.
3. Family Box Dinners To Go: Like meal kits, restaurants are again offering the early lockdown nightly and weekly family-style dinners to go, usually available for pre-order and offered by casual and fine dining restaurants alike. Most are multicourse, reasonably priced for two or four diners, and have an option to add wine or cocktails to go. Many of us are supporting restaurants with at least one takeout night.
4. Cocktails, Bottled and Canned:
I’m sure it’s not just me keeping fingers crossed that the temporary relaxation of liquor laws allowing restaurants and bars to sell pre-mixed and bottled cocktails and entire wine lists will stay beyond the pandemic. Now used to cocktails in the park, you’ll want something to replace the White Claw in your fridge. Locally, look at The Cocktail Club from Albany Distilling Co., which puts orange, black cherry or cucumber melon vodka sodas in cans. And expect more crowlers (32ounce cans to go) from breweries and tasting rooms selling your choice of draft beer, cider and mead. Long live the fourpack.
5. Healthy Cocktails: Millennial and Gen Z interest in low-alcohol drinks continues with functional and adaptogenic cocktails: juices infused with adaptogens (spices, fungi, roots) or relaxing nootropics (supplements like serotonin or CBD) and designed to reduce anxiety, sharpen the mind or boost the immune system. These tasty cocktails are showing up on menus from Plumb Oyster Bar in Troy to Saratoga’s The Brentwood Hotel. Among available online are zero-proof cocktails by Hudson Valley’s Curious Elixirs.
6. Virtual Farm Stands: The shift online was a game changer for farms in 2020 and connected produce with consumers when restaurants closed. Presales helped avoid waste, and small farms like Lovin’ Mama Farm and Edible Uprising paved the way with direct-order virtual farm stands. Several offer weekly farm boxes, a cheaper, hyper-seasonal option. And online farmers markets are sure to continue their virtual presence connecting us to farms, bakers and makers even when they reopen.
7. New Nostalgia: Something about 2020 saw a rise in what was initially dubbed the “New Nostalgia” for TV dinners, fried fair foods and classic 'dogs back in 2016. While we missed our summer fairs and large barbecue cookouts last year, a few new restaurants were busy elevating the humble hot dogs. In Hudson alone, gourmet hot dogs topped the menus at The Maker Lounge, Buttercup and Kitty’s Market.
8. Doughnuts: You don’t have to look hard to see that gourmet or designer doughnuts are taking the lead over super-stuffed cookies. Last year saw Darling Doughnuts (Saratoga), Duck Donuts (Latham) and Cosmic Doughnuts (Kinderhook) arrive on the sticky scene. Clearly we can’t get enough.
9. Self-reliance: After binge-watching Netflix and signing up for online yoga and gym classes, we grew skills in baking, fermenting, even whittling wooden spoons. But some enterprising bartenders, bakers and hospitality staff crafted cottage industries selling bread, pastry dough, pizza, cookies, even fat-washed whiskey. We paid via Venmo, pulled up to unmarked addresses and knew this was a creative way to put cash in pockets.
10. Zoom Classes: Real life has been forever changed by COVID-19, and while we pine for in-person bar nights and busy restaurants, we are turned on and plugged in to virtual entertainment, Zoom parties, tastings and cocktail-making online. Whether it’s Friday night or a celebratory event, we’re signing up for the virtual cooking school at Forno Bistro in Saratoga, Zooming live with Manhattan’s Death & Co. bartenders, or enjoying Sangria and Secrets with European drag queens. In 2021, expect more of the same.
11. Condiments and Spices: All that home cooking raised the stakes in the kitchen. Just look at our sourdough discard pancakes and new relationships with our Instant Pots. Sales of Lao Gan Ma hot chili crisp and chef-made spice blends like seasoned salts from David Chang’s Momofuku flew off the internet. Upstate it was Hot Crispy Oil from John Trimble of the shuttered Albany French restaurant La Serre; truffle salt from Hudson Valley Rockerbox Spices; seasoning samplers from Saratoga Spicery; and a slew of Hudson Valley hot sauces like Poor Devil Pepper Co. and Raw Heat by Hawthorne Valley Farm. Proof we all crave flavor.
12. Community Food: Finally, awareness of unequal access to fresh food in the community will continue to rise and build on initiatives like Feed Albany, which launched at the beginning of the pandemic to feed the many left unemployed by the shutdown and grew, recently reaching 250,000 meals served. Projects like Free Food Fridge Albany and community fridges in Hudson put refrigerators on the street filled by donations from local farms, co-ops and restaurants. We’ll continue to see communities pull together through donations, fundraisers and farm partnerships to get produce to those in need.
Susie Davidson Powell is a British freelance food writer in upstate New York. Follow her on Twitter, @Susiedp