The year in food trends
FoodTok celebrities
Sure, chef Gordon Ramsay has amassed 30 million TikTok followers. But New Jersey teenager Eitan Bernath has millions of online fans, too. Bernath led an army of home cooks, many equipped with little more than a smartphone and a cheap ring lamp, who catapulted to fame in 2021 by posting cooking tips on the micro-form video app. The always upbeat Bernath accumulated more than 3 million social media followers before he turned 19, and had his own studio kitchen and staff before he debuted this year as the chief culinary contributor on Drew Barrymore’s syndicated talk show. Polish doesn’t matter on TikTok. Many of the most popular cooking clips play like someone who’s cooking while on Zoom, and the instructions don’t intimidate kitchen novices. “If you look at the primary people in traditional food media, they’re all classically trained or restaurant chefs,” Bernath told The New York Times. “What TikTok has done is just more relatable. The feedback I hear all the time is,
‘If this 18-year-old Eitan can cook this so effortlessly, then I can, too.”
FoodTok recipes
On TikTok, a good recipe can become a phenomenon in its own right. In January, while much of the country was still locked down, a simple recipe for baked pasta with tomatoes and feta cheese took off like a SpaceX rocket. By late February, the hashtag #fetapasta had more than 600 million views. Grocery stores reported feta shortages, forcing producers such as Rhode Island’s Narragansett Creamery to dramatically increase production. Later in the year, Emily Mariko, then a minor-league lifestyle influencer in California’s Bay Area, rose to star status on the interest created by her simple idea about how to rewarm rice and salmon and create a rice bowl featuring kewpie mayo and Sriracha. On Instacart, the online grocery site, orders for salmon quickly doubled.
Other recipes that went viral this year: birria tacos, “corn ribs,” and chips made from air-fried pasta.
Pandemic pop-ups change the game
TikTok wasn’t the only app changing how we eat. Chefs who were idled by the pandemic’s many restaurant shutdowns turned to Instagram to post pretty pictures of food that they started making and selling from home. Lauren Tran, a former pastry chef at New York City’s Gramercy Tavern, found an enduring audience for her VietnameseFrench pastries, which she sold as Bánh by Lauren. When she offered her pandan coconut chiffon cake at Thanksgiving, the run sold out in just 60 seconds. In Los Angeles, Jihee Kim was part of a wave of chefs who started home businesses. She posted menus for banchan—Korean side dishes—to be delivered at preset parking lot drops, and enjoyed so much success that she plans to create a brick-and-mortar version of her concept, Perilla, in 2022. Though pop-ups can be labor intensive and often operate in a legal gray area, many chefs cherish the autonomy. Jessica Quinn, co-owner of Brooklyn-based Dacha 46, is one of them. “If we had the option to go back tomorrow to working at someone else’s restaurant, that would be a really hard pill to swallow,” she told Eater.com.
‘Functional’ drinking
Coca Cola? No way. Energy drinks? Too passé. The action today is in so-called functional beverages that offer alternatives to alcohol. Boosted by the rethinking about booze that many people did during their pandemic downtime, sales of nonalcoholic beverages grew by 33 percent in 2021, with sales of nonalcoholic spirits more than doubling. Aplós, the first hemp-infused nonalcoholic spirit, marketed itself as a healthier way to get buzzed while socializing. Ghia, a sophisticated new nonalcoholic aperitivo, won praise simply because it tastes good. The products that most perfectly blended these trends promised to be healthy pathways to enhanced mental clarity or well-being. Kin Euphorics, which added model Bella Hadid as a nominal cofounder, blends nootropics and adaptogens in carbonated adult beverages that alternately promise “social energy” and “inner peace” and start at $7.50 per small can.
Starry snacking
“Welcome to the era of the celebrity Happy Meal,” said Anna Kambhampaty and Julie Creswell in The New York Times. Virtually every major fast-food chain has suddenly become eager to promote meals or menu items curated by their famous fans. McDonald’s took the lead with meals endorsed by the likes of the K-pop superstars BTS, rapper Saweetie, and R&B diva Mariah Carey. The Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons teamed with Justin Bieber for a signature line of their “Timbits” bite-size doughnut holes, christened Timbiebs.
Bieber’s doughnuts
Customers behaving badly
Not everyone was grateful when indoor dining finally returned this spring in many parts of the country. Customer rudeness ran rampant as restaurateurs wrestled with staffing shortages and supply chain challenges. The friction between patrons and servers grew so intense that one farmto-table Cape Cod restaurant shut down in July for what the owners called “a day of kindness.” But it wasn’t all ugliness. Tammy Stirk Ramsey, a restaurant hostess in York Beach, Maine, shared with her local paper a heartfelt note of apology written to her by an anonymous customer who’d yelled at her when his party couldn’t be seated on a busy summer weekend. He also enclosed $100 in cash.
1 Newport, R.I. Architect Richard Morris Hunt designed “Hilltop” in 1870, blending styles to evoke a baronial estate. The five-bedroom house features Moorish arches, carved doors, stainedglass windows, a tiger maple–and-oak staircase, oak tinder beams and joists, window seats, stone and carved-wood fireplaces, a tiled Moroccan oven, and stone loggias. The 3-acre lot near downtown Newport is landscaped with lawns, shrubs, specimen trees, and daffodil beds. $2,999,000. Jose Aguon, Gustave White/Sotheby’s International Realty, (401) 263-4168. Status: Sold
5 Hartland, Wis. The Aperture House has 16-foot sliding glass doors on every level with expansive views of Moose Lake. Designed by Vetter-Denk architects, the 2002 three-bedroom home was completely rebuilt in 2020 and features a chef’s kitchen with butcher-block counters and a large pantry wall; three custom-tiled bathrooms; and radiant concrete floors. The half-acre lot includes a covered deck, patios, oversize garage, and access to the lake. $1,350,000. Kristin Prange Kessler, First Weber/Luxury Portfolio Intl., (262) 3379277. Status: Sold