Surprise food trends from 2023
The past 12 months have brought their share of surprising food trends, from the innovative to the odd to the downright sad. Emily Brookes highlights the most eyebrow-raising trends of the year.
Canned margaritas
Honestly, I’m not sure what I was expecting to happen next in the canned drinks category after Pals stormed in and rebranded RTDs for the middle-aged, paving the way for any number of vodka, gin and hard seltzer premixes in a can, but it wasn’t this: the tequila and triple sec cocktail traditionally served in a salt-rimmed glass, with plenty of slushy ice.
It shouldn’t work, but apparently it does; canned margaritas have stormed into the Kiwi drinks market, and you will be seeing them everywhere this summer (a recent taste test by Ensemble, a sister brand to the Sunday Star-Times, found the Chilli Sparkling Margarita from local drinks brand Alba to be the best of the bunch).
Food waste ice cream
Love ice cream, hate food waste? Well, 2023 really was your year. The biggest development was EatKinda’s expansion into Countdown (soon to be Woolworths) supermarkets – the start-up’s strawberry, chocolate and mint choc chip ice creams are so delicious you’d never know they are made from unsellable cauliflower destined for landfill; they’re available in 90 stores nationwide.
Then, in what it claimed was a world first, Auckland’s Island Gelato developed a brulee-flavoured gelato made from waste kūmara – and has promised other bases will follow, including avocado, banana, grapefruit and stone fruit.
Decaf coffee
After decades of exile in the tragically unhip pile, a combination of health-consciousness and coffee’s ascension as a complex artisanal product have meant that finally, it’s perfectly acceptable to drink coffee without caffeine.
Almost all New Zealand’s boutique coffee brands make at least one decaf, and baristas from all over the country have told me this year that if decaf is what allows you to enjoy the flavours of coffee, it’s all good.
Girl Dinner
Another year, another questionable TikTok-driven food trend. You’ve probably had a Girl Dinner before, whether or not you are, or have ever been, a girl and regardless of whether you ate it for dinner. Growing up, my household called this “a little plate of things”; I’ve also heard it referred to as a “mish-mash supper” or “picky bits”.
Whatever you call it, a Girl Dinner is not a meal but a collection of odd-and-end foods that you happen to have in the kitchen – anything from fresh fruit and vegetables to potato chips, cold cuts, olives or even portions of leftovers – put on a plate and consumed in lieu of a meal.
This year, the Girl Dinner trend was on the receiving end of both ridicule and wrath, as nutritionists and psychologists have warned it is nutritionally unbalanced and perpetuates a toxic diet culture. Nonetheless, videos tagged #girldinner have been shared over and over.
Itameshi
It’s been a while since fusion food was really a thing, with more focus over the last few years on replicating authentic, often micro, international cuisines – think birria tacos, or Korean fried chicken.
But fusion is back in a big way with Itameshi, an amalgamation of Italian and Japanese cuisines that’s taking off in the US in a big way and has made its first inroads into New Zealand with Ponsonby’s new Itameshi restaurant.
Nostalgic baking
On the other hand, after several years of hybrid Frankenbaking – cronuts, suprêmes, cretzels, what have you – the popular baked goods of 2023 harkened back to simpler times.
In a world full of hardship and uncertainty, it seems we’ve been looking to the comfort foods of yore for a nostalgic lift. That’s perhaps best illustrated by the craze around the custard slice from Auckland bakery chain Daily Bread, which saw customers lining up before the doors opened, and the admittedly bougie take on this retro classic selling out not long after.
Home pizza ovens
Post pandemic lockdowns, we’ve all learned the value of being able to cook a curry-house-worthy korma at home, but this “fakeaways” trend goes several steps beyond.
The portable home pizza ovens that have proliferated on the NZ market this year give a real woodfired taste because they are actual wood burners designed for use on your deck. Led by the internet-famous Ooni, which set up shop in New Zealand this year, there are now a number of local and international brands on the market, and while few of them will give you change for a grand (some are well over that price) they are lots of fun to use.
WaterTok
As the name suggests, this is another TikTok trend and this one involves - wait for it – drinking water.
Unlike Girl Dinner, which has been usurped by the weight-loss movement, this one began with it, and specifically, how those trying to lose weight could up their water intake.
The thing about water, you see, is that it’s boring and flavourless, so these TikTokkers decided to take something that comes free from the tap and jazz it up at not insignificant expense.
In New Zealand we lack the availability of sugar-free flavoured syrups to make viral drinks like “Birthday Cake Water”, “Little Mermaid Water” or “Unicorn Water”, but if you really want to get in on this multimillion-view trend you could always use cordial. Or Raro.
Restaurant closures
A sad trend, this one, but even the most casual of observers won’t have failed to notice that a number of top Kiwi restaurants – restaurants with Cuisine hats, even international accolades, screeds of positive reviews and oodles of public goodwill – have closed this year.
Among the more eye-popping are Pasture, Cotto and Inca Newmarket in Auckland, Wellington’s Shepherd and Field & Green, Hali in Christchurch, and nationwide sandwich shop chain Wishbone.
The effects of Covid, closed borders and a cost of living crisis continue to batter New Zealand’s hospitality industry – and they will continue to do so into 2024.
it with the very best of the international imports. If these same scripts, the same quality of performances and the same deft direction had arrived here from Aussie, the UK or the USA, then After the Party would still have been a hit on our screens.
But, of course that could never happen. All great TV needs to convey something of the landscape and the character of the place it is happening in, and After the Party, somehow, had Wellington’s only-partly-tamed and mostly quite bonkers south coast flowing through its veins.
After the Party is a domestic thriller, a bleak comedy and hell of a piece of writing, perfectly brought to life. A US or a UK remake seems quite possible, but I hope they get to see the original too.
Last Stop Larrimah (Netflix)
Ever since the first season of Tiger King helped us all make it through the first month of lockdown in 2020, the world has been on the look-out for another truelife tale of poor behaviour, committed by indelible characters under the influence of drugs and alcohol, in a rural small-town straight out of a David Lynch fever dream. And with Last Stop Larrimah, it finally arrived.
Last Stop Larrimah was originally a feature film. But Netflix chopped it into a short series and dropped it on an unsuspecting public back in October. The show is a revisit of a missing persons case from Australia, in which a local trouble-maker has vanished from the town of Larrimah, population 11... and one enormous crocodile.
Did Paddy finish up in the croc? Or was he dismembered and baked into one of Fran’s pies? These unusual suspects aren’t telling, even if they won’t stop talking. Last Stop Larrimah was beyond satire or parody. You couldn’t write it.
Slow Horses (Season 3, Apple TV+)
Season 3 of Slow Horses picked up exactly where we wanted it to, with Gary Oldman’s epically world-weary and biblically flatulent Jackson Lamb apparently still snoozing at his desk while the world goes to hell around him – and the gang of misfits he is unwillingly in charge of at Slough House.
Slough is the place where MI5 agents who have disgraced themselves are sent to either work their way back into a decent job, or live out careers far away from any place they can do any harm.
As the show has progressed across three seasons, we have maybe begun to suspect that these rejects and their whisky-sodden boss might have a bigger part to play in the spy-game than they realise.
Slow Horses is a comedic, droll, sometimes heartbreaking and always beautifully written show. Bravo.