In looking ahead to the coming year, I’m thinking back on my country-wide travels over the last 12 months and the cuisines, ingredients, and design elements that most stood out as compelling heralds of current restaurant trends. Glancing over the list (presented here in no particular order), I see a wonderful hodgepodge quality to culinary undercurrents: favorites from the past re-emerging, overdue innovations finally appearing, and some fresh variations in pursuit of our never-ending desire for comfort. If these aren’t yet a part of your local dining community, they’ll likely be arriving shortly.
1) Pasta is here for us like never before
The love of Italian flavors is fully grafted onto the rootstock of America’s culinary culture, as integral and inseparable as garlic to Sunday gravy. In selecting the 2016 Eater Awards, editors at seven out of our 23 city sites named a Restaurant of the Year that spotlights pasta. But beyond quantity, we’ve entered a golden age of pasta in America. It wasn’t as though we couldn’t find exquisite pappardelle or orecchiette in restaurants; Mario Batali and his partners have made a coast-to-coast business out of transforming noodles into luxury. This latest wave ushers the silkiest, most ingeniously sauced pastas into the more casual settings of neighborhood restaurants.
I’m thinking of Lilia in Brooklyn, where Missy Robbins crafts splendors like mafaldine — ruffled threads that look like they’ve been cut off the curly edges of boxed lasagna noodles — needing no more embellishment than crushed pink peppercorns and Parmigiano-Reggiano. At Monteverde in Chicago, Sarah Grueneberg shows equal brilliance with delicate pork-filled tortellini (served in chicken brodo with a splash of Lambrusco, a classic addition in Emilia-Romagna) and no-holds-barred feasts of ragù alla Napoletana, sierras of soppressata meatballs, sausage, and pork shank tumbled over fusilli. And my favorite new restaurant of 2016 in Atlanta, where I live, is laid-back, always-bustling Storico Fresco Alimentari, which morphed out of a pasta shop run by Italophile chef Michael Patrick. The menu hones in equally on timeless pleasures (tagliatelle alla Bolognese) as well as obscurities (pi fasaac from Lombardy). The latter’s name translates as “swaddled bundles;” taleggio, ricotta, Grana Padano, and spinach fill the silky parcels. It’s an uncertain world, but the pleasure of eating pasta in America has never been more reassuring.
2) The re-emergence of the proudly French restaurant
Post–World War II America fell in love with French restaurants as metaphors for sophistication: places where rich, showy dishes made dining feel like an event. Then came the American food revolution, deeming French restaurants and their Continental counterparts stuffy and stodgy. It wasn’t that French gastronomy (its techniques, its influence, its breadth) disappeared from dining in the United States, but overtly labeling restaurants as “French” fell largely out of favor.
Culture is cyclical, though, and specifically, Gallic restaurants of all styles are once again becoming vogue across the country. These genre reboots shun primness, favoring a more casual savoir-faire.
LA’s Petit Trois arguably led the charge when it opened in 2014, with Ludo Lefebvre’s precision-engineered takes on bistro fare (steak frites, mussels marinière, rice pudding with caramel) served in a tiny, effervescent bar. Le Coucou, Manhattan’s splashiest 2016 opening, reincarnates the French-Continental genre for modern tastes, tackling haute grandeurs like tête de veau ravigotée (fried veal head) and sole Véronique with a deft hand that sidesteps the overwrought versions of yesteryear. A mile downtown, Keith McNally brought to life his 14th restaurant, Augustine, with all the brasserie joie de vivre for which the creator of Soho’s Balthazar is known. (Hint: Order the cheese soufflé.) Across the country, Seattle chef JJ Proville, who holds both French and American citizenships, opened L’Oursin in November, where he cooks warming comforts like veal sweetbreads with apples, cabbage, and Calvados cream.
Many of these dishes have been out of circulation for so long that it seems as if a wholly fresh European cuisine is surfacing in the United States. But they’re comeback hits, and their return feels welcome and overdue.
3) Black walnuts are the new pistachios
Black walnuts are to English walnuts what blood oranges are to Valencias: similar in appearance but punchier and headier in flavor. English walnuts originally migrated to the West from ancient Persia; the black walnut tree (Juglans nigra) is native to North America, thriving from lower New England up through the breadth of the Midwest, and down south as far as Florida and Texas. My grandparents had a black walnut tree on their farm in Maryland; the walnuts’ ashy, golf-ball-sized hulls were so thick that my grandfather would run them over with his car to crack them.
The expense of commercially processing black walnuts has kept them largely in the province of home baking, but lately forward-thinking chefs have adopted black walnuts as potent accents in savory dishes. Their savory, tannic, almost smoky flavor means they can be used sparingly. In the fall, Smyth, a new tasting-menu restaurant in Chicago, served as one course an herb salad with duck tongues, roasted squid jus, and a scattering of black walnuts for crisp, earthy contrast. Shepard in Cambridge, one of Eater’s 2016 Best New Restaurants in America, offered rabbit agnolotti with a buttermilk sauce that smoothed out the black walnuts’ intensity. And at Alter in Miami (another BNR winner), Brad Kilgore paired sorrel and black walnut as an astringent one-two punch to jolt the gentleness of poussin with corn pudding. Honestly, once you taste black walnuts, you know if you’re in or out on them — but it’s nonetheless exciting to see a divisive ingredient in wider usage.
4) Chawanmushi as a vessel and palette for showcasing luxe ingredients
A staple on Japanese restaurant menus, chawanmushi (the word translates as “steamed in a tea bowl”) is a savory egg custard set with dashi rather than milk or cream. Traditionally it cradles morsels of shrimp or chicken breast and seasonal treats like gingko nuts and lily root. But its elemental purity makes it utterly adaptable, and chefs beyond Japanese kitchens have started embracing chawanmushi as a medium for showboating top-notch ingredients.
Anita Lo, at her Manhattan institution Annisa, was an early interpreter, steaming uni and morels in the fragrant custard. More recently, I’ve savored Peter Serpico’s version, gilded with caviar and cauliflower mushrooms, at his eponymous South Philly restaurant Serpico. And one of the most spectacularly gorgeous dishes I beheld all year was at Sung Ahn’s new 18-seat hideaway Mosu near San Francisco’s Japantown: His riff on the dish combined trout roe, crab, okra, and radish, all glimmering together like crown jewels. Chawanmushi can equally be a showcase for stunning ceramics; Ahn served the custard in a mottled, wide-lipped earthen bowl that was as elegant as the food.
5) Crab Rangoon leaps from Chinese-American menus
If in 2015 pierogis reveled in chefs’ attentions, the current dumpling darling is crab Rangoon, that veteran of Chinese-American menus. The dish is straightforward enough: a wonton wrapper sealed around a seasoned crab and cream cheese filling and then deep-fried. Crab Rangoon’s origins are vague, though they’re most likely a 1950s-era contrivance of Trader Vic’s founder Victor Bergeron. He suggested the recipe was Burmese (Rangoon, now called Yangon, was in Bergeron’s day the capital of Burma, now Myanmar), but the use of cream cheese — hardly an everyday ingredient in Burmese cooking — puts the claim more in the realm of stagecraft.
Despite its dubious roots, this can be a narcotic snack if prepared with quality ingredients and keen execution. Olmsted, the current sweetheart of Brooklyn dining, added kale from its own garden to give the filling some color and bulk. Momofuku’s David Chang, as part of the menu for his delivery service Ando, experimented with crab Rangoon in spring roll form. DC is also having a moment with crab Rangoon and its potential variations: TenPenh in Tyson’s Corner, for example, rejiggered the recipe into crab dip with wonton chips. As a tribute to what he calls a "neighborhood Asian restaurant,” Kris Yenbamroong of LA’s Thai sensation Night + Market Song serves a riff that includes mentaiko (cod roe) served with cucumber salad and sweet and sour sauce.
The most precisely honed version I came across this year was at the Peterboro in Detroit, where Brion Wong revamps Chinese-American warhorses like honey walnut shrimp salad, sweet and sour pork, and almond boneless chicken into cleaner, sharper exemplars. He folds his crab Rangoons into shapes nearly resembling lotus flowers, and the distinct taste of scallion cuts through the rich, gushing filling. His is the fine-tuning that will advance a mid-century stunt food into the stuff of connoisseurship.
6) Baked pancakes are sizzling
There is unfussy Americana pleasure derived from a stack of griddle flapjacks — fluffy yet hearty, maybe studded with pecans or blueberries or chocolate chips, but definitely saturated with butter and maple syrup. A baked pancake, the batter poured into a skillet or pan to set and rise in the oven for 25 minutes or so, has more of an air of sophistication and complexity. No surprise, then, that as the breakfast space emerges as an arena where chefs are excelling, we’re witnessing some accomplished innovations.
At game-changing Milktooth in Indianapolis, Jonathan Brooks has absolutely mastered the art of the Dutch baby — popover-like beauties that emerge from the oven puffed and bronzed. He flavors them both sweet and savory, in combinations like local pears revved with caramel corn, puffed rice, and honey-almond yogurt, or roasted broccoli and cheddar emboldened with beer mustard, pickled fennel, and mustard greens. LA’s unstoppable Sqirl rocks a version of socca, a chickpea pancake from the Mediterranean edges of France and Italy, which it currently flavors with kabocha squash, sparks with a mix of chiles, and then cools with cilantro yogurt. At New York’s Le Coucou, the easiest reservation to snag is at breakfast time. That’s when the kitchen serves clafoutis, a baked French dessert pancake studded with whatever fruit is in season: It translates as a satisfying morning meal piled with blueberries and a dollop of crème fraîche. When these fresh-from-the-oven stunners show up savory, I’ll gladly welcome them for dinner, too.
7) Green walls are a breath of fresh air
A decade later, I still vividly recall the surprise — the relief, really — of walking into Joël Robuchon at the MGM Grand Las Vegas and spying the wall of ivy in its smaller dining room. After walking through the hotel’s casino, with its smog of stale cigarette smoke, the air around the restaurant’s lush greenery smelled so clean and sweet.
The Robuchon memory came roaring back when I saw the vertical garden wrapping around a door frame at Tiger Mama, a recently opened Southeast Asian restaurant in Boston. Its thick greenery includes a revolving mélange of succulent plants and herbs. And this summer I dined at Vida, a new restaurant in Indianapolis, which approached the green wall in more practical terms: It houses rows of hydroponic lettuces and herbs that chef Layton Roberts incorporates into his dishes. This is a restaurant design I hope will continue. The effect is beautiful, the plants naturally absorb sound, and the calming visual winningly counterbalances the hard industrial slant that has defined so many dining rooms over the last decade.
8) Korean cuisine is no longer America’s ascending Asian cuisine; it has fully arrived
In 1993, during her first year as restaurant critic for the New York Times, Ruth Reichl wondered why Korean cooking wasn’t more popular in the United States. It would be a full two decades after Reichl’s lament that much of the country would begin to relish Korea’s culinary riches: volcanically bubbling tofu soups, bi bim bap, hubcap-sized seafood pancakes, kimchi and other fermented and pickled vegetable sides, and, most accessible, tabletop barbecue. This, of course, is only a starting list of dishes, but we can thank Korean-Americans David Chang and Roy Choi, two of the nation’s most influential chefs in the last decade, for nudging our palates in the right directions.
Now that America understands the culinary vocabulary, Korean-inspired restaurants can thrive through innovation, rather than just education. Chicago’s Parachute models this evolution thrillingly: On Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark’s menu, ddukbokki (spicy rice cakes) with pork mingles fluently with global ideas — say, chopped broccoli with dates and the North African spice mix ras el hanout. LA’s Baroo, owned by Matthew Kim and Kwang Uh, zigzags around Korean flavors with dishes like kimchi fried rice and “bibim salad” made with quinoa, oats, and bulgur. The restaurant also serves homemade tagliatelle with ragu, and it works; the kitchen’s style seems holistic, unrestricted.
If Baroo trades in complexity, Portland, Oregon’s Han Oak aims for hominess, in a very literal sense. The restaurant’s living room-esque dining space, which faces a walled courtyard, doubles as chef-owner Peter Cho’s residence. Han Oak only serves three days a week, Friday and Saturday dinner and Sunday brunch, and it’s reservations only. Evenings feel like a dinner party, with servers lugging out family-style bowls of banchan (ever-changing pickles and vegetable sides, subject to the improvisational way that Cho rolls with the seasons) and ssam plates featuring pork belly and hanger steak. At brunch, diners gobble down purple-tinged, umami-blasting kimchi waffles as though they rank along scrambled eggs and bacon as an American sunrise staple.
And given how prevalent Korean food has become, kimchi waffles — and who knows, Korean-inspired brunch served everywhere — may well be the next big thing.
Bill Addison is Eater's restaurant editor, traveling the country in search of America's most essential restaurants. Read more in the archive.
Editor: Erin DeJesus