Each year chefs and diners ask what the new emerging food trends will be. This year the answers are exciting and intriguing.
While technology in both the front and back of the house, such as ‘guest-facing’ tablets and ‘prepaid’ reservations, are being increasing adapted, food, both classic and enhanced, still holds center stage.
Many innovative food labs are exploring ugly root vegetables, dark colored seaweed, jalapeno honey, savory breakfast yogurt and adaptations of ‘flavor-combination’ Japanese snack foods to name just a few of the very newest food choices.
But have no fear because all is not the-newest-and-the-latest. In fact, one culinary classic has emergs,ed as a major trend leader – OYSTERS!
Traditionalists, of course, have enjoying oysters gathered fresh from the water’s edge for centuries. But now a new group of enthusiastic diners is discovering this great American culinary treasure.
Whether served with a lemon grass cocktail sauce, a muscated mignonette accented with tarragon or with a kimchee granite, oysters are, in a word, hot, hot, hot.
This growing oyster trend also includes those who enjoy savoring both the oyster ‘a la natural’ with its in-shell ‘liquor’ which to many seems the champagne of the sea.
And just as many lovers of champagne have a preferred source, so do a growing number of diners enjoying oysters.
As a result, diners now want to know where their favorite oyster is from. Simply being an eastern oyster or a western oyster isn’t enough. The word “merroir”, paralleling the wine term “terroir”, is now an accepted food term indicating source.
All of this culinary interest has created increased product demand among chefs along with an equal need for reliability and quality. Companies, such as Taylor Shellfish Farms, are busy answering those needs.
Taylor Shellfish Farms is a fifth generation family company that proudly name-sources their oysters after carefully checking the quality of each item. It should, therefore, be no surprise that they are the choice-provider of top chefs from Boston to San Francisco and even in Hong Kong!
