Magazine: Chef new world

Which trends will shape the hospitality and culinary world in 2016? This article doesn’t set out to foretell the new things in 2016: our goal is to find the relationship between processes, relying on international experience.

Experts say that by 2020 the average consumer of developed countries will have much more culinary and healthy-eating knowledge than today. The generation of those who were born around the millennium won’t only be interested on creative dishes but also in ‘the story behind the food’. Our lifestyles seem to break the habit of three meals a day more and more.

The proportion of take-away food and home deliveries is growing – the process is very much visible in the fast food sector. Many restaurants also deliver ready-to-use cooking ingredients so that guests can prepare their favourite dishes at home. Food halls are a rapidly developing category at the moment: they are like a ‘smarter big brother’ of the food court in shopping malls. High quality restaurants move in marketplaces or other halls, very often acting as the vanguard of top restaurants, in this respect having a kind of marketing function as well. Mobile food trucks and small street food places are increasingly popular because they offer favourable prices and flexibility. What is more, these enterprises are also easier to start than traditional restaurants.

While 20 years ago it was national food trends that occupied people’s thoughts, in the early 2000s regional flavours were the stars and today modern cuisine is about using ‘super-local’ ingredients. This includes spices and herbs from the chef’s small garden, but most of the time restaurants order ingredients from local farmers. Pickles, sausage, butter, cheese, pasta and ice cream – they are all made in the restaurants kitchen. Alternative ingredients turn up in a growing number of fields; the reasons behind this trend are innovation and consumer demand generated by health trends.

Cooks are using a lot of butter again and fat is also slowly getting back the reputation it used to have in decades long gone. Guests are looking for dishes with high protein content and vegetarianism is still popular, too. In pairing food with drinks wine used to be the absolute winner, but these days it is completely normal to recommend beer or cocktails with food. Many think that in the world of craft beers the end of the IPA era will come soon, but other experts are of the opinion that this popular beer type still has 1 or 2 good years ahead of it. The youngest generation of wine drinkers don’t care about dry wine being more valuable than sweet wine, they like to drink the latter too. A democratisation process has been taking place in wine consumption and in the USA wine on tap is becoming a common practice. Among alcohol-free beverages we can witness the biggest changes in the coffee segment – the new trend of drinking quality coffee is called the third coffee wave.