Restaurant Guru Predicts the Future, Assumes We’ll Eventually Get HungryMichael Whiteman — the restaurateur who, with his late partner, the legendary Joe Baum, created the Rainbow Room, Windows on the World, the Hudson River Club, and a number of other historically important places — has issued his annual predictions for next year’s restaurant trends, including “tropical superfruits,” “ethical eating,” and “wildly flavored chocolates.” The list is pretty wide-ranging, but if we were handicapping all ten wrinkles, we’d say the odds are on “chef-driven steakhouses” (as Whiteman has persuasively argued), “Japanese small plates” (i.e., izakayas), and “burgers with pedigrees,” like those promised by Joe Bastianich’s Heritage Burger (which we announced the other day). The long shots for ‘07? Peruvian cooking, those spice-flavored chocolates, and the popularization of molecular gastronomy (“equivalent to a gastronomic IQ test in which typical diners are all below average”). Then again, no one ever said we were the oracle.
‘Party-Colored Beets’: 2007 Buzzword Preview [Eater]
Remembering Joe Baum [NYM]