Restaurant Confidential: Monday nights special is Tuesday's trash.

"The Amuse From The Kitchen".

Truffle flavoring. I love fresh Italian white truffles in the fall, particularly freshly shaved over a simple pasta or risotto. I love fresh black truffles in France.
There is now truffle flavor in far too many dishes. I say "flavor" as I understand that the commercial truffle flavor used in restaurants is often created in a laboratory and not sniffed out by pigs.
Local diners feature truffle fries, truffle burgers, truffle cheese, truffle flavored pasta, salt, honey, etc.

Eliminating spoons from the cutlery set up - why did that happen? I miss my spoon, and often ask for one.

+1 on dump truck-sized portions. And then you offer dessert (similar sized)? I might have a touch of dessert if I weren't stuffed from the entree.

For me, it's the demise of salad bars. I can happily make a whole meal out of a well-stocked salad bar. Maybe too much of it went unused and they had to throw a large portion out at the end of each day?

Makes sense though, you're talking about two cultures that love their rice, noodles, and pork products....

hate fusion

Most trends suck because only a few chefs/restaurants do them well.

I think sous vide gets a bad rep only because most people don't understand it and chefs/waiters love to oversell it. Sous vide is no more special than sauteeing, BBQ, or steaming.

A few trends which I dislike from the past decade (or decade and half):

1) Asian-[insert western cuisine] fusion. Asia is f*!#ing huge. At the very, very least focus on one country, otherwise, all the dishes tend to suck and be unfocused.

2) Smoke. Not smoked meat/protein. But wafting some aromatic smoke to eat with a dish. Sorry, doesn't do it for me.

3) $35+ corkage. Yes, I know the reasoning behind corkage at high-end restaurants. It's still short sighted and annoying. I might give a restaurant a pass if their wine list is diversified and phone book heavy.

4) Creme brulee. Most are just "ehh"

5) "Molten flourless chocolate cake" Double "ehhhhhhhh"

6) "Still or sparkling water?" Bottled water has taken over in our daily lives. I'll take unspoken option #3, then I'll consider ordering from your crappy wine list.

How can this list be considered complete without the idiotic "Dark" scam?

+1

I'm not particularly keen on truffles and the misuse of them generally leads to a dish that only tastes of truffle. It's as though they have to prove there's truffle in there by overpowering every other flavour.

Truffle oil :td: Just give me EVOO thank you very much!

Reminds me of how every somewhat supposedly upscale restaurant now has to offer a seared or raw tuna appetizer with some godawful wasabi sauce.

+1 on these sentiments.

For all of the fusion cuisine haters, have you been to Malaysia or Singapore? Now that's fusion and some good eating! Though I do understand how it can be disliked particularly how its marketed everywhere..

Singapore and Malaysia are a bit different, unless you are talking about haute-cuisine Malay-Western and Singaporean/Western fusion (of which I've never tried). Those two countries have culinary influences from neighboring Asian cultures as well as Western countries from colonial times. That is old-school "fusion" which has to come to have its own character as "Singaporean" food.

As an American-born Chinese (Hong Kong ancestry), I've never understood or liked the "HK cafe-style" food which is a weird Cantonese-European old-school "fusion". But I'm veering a bit off topic now.

I agree completely about pretentious menus that describe the pedigree of their foods.
It's getting to the point where some menus are becoming novellas.

I don't really care if my tomato salad originated as heirloom seeds collected from an Amish family and then grown by hand in an organic family owned farm that overlooks the Shenandoah Valley.

i'm hk-raised, yet still i hate the fusion: except sth like tea w milk.
Spaghetti overcooked soaking in MSG water. ew.....