Food Trends On Their Way Out
 

The "hand-crafted" and "curated" cocktail phase passed the point of ridiculousness when "mixologists" began serving them in a stupid mason jar.

Well, another high (or low) point in the "all things artisanal" fad will be reached tomorrow when a new bar in D.C. opens.

They are offering, yes, "artisanal" ice cubes they are calling "hand cut rocks.":rolleyes:

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/b...ent-1629475153

They're a few years late to the artisanal ice cube craze. The only difference is that they are upcharging for it and attributing it to the ice cube. (I've seen other bars that charge different prices for drinks served neat vs. on the rocks, but they've usually attributed the price difference to variations in the pour size.)

I had the pleasure of sitting at a bar a couple years ago and watching the bartender hand-chip a block of ice that started at about 4" x 4" and end up with perfectly spherical tennis-ball shaped cube. I had two thoughts:
1. When I saw how much time it took to hand carve an ice cube, I understood why the bar only had 11 seats.
2. If you told me to carve a perfectly round ice cube, it would probably be pea-sized by the time I was finished.

(For Chicagoans, this was at Charcoal Bar -- located below Sumi Robata -- back when Matthew Lipsky was the bartender.)

Luckily mason jars are out of fashion even more the term "mixologist" is.

Referring to the below point, I would be in favour of more Japanese quality ice-cutting though. Different drinks need different ice shapes, and so you either need to have a huge ice programme, or you need to buy in from a supplier (quite expensive), or you need to buy in giant ice blocks and train your bartenders into chipping ice.

Kale, kale, kale.
It's not even the healthiest or tastiest greens.

The kale thing makes me laugh. Curly kale used to be what you bought as a student to fill out meals as it was about the cheapest vaguely nutritional ingredient in the market.

But I suppose it varies. When I worked in Norway, people used to look on salmon and crayfish in the same way, they were so cheap and plentiful.

I still look at kale as a garnish rather than a food, although i have enjoyed it in some soups.

I always considered parsley a garnish, but as I've gotten older I've developed a taste for it, particularly in something like an Adana kebab

Ew. I've had a couple middle eastern salads with too much parsley and couldn't finish them. A little bite to sweeten the breath, okay. Mouthful after mouthful, no thanks.

Flat leaf parsley or the standard issue type?

Same here.

Middle eastern salads are what developed my taste for it.:)

Flat leaf parsley is pretty tasteless. More like just another salad green to me.

This reminds me of living in Chile. Salmon was something I'd rarely eaten in the Midwest and viewed as expensive and exotic. My Chilean coworkers had grown tired of salmon (admittedly, farmed there, not wild), because they'd had to eat it so often in school lunches.