Ten Restaurant Trends We Hate

Ten Restaurant Trends We Hate 1. Celebrity chefs who never cook: Put down the glass of champers, trade your pin-striped Hugo Boss for a white chef jacket, and get back behind the stove! 2. Restaurants with more publicists than cooks: Telltale signs that an eatery will be short-lived: More attention and money are dedicated to the decor than the menu; the phone number or address is a "secret." We've reached our tolerance for over-hyped "hot spots." 3. Fancified raw cuisine: Despite several prominent chefs' exhortations, this pretentious, tasteless, unhealthy trend, both time-consuming to make and expensive to buy (think $12 "tomato tartare" — a.k.a. salsa), has far outlived its 15 minutes. 4. Sell-out Sams: The burgeoning crowd of chefs and sommeliers shilling low-quality products are doing two things: misleading the unknowing food and wine lover into believing those products are good, and diminishing the professional's reputation as quickly as his or her bank balance increases. 5. Megaplexes: Restaurants the size of a football field, with menus to match, are an unwelcome new development. 6. Menus brimming with more information than an iPod database: To enjoy the brioche bread pudding, it's really not necessary to know the name of the farm that supplied the eggs. 7. Overuse of the terms "local" and "artisanal": These days, you can't open a restaurant without claiming that you're truly "buying local." While it's a commendable goal, much of the time it's not true (particularly with fish). And if you can't cook, it doesn't matter where you've sourced your ingredients. 8. The 5:30 or 10:30 rule: Call many spots for a reservation less than two weeks in advance, and you'll likely be told that these are the only time slots available. But show up at 8 p.m., and often you'll find plenty of tables to spare. 9. Unisex bathrooms: It's hard enough to share bathrooms with the opposite sex at home. Why on earth would we want to do it at trendy restaurants? 10. Foam: It was a bold innovation when Ferran Adrià did it six years ago. Now it's just an oddly textured, melting lump on the plate at every bo?te with culinary pretensions. Give us something we can bite into, please. Epicurious_com.htm