by David Sax
For the better part of an hour Schaibly and I sat there skewering and frying, eating and joking. We talked about our families, about work, travel, and, in Schaibly’s case, the finer points of shooting an angry alligator in the head with a high-powered pistol (Florida, baby!). I’d barely known the man for a day, but with each skewer the barrier of unfamiliarity between us fell away, and I felt like we had been good friends for years. (A year later, Schaibly moved on from the Melting Pot to another job. He finally broke free of his fondue cage, perhaps bringing the promise of melted cheese creations to a whole new audience.) It made me think back to something Erwin Herger had told me the day before when we sat with his wife, eating separate plates of fish on the other side of the state. “The strength of fondue is the idea that everyone participates in eating or cooking from the same pot,” he said. “It somehow creates a unity at the table.” Fondue’s fundamental strength, the core of what made it a trend, was the central idea of a shared eating experience. It occupied the same place as a giant banana split, something you ate for the dynamic it created with people at the table as much as for the taste. Whether it was melted cheese, boiling oil, or chocolate, fondue was just the vehicle toward the ultimate goal of conversation and familiarity, and no matter what the fads of the day were, whether low-fat or low-carb, frozen or Greek yogurt, small plates or big entrées, the pleasure we got from sharing food with other people would never diminish. It was a trend that would always reemerge in various forms but that fundamentally could never go out of style. “That’s what the name of fondue means: it’s melting,” said Herger, looking off across the water in the direction of his native Switzerland and, perhaps, the first kiss he stole from a girl who dropped her bread into the fondue many years ago. “It’s melting people together.”
Perhaps I was being a little bit cheesy, but wasn’t that the whole point?
On May 10, 2013, as I sat at home writing the cupcake chapter that opens this book, a new food trend was being born three hundred miles away. That was the day Dominique Ansel, a Parisian-born, New York–based pastry chef who had worked in the kitchens of star chef Daniel Boulud, debuted a new confection at his Dominique Ansel Bakery in the fashionable SOHO neighborhood of Manhattan. Ansel’s creation began with a laminated dough, similar to the buttery, layered, proofed dough of a croissant. He shaped this into a ring, then fried it in grapeseed oil so that the dough puffed up crisp and golden on the outside, creating airy pockets between the flaky layers, which now peeled away in sheets. Ansel then piped in Tahitian vanilla cream so the thing practically bulged, rolled it in flavored sugar, and topped it all with a hot-pink rose-flavored glaze, which was sprinkled with rose sugar for added effect. Ansel named his new pastry the cronut, a croissant-donut hybrid. The cronut was extremely delicate, limited in number, and expensive ($5 each). You couldn’t refrigerate a cronut, and it basically wilted like a flower after six hours, but its promise of novel decadence and deliciousness proved irresistible.
Because the popular food blog Grub Street had posted an article about the cronut the day before its official debut, its existence wasn’t exactly a secret. But the public’s response to the cronut was more than anything Ansel or anyone who has ever witnessed a food trend could have imagined. New Yorkers had been searching for an heir to the cupcake trend for years, and fancy donuts had been their rising contender, but this took the momentum of both and blew it up like a cream-filled hydrogen bomb. That first day Ansel and his staff sold out of their first batch of cronuts within half an hour of opening their doors, then scrambled to make more and immediately sold off the day’s second batch. Dozens of people were frantically calling Dominique Ansel Bakery, trying to secure orders. FoxNews.com carried a story about the cronut’s invention that day, and over the following week cronuts went from an unknown culinary creation to a feverish trend in record time. Food journalists looking to write reviews began heading to Ansel’s bakery before opening, waiting in line in the early morning hours to score a batch. To try to control the madness, Ansel limited shoppers to a maximum of two cronuts per person. This only increased demand. Each day cronuts sold out quicker than the previous day. On May 15 someone gave one of Ansel’s staff the middle finger when they were informed, upon reaching the end of the line, that the cronuts were already gone. Another person broke into actual tears of despair. On May 17 Ansel trademarked the word Cronut™.
It only got crazier from there. Within a week there were lineups for cronuts winding around the blocks near Dominique Ansel Bakery at all hours of the day, with the first eager customers showing up as early as five in the morning. Summer interns from businesses all over New York were dispatched to sweat it out in the line so their bosses could be presented cronuts at their desks. Enterprising Craigslist entrepreneurs began offering to wait in the cronut line on your behalf for a fee. A month after the cronut launched, a black market service called Premium Cronut Delivery opened for business, charging $100 to bring a single cronut anywhere in New York City (a 2,000 percent markup). If you wanted twenty cronuts, it cost $3,000 because larger orders required multiple rounds in line, the opposite of an economy of scale. Each day the cronut lineup formed a few minutes earlier, by August inching as early as three in the morning. The blog Gothamist even posted a photo of two young women rooting through the bakery’s trash late at night, searching for rejected, overcooked, degenerate cronuts to eat or possibly even resell. Their desperation was tragic.
The shocking thing about the cronut trend was its sheer blitzkrieg speed. No one predicted its arrival, and no one had ever seen anything like this. It ushered in a new era of instant food trends. In the span of a month cronuts received the combined press coverage that the cupcake craze accumulated over a decade, with articles in every major national and international newspaper and website, TV news broadcasts all over the world, and a relentless onslaught of social media attention. Vogue magazine declared 2013 the summer of the cronut, the Atlantic called them “New York’s favorite cruller on vanilla-flavored steroids,” and cronut stories appeared on the Freakonomics blog as well as in the business magazine Inc., questioning the long-term financial potential of the pastry’s future. Cronut blogs, like funkincronuts.com, popped up to chronicle every minute development of the craze.
The cronut was unique because it was the first time a food had been born directly into a trend. Whereas cupcakes took one or two years to move out from Magnolia’s kitchen into other New York bakeries, several more years to inspire cupcakeries in other American cities, and almost a decade to establish the cupcake trend internationally, the cronut emerged from Dominique Ansel’s kitchen and leaped directly into the world of imitators, hybrids, and inspired pastry creations popping up as far afield as San Diego (the square cronut), London (the dosant), Singapore (crodos), and even Caracas, Venezuela (@MrCronut), to name but a few. All over the world pastry chefs were reverse engineering cronuts as the trend spilled from one country to the next. A bakery in Beijing reportedly got the idea from one in Australia, which had flown someone to New York to acquire a specimen in the same way that someone in Manila had done. In South Korea the country’s Dunkin Donuts chain had already mass produced a “New York Pie Donut” by late July.
Few if any of these people had even tasted a cronut or even seen one up close, but the lessons of the cupcake trend were clear: get in early, catch the wave, and ride it for every dollar you can. I first encountered this early in July when Le Dolci, the bakery at the end of my block in Toronto specializing in cupcakes, macarons, and other sweets, began advertising cronuts on their chalkboard. They were smaller than Ansel’s and more dense, but they were fried and flaky, and suddenly there were crowds of curious foodies taking photographs on my street with cronuts triumphantly displayed. Even after a year spent writing about food trends, this one amazed me.
As impressed as I was with the cronut trend, I only managed to observe it peripherally because my wife gave birth to our first child ten days after the cronut was born in Ansel’s bakery. All summer long
I saw the stories and Tweets and jokes about the cronut. People I knew were heading to New York for vacations and spending half their weekend in line for cronuts, which they chronicled as slideshows of photographs on social media. The cronut trend’s sheer absurdity began to overtake reality. Karon Liu, a friend and fellow food writer at the Toronto newspaper The Grid, wrote an article about the potential of a crookie (croissant + cookie), almost as a piece of satire. To his surprise, the crookie instantly became a creation sold by bakeries in the city and then around the world, officially endorsed by the folks at Oreo, and covered in Time.
I was too stuck in a cycle of sleep deprivation, feeding schedules, colicky screams, and sheer parental joy to pay any real attention to all of this. I couldn’t even manage to walk to the end of my block to buy a cronut before they sold out each day, despite regular promises to do so. In fact, my knee-jerk reaction to the cronut was a sign of how hard it was to shake the ambivalence I held toward food trends when I began this book. Each time a new cronut story came to my attention, each time someone excitedly asked whether I had already tried one, I groaned, as I once had for cupcakes, gluten-free diets, and restaurants that served bacon-flavored desserts. “It’s just another fad,” I said dismissively. “It’ll be gone by Labor Day.”
By mid-August my curiosity got the better of me, and I was finally ready to embrace the cronut. I marked a date in my calendar—the date my first draft of this book was due—when I planned on walking down the street to Le Dolci to pick one up, partly as a reward and partly as a fittingly delicious conclusion to my research. As my deadline approached, the excitement around Le Dolci’s cronut reached fever pitch. The bakery had teamed up with a vendor called Epic Burgers and Waffles, which operated a booth at the Canadian National Exhibition (a giant end of summer carnival) that sold gut-busting creations like a waffle and fried chicken sandwich or a hamburger set between two halves of a Krispy Kreme donut. Together they unleashed the Cronut Burger, a seven thousand–calorie bomb that replaced donuts with a cronut, quickly becoming a media sensation and generating its own vast lines and celebrity status. The cronut was now in such hot demand that I was worried I wouldn’t ever be able to get my hands on one.
On the day of my cronut appointment I woke up, checked Le Dolci’s hours, and counted down the time until they were open. At eleven in the morning I strapped my daughter to my chest in her sling, put on my sunglasses, and strode confidently down the block. When I arrived at Le Dolci, however, the bakery was closed. I checked the time, peeked inside, and then turned to my phone, where I looked at my e-mails for the first time in a few hours, discovering only then why I would not be getting a cronut that day: a wave of violent food poisoning had affected over two hundred people who had eaten the Cronut Burger the previous night, sending several to the hospital. Both Le Dolci and Epic Burgers and Waffles were closed, pending an investigation by the city’s health authority. Over the coming week it would be revealed that the culprit was neither the cronut nor the hamburgers but rather a maple-bacon jam Le Dolci had created as a topping for the monstrous sandwich that had been contaminated with the Staphylococcus aureus toxin. Le Dolci had fallen victim to the hubris of a food trend and had taken the cronut down with them. The bakery had opened the previous year, chasing the cupcake and macaron trends long after they had passed, and when the cronut came along, they were the first on the ground to offer it in Toronto. Drunk with the taste of a food trend’s power, they sought to amplify their success and chased too many food trends at one time, combining the cronut, burger, and bacon trends into a hideous frankentrend that ultimately destroyed them—before Labor Day, no less.
That same summer a Japanese chef and blogger named Keizo Shimamoto invented a ramen burger at his pop-up noodle stand in Brooklyn. This dish, a hamburger set between two buns made from fried ramen noodles, was to some the high-water mark of food trend memes, the edible equivalent of a double rainbow video gone viral. Of course the lines began forming immediately, and of course the ramen burger attracted the scorn of many who had never even tasted it, but as one article pointed out, the ramen burger, in all its insanity, proved by its very existence what was great about our society. In Japan, where the food is delicious but governed by strict conventions and traditions, the ramen burger would be a blasphemy that would never see the light of day. The same could be said about cronuts, which would never fly in Paris, the city where Dominique Ansel was born. But here in North America we embraced food trends and allowed them to thrive. Kara Nielsen, the trendologist I spoke with in San Francisco, saw this as one of our greatest strengths. Food trends, she felt, were as powerful an example of the creative, democratic North American spirit than anything else out there in our culture. They represented the same force of entrepreneurship, fresh beginnings, and boundless destiny that drew immigrants to our shores with dreams in their eyes.
At their worst, food trends can be annoyingly shallow. They may start out as individual expressions of imagination, but ultimately they become victims of a herd mentality. One day everyone in your life is eating Greek yogurt, and you’re not sure how it happened. In the case of trends like the cronut they literally attract stampeding herds of humans. It is easy to view the culture of trends as the vapid expression of a society obsessed with materialism, as insubstantial fads. We dine out for entertainment, watch hours of food being cooked and eaten on television, and plan road trips to taste the latest hot meal. Food has become fashion, chefs are hailed as rock stars, and photos of the latest dishes are our art. At the same time we live in a world where millions are starving or malnourished, and not just in distant poor countries but also within walking distance of our homes. In the United States alone more than 16 million children don’t have reliable access to food. They’ve never heard of cronuts or chia seeds or the latest ceviche from Ricardo Zarate’s kitchen, and they don’t give a shit that you just posted a review of the top-twenty hottest food trucks in DC on your blog. These people wait in lines and dig through the trash for their next meal, not for some sense of culinary thrill-seeking.
It is hard to contemplate this reality when you’re walking the halls of the Fancy Food Show, having so many culinary creations thrust at you that you can hardly swallow them fast enough. While writing this book I was often tempted to blame the ramen burger, the bacon explosion, or the chia-flavored Greek yogurt crookie for the sad absurdity of this problem, not to mention the much pettier but sometimes compelling problem: I was tired of hearing about new trends.
But somewhere in the midst of my year of decadent cupcakes, food truck festivals, and $2,000 worth of creamy, nutty black rice, it occurred to me how lucky I was—to be able to do this for a living, to live in a country that not only supported but encouraged these sometimes quixotic innovations, to have grown up in a time when food was so tasty and plentiful that we could sneer at steak and potatoes. It is a wonderful time to be eating.
Food trends bring us happiness. You can groan all you want about how cupcakes are “over” as a trend, but if I placed a cupcake in front of you, you would still peel back the folds of its paper cup with the same eager anticipation you had when you were a kid at a birthday party. You would chomp down on the sweet moist cake and the creamy icing with a single, ferocious bite and then lick the remnants from your sticky fingers until every last crumb is gone. For the same reason people will continue to eat Ricardo Zarate’s food—not because it is cool and trendy but because it is fundamentally delicious and the experience of enjoying his uniquely composed causas and tiraditos brings diners a joy they cannot experience in other restaurants. Chefs like Roy Choi, David Chang, and Sang Yoon may have become known for a particular dish or a flavor profile that grew into a trend, but that was because that Korean taco, pork bun, or hamburger they created brought great happiness to the people eating it, and still does. The trends those chefs launched spread smiles to millions of diners everywhere, and this is why other chefs and other diners sought them out in their own cities and homes, where that happiness only gre
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Food trends are for everyone. They may originate as specialty items, available only in select cities for a high price and long wait, but eventually the nature of all food trends is democratic. The creation of a brilliant chef or a small food company will quickly be adapted, reinvented, and reborn in countless different ways at all different price points. Products and tastes that make their debut at the Fancy Food Show as rare, expensive indulgences will trickle down to the average supermarket buyer through the process of a trend’s evolution, which is why goat’s milk caramels may one day be as commonplace in our pantries as Hershey’s chocolate. We now have a vastly greater selection of foods at our fingertips than we did a generation ago.
Food trends can also deepen and expand our culture beyond the plate. The success of Anson Mills grains has done more to further Glenn Roberts’s goal of preserving the Carolina Rice Kitchen than any political campaign or charitable plea ever could. The quality and flavor of his grits and rice may propel their trendiness, but their ultimate cultural impact has resulted in a revived interest in southern history, traditional cooking, heritage ingredients, and farming practices that are spreading across the South and around the world. Trends also bring the kitchens of that world together. The years Sushil Malhotra, Sukhi Singh, and Hemant Bhagwani have spent trying to make Indian food popular in North America will soon pay off, as naan bread and chicken tikka masala become lunch staples in more homes, workplaces, and restaurants, and as fears about Indian food give way to an expanding curiosity and hunger, both for Indian cuisine and the greater culture it comes from. Our food isn’t a static thing. It doesn’t belong in a museum, hermetically sealed and unalterable. It shifts and changes to reflect our values, enriching us in innumerable ways as it does. Trends are what push it forward.