From customized matchbooks match in your ceremonial dinner to thrilling restaurant collaborations to savory pints of ice cream, eating traits for 2023 ran the gamut from pleasant to perplexing to… possibly merely dangerous. As all the time, Eater spent the yr chronicling the traits hitting restaurant menus, TikTok, and tradition at giant (Pasta Lady Fall, anybody?), however right here’s a glance again on the worst of the bunch, in line with Eater’s specialists:
What have been the worst meals and eating traits of the yr?
As Eater identified in October, maximalism was huge in 2023. And whereas I’m all for loosening the tie and kicking again in barely wacky eating rooms, that urge for maximalism typically resulted in areas and menus that seemed to be designed for literal infants. Would I, an grownup, wish to eat my dinner whereas seated in a huge neon inexperienced hand? No. If I have been a child, nevertheless, I might find it irresistible. As a substitute of an everyday pepper grinder, would I maybe choose one that’s three-feet tall? Once more, no, but when I have been a tiny child, sure. Would I like a shot delivered to me on a cup affixed to a Sizzling Wheel? I’m sufficiently old to legally drink, so the reply is once more no. Had been I someplace between a new child youngster and a preschooler, signal me up. All of these gimmicks and so many others truly appeared in eating places in 2023. Subsequent yr, if we need to make eating places extra enjoyable, let’s make them extra enjoyable for grown-ups. — Jonathan Smith, interim senior editor
TikTok has birthed many unlucky meals traits, however I believe chief amongst them must be the “attractive” meals guys, these movies by which males with abs do unspeakable issues to meals. The height (or low level, somewhat) of this development has acquired to be this video by which a deep-V-wearing muscled man violates dough as he makes a set of festive Halloween doughnuts. I can’t make it make sense. — Monica Burton, deputy editor
It isn’t the worst development, however I really feel us coming upon the precipice of Too A lot Olive. Between martinis having a second and them displaying up in desserts and Jell-O pictures, I fear we’re on the trail to them being thrown in the whole lot by much less cautious and artistic cooks, after which everybody getting sick of them, after which a backlash. Which might be foolish, since olives are nice and we should always all be capable to get pleasure from them. What can we do to avoid wasting olives from this future? — Jaya Saxena, correspondent
I believed it might finish with the Stanley: that we might agree, hey, right here’s one actually nice, indestructible cup for consuming water and we’d purchase one or two and present a pair, as a result of water actually doesn’t have to be so difficult or so costly, proper? Properly, that was naive of me. As if the Stanley collectors on my feeds, with a cup in actually each shade, weren’t sufficient, I’m now continuously being pushed “higher” different bottles, just like the one from Owala, with its sippy spout. I’m begging us all to confront the truth that what now we have is sufficient, and that no person actually cares in case your Stanley matches your seasonal shade scheme or no matter. — Bettina Makalintal, senior reporter
WaterTok. Water “recipes” will not be a factor that ought to exist, particularly in the event that they contain 14 various kinds of sugar-free syrup. — Amy McCarthy, employees author
Paying for restaurant reservations is fairly rank: Let’s make eating out much more aggravating and inaccessible! That stated, this can be a drawback that tends to have an effect on solely these intent on going to buzzy eating places, so on this, the most popular yr in recorded historical past, I’m saving my true ire for dangerous meals traits of a extra world nature, specifically the persevering with incapacity of nations within the World North to chop again on our meat consumption, and the livestock trade’s concomitant bloated affect on policymaking. The common American continues to eat an annual 264 kilos of meat whereas the world actually burns, and that has a manner of placing issues like combating for restaurant reservations in perspective. — Rebecca Flint Marx, House editor