A Year in Food - What restaurant trends will we see emerging in 2016?

Aoife Carrigy polishes up her crystal ball to see what’s coming to the restaurant scene in Ireland - especially Dublin - and elsewhere this year (with a little help from some insider tipsters…)

1. Values not value

‘Values not value’ is what serial restaurateur Elaine Murphy, right (of The Winding Stair, The Woollen Mills, The Washerwoman and next year’s Legal Eagle gastropub) describes as “a hilarious phrase which is set to sum up the ethos for food in 2016”. Sustainability, ethical and ecological trading and food waste were certainly hot topics at 2015’s Food on the Edge food symposium. Run by Galwegian chef JP McMahon, it attracted top international chefs such as Daniel Patterson, whose game-changing new US-based Loco’l chain offers “fast food with real ingredients”. McMahon has since been busy on Kickstarter raising funds for Farmer, a new Irish ethical fast food chain with a focus on provenance, sustainability and animal welfare. Watch this space.

2. Dramarama

If there’s one man who knows a marketable food trend when he sees it, it’s entrepreneur John Farrell of Dublin’s 777, SuperMissSue, Luna, The Butcher Grill and Dillingers. He stirred up 2015 with 1950’s glamour à la SMS Luna, with the kind of glamorous dining room that you’d don your glad rags for. Food consultancy specialist, Tim Magee of Host & Co believes that next year we’ll see “more ‘dressy up’ dining” by which he means heavy investment in pretty rooms. “People want comfort again, and drama.”

3. Less is more (or less)

“I love the idea of little restaurants or vendors in stalls that are doing one thing, and doing it really well,” says Katie Sanderson of Dillisk and Living Dinners fame. Katie name-checks London’s Weligama (Sri Lankan egg hoppers from a street market) and Bao (steamed buns) as great single-item examples. “I think I'd personally like to explore this area,” she adds, having just dropped the bomb that there most likely won’t be a Dillisk 2016.

4. Green green grass of home

Fat is back and butter is the reclaimed Queen of the Dairy. And who does butter better than we Irish? Chefs are taking advantage of all that rain and all that grass with dishes that celebrate our milk and cream. They’re churning their own butter, like Barry Fitzgerald at Bastible, whose menu might also feature milk curd dumplings, smoked ricotta, or truffled crème fraiche for the house chips. And a cow’s not just for cream you know. Indigenous breeds are making a comeback with the likes of Glenarm Shorthorn and Dexter (as featured on the menu of D2 newcomer, Richmond) being So Hot Right Now.

5. Chuck’s back

Crispy chicken skin is de rigeur while wings are getting a going over. London’s Smoking Goat and Portland’s Pok Pok pimp theirs with fish sauce for extra umami-whammy. Glasnevin’s The Washerwoman offer Washerwings, a three-way choice between classic Buffalo, Washerwoman BBQ or Chipotle Ketchup style, each served with Young Bucks Blue raw milk cheese dip

6. Ethnic reboot

With John Farrell, chef Karl Whelan and music guru Will Dempsey off to Hong Kong to research their new Dublin ‘contemporary Chinese’ juke joint (which Farrell is designing for owners Dempsey and Whelan), we’re set to see ethnic being re-mapped. Farrell describes the yet-to-be-named Camden Street eatery as “contemporary Chinese, an homage to Hong Kong with an emphasis on duck”. Further up the road, chef Sunil Ghai of Ananda fame will open Pickle very soon, focusing on regional northern Indian cuisines and eschewing prime cuts for rustic ingredients.

7. Here, fishy fishy

Once there was none and now they’re everywhere. Seafood eateries, that is. But it’s not just Dubliners who think fish is suddenly sexy. Berkeley Square’s preposterous Sexy Fish was the hottest things to hit Mayfair this year. Throughout January 2016, The Cliff Townhouse’s initiative called ‘Here’s a fish you should meet’ will feature daily special lesser-ordered lovelies such as coley, dory or pickled herrings and they will be tweeting tips for cooking with fish in the run-up to their Seafood Masterclass on Wednesday evening, 27th January (€25pp including glass of bubbly on arrival).

8. For Preservation’s Sake

Smoking, fermenting, pickling, brining, curing. All these age-old ways of making food last longer often make food taste better too. And chefs love making food taste better. Simple infusions can stretch out seasonal flavours, while the lighter touch of marinating may not preserve so much as transform – think raw fish as reconfigured in ‘poke’, an on-trend Hawaiin-style ceviche. Expect a further embracing of these age-old arts, with a particular scope for non-alcoholic fermented drinks such as kombucha and kefir to become the new cold-pressed juice (as per The Fumbally’s lead).

9. Super Sprout Me

We all want to eat well. And we all want to live well. ‘Can’t we do both?’ asks almost everyone these days, and daytime hotspots Counter Culture, Cocu and Sprout & Co are answering with clever takes on clean food. Besides their cold-pressed juices, Sprout & Co offer chia porridge for breakie various veg-tastic salads and build-your-own protein boxes (the new sandwich). There’s kale too, natch.

10. And to drink?

Murphy’s “old-school gastro-pub” Legal Eagle will have “an unprecedented whiskey bar with people able to keep and mark their own bottles”, with which to wash down all sorts of fare from devilled kidneys and jugged hare to hefty salads and soul-food sambos. As well as whiskey in the jar-oh, all over town we will be drinking craftier cocktails, ciders and beers, often paired with food in place of wine, not to mention more Irish gins and even Irish tonics (aka the new Poacher’s Well). Cheers to that folks – and a happy new year while we’re at it!

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Aoife Carrigy is a freelance food and wine writer and editor. She is a regular contributor to FOOD&WINE Magazine, The Irish Independent, The Herald and Cara Magazine, amongst others, and was co-author of The Ard Bia Cookbook and general editor of The ICA Cookbook, The ICA Book of Home and Family, The ICA Book of Tea & Company and, most recently, The ICA Book of Christmas. In 2015, she teamed up with Great Irish Beverages to launch the inaugural Dublin Wine Fest and Irish Cider & Food Day.

This feature first appeared in The Herald and is reproduced with their kind permission.