Celebrity chefs are, in many ways, our culinary tastemakers. When random food trends pop up
out of nowhere, our fav celeb chefs have a thing or two to say about them. Wondering
what your favorite celebrity chef has to say? Here are 14 popular food trends celeb chefs
can't stand.
Mention Martha Stewart and the name likely conjures up images of perfectly laid tables,
beautiful banquet spreads, and expertly decorated domestic spaces. Martha Stewart is known for
creating spaces of tranquility and tables filled with nourishing, delicious food. So
why would Martha Stewart hate on plant-based eating? Well, as Stewart told the Vancouver
Sun, it's not that she doesn't like plant-based foods or even vegetarianism or veganism. It's
the "fad" part of "plant-based eating fad" that she doesn't care for.
She assures readers that plant-based eating is a good thing and here to stay — so you
might be making a big mistake by just chalking it all up to a passing trend. In fact, Stewart
is so behind plant-based food options that, in 2020, she lent her face to a Subway Canada
commercial for the chain's Beyond Meat Meatballs, featuring its vegetarian-friendly meatball
subs. Stewart credits a range of factors for this “non-fad,” pointing to the wealth
of plant-based options diners have to pick from and the environmental ramifications of
meat-heavy diets.
Nigella Lawson has been pretty outspoken regarding her opinions on diet foods and restrictive
eating, so a Good Housekeeping article claiming that she "loathes" the terms "healthy food"
and "clean eating" isn't so surprising. Lawson said,
"I wouldn't want a life where I lived on chia seed pudding, just as I wouldn't want a life
where I lived on eggs Benedict or steak and chips. [...] You can guarantee that what people
think will be good for you this year, they won't next year."
"I like eating. And I don't like eating if the occasion of pleasure is not made the most
of."
And Lawson has a point. Over time, the recommended "healthy" diets and health foods have changed
vastly, as science continues to prove and disprove past assumptions, so what's considered
healthy today may not be considered healthy tomorrow. As Business Insider notes, only
a few decades ago, healthy food fads and trends included items like radioactive water. Even
more recently, Vitamin Water was all the rage and considered healthy, despite the fact that
the drink includes 33 grams of sugar.
Foam foods have gained quite a lot of attention over the last few decades. A foamed food is
simply any liquid food item that's been either pumped up with air or watered down, typically
via tools such as an immersion blender or an espuma gun, which uses nitrous oxide to
turn foods to foam.
You can find both savory and sweet foams, and both are typically popular at fine dining
restaurants. And Gordon Ramsay is firmly not a fan, at least where savory foams are concerned.
As he recounted a bone marrow foam that he tried while in Russia, he told PopSugar that
"Sometimes they look like toxic scum in a stagnant pool."
He feels a little bit better about dessert foams, though, and even serves a citrus foam
on top of a pineapple carpaccio as part of the Hell's Kitchen menu.
In the same PopSugar article, Gordon Ramsay went off on truffle oil, too, noting, in true
Ramsay style,
"The worst thing, for me, is truffle oil. That thing needs to be let down. [...] This
thing needs to be let out in tiny, tiny, little [amounts]."
But he is definitely not alone when it comes to his hate of truffle oil. For Giada De Laurentiis,
it sounds like she may think that some chefs are using truffle oil in everything simply
because they think it automatically upgrades their food or makes them seem a little more
knowledgeable than they are. As she told Bravo,
"It doesn't make you more of a gourmet cook to use truffle in everything. It's very overpowering.
Use in moderation! It's been overused a little too much.
And using truffle oil in moderation won't just rank your cooking a little bit higher
in her estimation. It may also save you quite a bit of money, too. While imitation truffle
oil that's filled with synthetic stuff can be relatively affordable for the average home
cook, real truffle oil made at home using genuine truffles can be extravagantly expensive,
thanks to truffles' wild price of $1,000 to $5,000 per pound. Kitchen Stories notes that,
if you're really dying for that true truffle flavor, but are operating on a budget, you'd
be best going with truffle salt.
Where De Laurentiis cautions cooks to use truffle oil in moderation and Ramsay says
to use it in "tiny, tiny, little [amounts]," Martha Stewart's hatred for truffle oil seems
to run a little bit deeper. At the 2018 Mohegan Sun Wine and Food Festival, TODAY asked Stewart
if there were any ingredients that she refused to use, and she reported back,
"Oh, I would never use truffle oil, oh never."
"The secret ingredient, if you can find it, is the white truffle oil." "OK, but the real
thing. Not the fabricated."
Avocado toast, no matter how delicious it is, has unfortunately received a pretty poor
reputation as the downfall of millennials. If only millennials would spend less money
on avocado toast, they could all buy houses! And pay off their student debt! And have children!
But the supposed economic impacts of avocado toast aren't the primary reason why Mary Berry
doesn't care for the popular brunch item.
Instead, the Great British Bake-Off judge said in an interview with Hello! that avocado
toast is basically a waste of avocado. She also mentioned the retro food fad that she'd
rather see in avocado toast's place, saying,
"Better to add them to a prawn cocktail or to a little plate of smoked salmon or shrimps.
And I love prawn cocktail – it's so retro! [...] People used to laugh at prawn cocktail
because it felt dated, but it's coming back."
In Hello!, Mary Berry likewise mentioned the absurdity of certain restaurant presentations.
"Serving food on slate tiles? Oh no — that's all very gimmicky [...] And I don't like it
when a plate is zigzagged with sauce across it or dropped in little blobs in circles."
While some diners might be entertained by the odd restaurant presentations that are
becoming increasingly trendy, it seems we're all quite self-aware of just how ridiculous
some of the restaurant presentations out there are — and they go far beyond Mary Berry's
disliked sauce zigzags and blobs.
Just take a look at the popular Twitter account We Want Plates, which was started in 2015
and has since amassed a following of more than 155,000 people. All would rather eat
off some simple plates than some of the interesting restaurant presentations they've been served,
including everything from one user's experience with beef draped over a knock-off Barbie doll
to another's confrontation with mozzarella sticks served in a Croc.
But before there was avocado toast or dessert served atop VHS cases, there was molecular
gastronomy, the trendiest of all food trends. At first glance, you might think that Alton
Brown would be a fan of molecular gastronomy. But, as Kitchn says,
"Alton believes that the popularity and labeling of such things [as molecular gastronomy] creates
cooks who are less interested in the more 'basic' skills of cooking ... [T]his new breed
of chef who is label-driven is more interested in the cool tricks and less concerned with
the proper cooking of an egg."
Meanwhile, Tyler Florence doesn't hold back at all. In a New York Magazine interview,
he says,
"I think Ferran Adria [the creator of molecular gastronomy] sparked a lot of interest in people.
In the right hands, that kind of food is mind-blowing; it makes you think about things. But the ripple
effect of that, of the guys who are trying to knock him off [...] it's just gross. It's
terrible, it's disgusting, it's horrible cooking."
It's true: Southern food has experienced a renaissance. Just look at the explosion of
fried chicken sandwiches, for instance. According to Us, Alton Brown says he's "tired" of anything
made in the Southern United States being slapped with the "Southern food" label. He recommends
that we all just focus on good food versus bad food, admitting he's "over labels" and
that "we've beaten Southern food about to death."
Besides, just because you're calling something "Southern" doesn't make it so. For example,
Brand Eating reported that 7-Eleven opened a Southern-inspired fried chicken restaurant
in Manhattan. However, the Southern authenticity is certainly up for question, especially when
you consider that Southern cuisine as a whole is evolving rapidly. Sure, if you cross into
the South, you can still find your barbecue, your meat-and-threes and your farm-to-table
fare. But, as Thrillist points out, you can also find a range of international cuisines
that are claiming traditionally Southern ingredients and foodways as their own, and to great success.
So, maybe think of Alton Brown's advice the next time you proclaim you love Southern cuisine
when really you just love a good piece of fried chicken or a bowl of cheesy grits.
Where a lot of the celebrity chefs on this list are spewing their hate for food trends
that have been around for quite a while, such as truffle oil and molecular gastronomy, Guy
Fieri's most-hated food trend is actually pretty new. In fact, it reached brand-new
heights over the COVID-19 pandemic, but Fieri was proclaiming his dislike for this trend
before it even really became a trend, way back in 2015. What does he dislike so much?
Online grocery shopping.
In a blog for Food Network, he admitted that buying groceries online fills him with "worry
and anticipation of what's coming," saying,
"I want to smell those oranges, I want to see those bananas, I want to feel, I want
to look at those beets. I want to see the asparagus. I know the picture, but you're
not going to send me that exact asparagus."
The chef further went on to say he loves going to the grocery store in person, specifically
to shop for whatever he's actually going to cook that day. The only thing he doesn't like
when it comes to the in-person shopping experience? Carts with wobbly wheels.
At some point in time, burgers became so much more than just burgers. Gourmet burgers made
of high-class ingredients began popping up on fine-dining menus. Burger toppings started
to include not just your basic lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion, cheese, but branched out to
include all sorts of fancy things, from aioli to the hated truffle oil to bacon jams and
pork belly. But when is enough finally enough?
And as the late, great Anthony Bourdain noted in a Food & Wine interview,
"It's dismaying, but I completely understand the impulse. What chef wants to die broke?
And let's face it: Burgers are good. But it is definitely a little dismaying, any time
you see really great chefs cooking below their abilities by putting out a burger."
"It makes me violent, actually."
In the same interview, though, Bourdain does say that he's not "categorically" against
food trends, just "dismayed" or "annoyed" as the situation requires, admitting that
he's a "jaded foodie observer" and that sometimes food trends are at least based on good ideas.
Still, next time you're in the midst of a burger craving, consider keeping it simple.
Lastly, Alex Guarnaschelli says what you may have been thinking throughout this entire
video: leave my trends alone! That is, if you're a foodie who loves a good food fad
and trying the next big thing at brunch and posting it all over your social media, anway.
She told Us,
"I wish people would stop calling a doughnut, or a cupcake of any kind, a trend. I wish
the trend of labeling things a trend would go away. For me, a doughnut, and a cupcake,
they're just eternal. So is a muffin and a scone. I think they should be left alone."
So, if you found yourself offended by a certain chef's dislike for truffle oil or Mary Berry
looking down on avocado toast, follow in the footsteps of Guarnaschelli and hold on to
your favorite food trend that will be eternal for you. Have fun with it, even if Martha
Stewart rips your favorite truffle oil brand. Lie in bed and order all of your groceries
from your phone, even if it means disappointing the Mayor of Flavor Town. After all, as Nigella
Lawson notes, these trends are here one day and gone the next, so you might as well enjoy
them while you can.
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