Top 10 food and drink trends

Casual dining and comfort food are proving big hitters with pizza, chicken, doughnuts and tea among today’s culinary success stories.

With London having emerged as the culinary capital of the world, the pace of change in the city is fast. While last year people went wobbly at the knees for MeatLiquor burgers, Pitt Cue Co pulled pork buns and MASH steaks, chicken is indisputably the meat of choice in 2013, with Zuma founders Rainer Becker and Arjun Waney choosing to open a rotisserie restaurant rather than a steakhouse on the 32nd floor of The Shard.

Meanwhile, pizza is also enjoying its moment in the sun, with Polpo’s Russell Norman soon to open a Brooklyn-style pizzeria in Soho and the erstwhile peripatetic Homeslice London setting up a fixed address in Covent Garden offering gourmet pizzas by the slice and Prosecco on tap, another trend emerging in the capital despite the practice being banned in 2009.

Also on the fizz front, a buzz is building around cava with two specialist cava bars opening in the capital in as many months, offering flights, tapas and vintage examples of the northeastern Spanish sparkler. On the subject of vintage offerings, forward-thinking London bars have been expanding their liquid libraries with vintage spirits, serving cocktails mixed with 19th century rye and Edwardian gin at £100 a glass.

And if it all gets too much, Londoners can lay off the sauce and switch to tea, which is seeing a surge in popularity through the opening of a slew of tea bars across town, offering everything from bubble teas and chais to vintage and single estate brews at the top end – gan-bei!

Click through the following pages to find out more about the top 10 food trends.

Doughnuts

Homer Simpson’s favourite snack is the latest sweet treat to get the gourmet treatment, knocking the cutesy cupcake off its saccharine perch.

While Krispy Kreme has been serving up glazed rings in London for over a decade, a new breed of doughnut is emerging in the capital, championed by top chefs like Yotam Ottolenghi and Fergus Henderson of St John, who have been plying sweet-toothed Londoners with sugary delights, the former specialising in Spanish churros with fennel seed dipping sugar and doughnuts stuffed with walnuts and sesame, and the latter’s filled withhomemade jams, including strawberry, raspberry, rhubarb and peach, with his salted caramel custard doughnut proving a best seller.

Pizza East, meanwhile, sells hot cinnamon rings with Amedei chocolate and Fulham gastropub the Harwood Arms brown sugar doughnuts with sea buckthorn and sour cream. Late night revellers can get their sugar fix at Soho House’s Electric Donuts.

Based in the foyer of the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, which recently reopened having been ravaged by a fire, Electric Donuts offers exciting flavours like bergamot orange; lemon and poppy seed; and the decadent sounding buttermilk old fashioned at £1.50 a go. The savoury doughnut is also springing up around town, with Duck & Waffle serving a spicy ox cheek version and chef trio Free Company serving them stuffed with chicken liver parfait at a recent pop-up at the Endurance pub in Soho.

Pizza

While Santa Maria in Ealing and Franco Manca in Brixton got the dough ball rolling a few years ago, pizza is set for its moment in the sun this year, with more “by the slice” restaurants emerging in the capital.

With Pizza East setting the high-end tone with offerings such as veal meatballs, prosciutto and cream, Polpo’s Russell Norman is set to move beyond the confines of the Venetian bacaro with an “egalitarian” pizza restaurant in a cavernous site in Soho inspired by the pizzerias of New York’s Brooklyn district, with toppings made from locally sourced, seasonal ingredients.

In addition to a rotisserie, the aforementioned Oblix, which recently opened in The Shard, also serves New York-style pizzas from a wood fired oven, while pop-up pizza pioneers Home slice London opened a permanent site in Covent Garden’s Seven Dials in March serving pizzas hand-rolled on a marble counter then blitzed in a wood fired oven, with offerings including the likes of artichoke and courgette with lemon and parsley; and bone marrow, spring onion and watercress at £4 a slice and £20 a pizza.

For a decent slice from the street during the week, the Pizza Pilgrims – brothers Thom and James – serve Neapolitan-style, supermodel-thin pizzas from a food truck at Berwick Street Market.

Chicken

Chicken is indisputably the meat of 2013. Following on from a trend that started last autumn at places like Mark Hix’s “no choice” restaurant Tramshed in Shoreditch, offering either homegrown steak or a whole roast chicken enjoyed under the watchful eyes of a cow and a cockerel floating in formaldehyde courtesy of Damien Hirst.

Also getting Londoners clucking with delight are Chicken Shop in Kentish Town, where you can order a quarter (£4), half (£8) of whole (£14.50) free-range bird from the spit, with hot sauce, smoky sauce or naked, and Clockjack Oven in Soho, which offers herb-marinated free range chicken roasted on a spit over a naked flame and served with a range of homemade sauces.

The strongest indicator that the chicken trend is here to stay is Zuma founders Rainer Becker and Arjun Waney’s decision to open a rotisserie restaurant, Oblix, on the 32nd floor of The Shard. But chicken is a versatile creature and the capital is also in a free-range fried chicken frenzy, spearheaded by Brixton newcomer Wishbone, where fried wings and thighs come in a variety of guises, from Korean double fried with daikon, to salt ‘n’ pepper chicken with Asian mayo.

The shack is also earning praise for its sours at £5.50 a pop, where customers get to choose their base spirit. Meanwhile, Jackson Boxer’s Rita’s Bar and Dining in Dalston is gaining a cult reputation for its Southern fried chicken in a sweet glazed bun presented to diners in a brown paper bag, with fried chicken and waffles served on Sundays.

All-day dining

The long-awaited opening of the London branch of New York brasserie Balthazar in Covent Garden in March firmly stamped all-day dining on the capital’s culinary map. The brainchild of Bethnal Green-born father of five Keith McNally, the man behind some of New York’s most successful casual dining restaurants, from The Odeon to Pastis, Balthazar takes an egalitarian approach, offering breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and brunch at weekends, with signature dish steak frites and béarnaise sauce making it across the pond.

In addition is an abundance of fruits de mer and classic bistro dishes like French onion soup, foie gras terrine, steak tartare and moules frites. While the buzz surrounding Balthazar is at fever pitch, and a table for dinner near impossible to score, McNally faces stiff competition from a slew of new brasseries offering affordable all-day dining in elegant surroundings.

Brasserie kings Chris Corbin and Jeremy King were early to the party with The Wolseley next to The Ritz in Piccadilly, which has had recipe books written in its honour. A sister site, Viennese café The Delaunay in Covent Garden, specialising in wiener schnitzels and Sachertorte, opened last year along with the cavernous, Art Deco-inspired, absurdly good value Brasserie Zedel in Piccadilly, which famously acerbic food critic AA Gill spilt his ink in excitement over when it opened.

Also new to the all-day dining scene is Corbin and King’s Café Colbert in Sloane Square and Eric Chavot’s Brasserie Chavot in Mayfair, where snail bourguignon headlines. Lest we forget the Russian-inspired all-day diner Bob Bob Ricard and its alluring “Press for Champagne” button.

The carafe

The carafe is becoming an increasingly popular wine measure in the capital, expanding from hip London wine bars and small plates restaurants to more mainstream venues. Smaller than a bottle but larger than a glass, the 250ml carafe is ideally suited to after-work drinking, when one glass isn’t enough but three is too many.

It also works well in casual dining restaurants built around sharing plates, allowing the opportunity for diversity and experimentation. Carafe offerings have become more interesting and plentiful in the last year, championed by the likes of Sir Terence Conran’s Lutyens Bar & Bistro on Fleet Street, which offers gems like Rafael Palacios Louro du Bolo Godello 2011 for £15 per 250ml, and Claude Bosi’s new Fulham gastropub The Malt House, which sells Musar Jeune by the 500ml carafe for £21.

The forward-thinking Arbutus Restaurant Group, formed of Arbutus, Wild Honey and Les Deux Salons, also trumpets the carafe, offering the majority of their wines by the 250ml measure, including La Spinetta Chianti Riserva 2007 for £19, and Tyrrell’s VAT 1 Semillon 2004 for £29 at Arbutus, and Duckhorn Merlot 2006 for £32 at Les Deux Salons.

Wild Honey, meanwhile, sells Pegasus Bay Sauvignon Blanc 2010 by the carafe for £15. Early pioneers of the carafe were Vinoteca, Xavier Rousset MS’s popular French bistro 28-50 and Eric Narioo’s natural wine-focused restaurants, which now include Terroirs, Brawn, Soif and newly opened Loire specialist Green Man & French Horn, all of which sell a variety of natural, organic and biodynamic wines by the 500ml “pot”.

Tea

Tea is the new coffee. Lured by its health benefits, the idea of fine and rare tea is being taken increasingly seriously in London with the emergence of tea bars selling vintage and single estate teas. HKK, the latest opening from the Hakkasan Group, has helped the tea trend along by selling vintage Puer-Tuo-Cha tea from 1980 and incorporating a tea ritual performed at diners’ tables midway through its signature 15-course tasting menu.

Meanwhile, South Carolina tea bar Amanzi Tea (meaning water in Zulu) opened a London branch in February offering 150 loose-leaf blends, from gunpowder green tea and dong ding oolong to chocolate orange truffle, along with iced teas, bubble teas, chais and tea-based virgin cocktails. At the top end are a small selection of single estate and vintage teas, which owner David Elghanayan, also co-owner of Vanquish Wine, is keen to expand.

“Tea is more versatile than coffee in terms of the flavour profiles you can create,” he says, adding, “Londoners are getting exposed to interesting local tea customs in the Middle East, Asia, India and Latin America and want that same high-end experience back home.”

Dim sum specialist Yauatcha was early in on the tea trend, with its ground floor designed to look like a traditional Chinese tea house where a tea ceremony is performed every afternoon. The restaurant boasts one of the most extensive tea lists in London, including Sri Lankan Ceylon, Indian Assam, Chinese silver needle, Taiwanese flower tea, an exhaustive selection of blue teas from China and a couple of 15-year-old vintage teas.

Even Richard Geoffroy, Dom Pérignon’s chef de cave, is keen to explore the world of fine and rare tea: “Tea could be my next big project. I’ve been tasting vintage teas from southern China from the 19th century. I like the idea of single estate tea, like single vineyard wine, and would like to do something with DP and tea,” he says.

Vintage cocktails

Veteran Italian bartender Salvatore Calabrese kicked off a vintage cocktail trend at his bar at The Playboy Club in Mayfair late last year when he broke the record for the world’s most expensive cocktail – Salvatore’s Legacy – priced at £5,500 a glass, composed of 1788 Clos de Griffier Vieux Cognac, 1770 Kummel Liqueur, 1860 Dubb Orange Curaçao and Angostura Bitters from the 1900s.

Nightjar in Shoreditch quickly followed suit with a vintage spirits list at affordable prices. Sourced by co-owner Edmund Weil, highlights include a bottle of 1863 Hannisville Rye, a Monticello Rye from Baltimore dating back to the 1880s, El Chico rum from the 1930s, Lapostolle Cognac c.1910, and Fox’s Cherry Brandy from the 1940s.

Samples are available from £30, while a Manhattan made with rye from 1863 and a Martinez mixed with Old Tom gin from 1910 are priced at £100 each. Also in on the vintage cocktail act are the Experimental Cocktail Club and the City of London Distillery bar, which specialises in vintage gin, offering a Connoisseurs Martini made with gin from the 1960s.

The ECC, meanwhile, has sourced unusual French spirits and liqueurs from the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, such as Amer Picon, Green Chartreuse, Benedictine, Eaux d’Arquebuse and Noilly Prat Red, with bar manager Thor Bergquist creating a vintage cocktail menu to show them off. A Vintage Stinger, made with Martel XO from the 1950s, costs £150, while a twist on the Manhattan – Vintage Purgatory – tops the list at £200, made from 1951 Old Overholt Rye, Benedictine from the ‘50s and Green Chartreuse from the ‘70s.

Cava bars

A buzz is also building around cava with two dedicated cava bars opening in the capital in as many months. Billing itself as “London’s largest cava bar”, the Aqua Nueva Cava Bar at Spanish restaurant Aqua Nueva in Oxford Circus, opened in March.

Offering 15 cavas by the glass and bottle, alongside a selection of tapas, among the sparklers in the line-up are Kripta Gran Reserva, Alta Alella Laieta, Canals Nadal Brut Reserva, Augusti Torello Grand Reserva, Heredad Brut Reserva, Conde de Caralt Rosado and Privat Opus Evolutium.

The bar also offers a flight of three flutes of Castillo Perelada, including Gran Claustro 2008, for £19. To highlight cava’s food matching capabilities, head chef Alberto Hernandez creates a daily tapas menu featuring dishes like seafood tartare with ajo blanco; and grilled cuttlefish with squid ink and alioli.

Across town, Richard Bigg, owner of Spanish restaurant group Camino, has opened London’s “first authentic dedicated cava bar” at Camino San Pablo in St Paul’s. Rather than linking directly with a brand as he did with González Byass at Sherry shack Bar Pepito, the cava bar offers a democratic selection from a number of different houses. Bigg believes cava delivers more in terms of depth of flavour than Prosecco. “Cava offers a lot more complexity than Prosecco.

The general quality is improving all the time, and there is a range of styles and a number of different grape varieties to play with,” he says.

Prosecco on tap

While global Champagne sales continue to slide, UK consumers are developing a thirst for Prosecco, which has emerged as the star performer in the sparkling wine category in both the on- and off-trade. Year-on-year on-trade volume sales of Prosecco are up 8.6%, with a recent trend having emerged for serving “Prosecco” on tap in London’s causal dining restaurants, despite the fact that the practice was banned in 2009 when the Prosecco region was elevated to DOCG status.

Covent Garden pizza restaurant Homeslice London, the brainchild of restaurateur Mark Wogan (son of Sir Terry), serves Prosecco on tap along with Italian small plates restaurant Tozi across town in Victoria, which also offers Prosecco-based Venetian cocktails like the Aperol Spritz and Bellini.

“On tap is the traditional way to serve Prosecco in Venice and Tozi is about recreating this authentic experience while also appealing to a young audience switched on to current bar trends,” says Tozi’s manager Velio di Nolfo, who is able to lower the cost to just £4 a flute by selling the sparkler on tap.

To cater to London’s growing thirst for Italian fizz, Liberty Wines provides Glera (as of 2009 the Prosecco variety’s official name) in kegs for a number of on-trade outlets, with Vinoteca and 10 Greek Street in Soho taking on Cantina Colli Euganei Extra Dry Glera by the keg.

Aperitivo hour

Londoners are catching on to the Milanese tradition of the aperitivo hour, where workers spill out of their offices around 6pm and into nearby bars to unwind with an apéritif like a Negroni or an Aperol Spritz served with complimentary plates of antipasti, cured meats and cheeses before dinner.

Buoyed by the recent surge in interest for Italian bitters like Campari, Aperol, Fernet Branca and Antica Formula, aperitivo hour offerings are popping up across the capital in various guises. Grupo Campari, which owns the Campari and Aperol brands, reported strong UK sales last year due to a growing interest in the apéritif culture in Britain, with Russell Norman’s popular small plates restaurant Polpo on Beak Street the number one unit in the UK for Campari and Aperol sales.

Heading up chef Theo Randall’s aperitivo hour cocktail list at his eponymous Italian restaurant at the InterContinental hotel on Park Lane is the Montalbano – a mixture of Moscato d’Asti, Martini Bianco, Campari, Galliano and a splash of Bombay Sapphire gin, named after the Sicilian police inspector in Andrea Camilleri’s novels.

Over at Apero at the Ampersand Hotel in South Kensington, taking centre stage in the aperitivo hour line-up is the Tintoretto – a blend of Banks rum, Antica Formula and Amer Picon, named after the 16th century Venetian painter, while at Banca in Mayfair, from 5-7pm every Tuesday to Friday, customers that buy an apéritif at the bar are offered snacks such as salt cod fritters, pizzette, seared octopus, zucchini fritti and Sicilian calamari.