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POSTMODERN DINING: Contemporary reflections on food trends
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April 2008

Imagine, if we had approached you in 1982 (some 10 years after Alice Waters and colleagues opened Chez Panisse) and said you need to be paying attention to Alice's quirky restaurant where she serves food crafted only from locally and seasonally sourced produce, dairy and meats, many of you would have thought us nuts. After all, in an era marked by the rapid expansion of over-wrought chain restaurants where the food itself was often an afterthought (think Hard Rock Café, Chuck E. Cheese, etc.) such a trend would have seemed patently absurd.

Fast forward to the present, where not only nearly every restaurant in America is following Waters's lead with ever-more complicated menus detailing the pedigree and lifestyle circumstances of each ingredient, but the venerable center-store of the mainstream supermarket is no longer relevant with consumers who have moved beyond the highly industrialized foods of yesteryear in search of fresher, higher quality and often times, more local food products.

A new generation of food manufacturers and retailers has been quick to embrace the spirit of all things fresh and local recognizing that consumers are more than willing to pay price premiums for goods and services that deliver on the upper end of the quality experiential scale.

As food culture evolved, consumers have begun to devote attention to more serious matters, namely, enjoying food on their terms, in a cultural fashion (via the food world and not the food industry's world) and for the food's sake.

Throughout this food culture evolution, consumers have been transitioning away from exercising careful nutrient-based choice at the shelf and at mealtime toward a more holistic understanding of high-quality food. Here our understanding of food shifts from something that must exist under our control to something that can be elevated to art for the sake of passionate enjoyment.

Where is this heading? Current cutting-edge restaurant trends suggest it is already time to begin thinking about the future. Specifically, we are finding that the general historical transition from food we control (the past) to food we begin to celebrate (the present) will become fully realized in the (not-too-distant) future. There we will stand in awe and amazement — and work hard — to enjoy our food as an elevated, quasi-religious experience.

Postmodern Dining: Elevating Food Experiences to New Levels

Reading about foodies uniting to transform the traditional dining experience leaves many of us intrigued by this emerging world of postmodern dining. There are two cutting-edge trends in the restaurant world. At one end of the spectrum we find the carefully crafted experience staged by the Authenticos-their underground restaurants, their meals served in abandoned bowling alleys, their communal tables and disdain for the customer's food preferences-are just as pretentious as any other experience. Whether dining at Chuck E. Cheese, in the Rainforest Cafe or in one of those medieval settings, replete with giant turkey legs and jousting tournaments, these are all carefully fabricated experiences designed to tap into a specific set of beliefs about what constitutes an entertaining dining experience. The thing the Authenticos never really understand is that all of these experiences are imagined to fit our desires; it is just that their experience happens to be all about authenticity.

The average Joe consumer is obviously far too busy to really devote the kind of effort to required to reimagine his or her daily food experience. And yet at the same time, we are surprised at how many consumers we encounter who are demonstrating a strain of this behavior, albeit in a much more diluted form.

We have been finding that while the general trend has been toward more dining outside the home, more and more consumers are turning to restaurant alternatives such as grocery stores and specialty stores. There they assemble a meal from various fresh and prepared food offerings before returning home to dine in, once again, a more communal setting. So in a strange way, we are seeing threads of this obsessive foodie behavior express itself in everyday settings.

What are the implications for the restaurant industry? For starters, the obvious issue is that the competitive set is now much larger. QSR restaurants, for example, now find themselves competing not just with fast-casual alternatives but, increasingly with the higher quality food offerings of grocery stores. As competition continues to heat up among the grocery sector, with more and more retailers upping their quality offerings as a means of competing with Wal-Mart, we suspect the number of diners defecting to grocery will only increase.

At the same time this presents amazing opportunities for non-restaurant or foodservice suppliers. There is no reason many of the brands that pervade the traditional grocery arena could not begin competing effectively with the restaurant sector by offering innovative high-quality, fresh options in grocery.

What Does This Mean?

While today's consumer is content to enjoy high-quality food in a conventional cultural context, the cutting-edge food folks are working diligently to ensure that our food experiences of the future give the food its proper due and reverence. If eating in the past was about utility and eating in the present is about quality, eating in the future will resemble a form of ritualized worship.

While many back in the day pooh-poohed the notion of fresh, local, and artisanally crafted foods advocated by Alice Waters, don't be too quick to dismiss the food trends emerging from the era of postmodern dining. You may just be staring at the future evolution of your own product or retail food experience.

Click here to download Tinderbox's report on Postmodern Dining: Contemporary Reflections on Food Trends>>