Food and geography have always paired well. With restaurants boasting seasonal fare and regional specialties, location has never been so popular. For the last two years, Danish chef Rene Redzepi has garnered the Best Restaurant in the World award for elevating local foraging to haute cuisine; one recipe in his cookbook, for example, is called “Blueberries surrounded by their natural environment.” So, too, have restaurants that focus on a particular period of time. Renowned chef Grant Achatz’s new restaurant, Next, turns dining into theatre with themes like “Paris, 1906” and “Childhood.” This phenomenon of “scenario dining” turns meals into deeply powerful, sensorial experiences.
With concerns for an increasingly synthetic world, it’s no wonder that we’ve embraced food with emotional substance. A new pattern is starting to form: traditional faith-based cuisine.
It’s easy to imagine Moroccan cafes (place), kitschy American diners (time) and even Uighur restaurants (ethnic group). Rarely, however, do we see menus centered on Orthodox Christian or Jain cuisine- yet religion has an enormous influence on cultural rituals surrounding food. When Grubstreet.com found a menu for Kutscher’s in TriBeCa, they mentioned that it might be “time to officially declare ‘modern Jewish cuisine’ a trend.” The Wall Street Journal showed that handcrafted knishes and organic lox are gaining ground across the United States, and not just with those of Jewish faith. A New York Times article recently featured “redefined Mormon cuisine,” and Halal food is poised to become a booming market. All of these examples place faith, not location or time, as their central inspiration.
It’s not surprising if you look at our collective desire for more human, empathetic experiences. Dishes with religious origins have all the factors needed to create ties between plate and patron: heritage, emotionally significant holidays, association with childhood and family, and traditional ritual. This is the new definition of emotional eating- finding deeper connections to food and the context in which it was intended.