06.25.2008

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Going Beyond Grocery Store Walls

A New Study from Retail Intel

Consumer behavior at grocery stores and restaurants is at a crossroads. Understand the larger, cultural shifts occurring in food consumption and learn the current definition of "food culture" and how it impacts consumer choices.

Learn more »

04.16.2008"Food Trends of College Students"

04.02.2008"What Emerging Dining Trends Can Teach Us"

02.06.2008"Understanding Consumer Culture"

03.28.2007 "The 'Fiber' of Organics"

11.14.2007 "4 Signs of Changing Tastes: The Adoption of Ethnic Foods in America"

11.07.2007"Fresh Thinking on Fresh"

09.05.2007 "Restaurant Trends: Looking to the past to tell the future"

08.29.2007"Multicultural Foods"

06.20.2007"4 Key Implications of the Globalization of Food"

04.11.2007"New Paradigms in Eating: From Healthy to Quality"

01.24.2007"What Makes Local Special"

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Chef Confidential: Tales from the Frontlines of Food Culture

New Orleans, Louisiana, a city with as unique a food culture as any in the world. It’s home to an array of world-renown culinary delights: Creole, Cajun, muffuletta, crawfish, café au lait, beignets, gumbo, red rice and beans and so much more. New Orleans attracts and inspires chefs and would-be chefs alike from around the globe; its tasty influence reaches the far ends of the food world.

Seemingly a culinary world away, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, boasts of no such influence, unless one counts the Philly Cheesesteak. But, that would be a stretch; Philadelphia is over an hour away by car. Famous culinary shortcomings aside, Bethlehem is a wonderful city: In 2006 Money magazine named it one of the Top 100 Best Cities to Live. Like all great cities, Bethlehem does have its share of great restaurants. It is here, within the kitchen of Bolete Restaurant, that a common bond can be found with New Orleans.

Bolete Restaurant was named by Condé Nast Traveler Magazine as “one of the world’s most exciting NEW restaurants” in 2008. Chef Lee Chizmar and partner, general manager Erin Shea have reinvented a neglected shambled 200-year-old building into an intimate dining experience. Cast iron-seared East Coast halibut, bacon, littlenecks, cockles, celery root, and potato leek puree all grace the menu.

In the oldest section of the French Quarter in New Orleans is another 200-year-old building. This historic Creole cottage is home to one of the city’s treasures, Bayona Restaurant and its James Beard Award-winning chef, Susan Spicer. The greeting to its website best captures the essence of Bayona: “Our restaurant gives you New Orleans. Our menu gives you the world.” Not too likely you’ll find Italian sausage-stuffed rabbit loin, paneed leg, escarole, cippolini, white beans and marsala sauce in the prepared foods section of your local supermarket.

Although American consumers spend an estimated $5.2 billion on prepared foods in supermarkets, it pales in comparison to the $588 billion in restaurant sales. Setting aside the current economic woes, it’s still safe to say that American consumers jump at the chance to eat out. Why is this?

For starters, restaurants set the stage for what is now the most dominant food trend in our era: the trend toward all things fresh, seasonal and local. And, with experiences set to dominate far beyond the foreseeable future, the contemporary consumer infatuation with authentic, high-quality food experience knows few bounds.

A select set of current kitchens and dining experiences, like Bayona and Bolete, we believe hold the secrets of what is to come in the years ahead for not just restaurant trends, but packaged goods as well. HartBeat recently interviewed Bolete’s Lee Chizmar and Bayona’s Susan Spicer to talk about things that inspire and things that turn them off in the world of food, about keeping up with consumers’ changing tastes and about inspiration and food trends in general.

Here are some excerpts from these talks. Bon appétit.

HartBeat: What changes have you seen occurring in the World of Food?

Susan Spicer: “Obviously, more awareness on the part of diners, more curiosity and more awareness of ingredients and kinds of food. People are more adventurous. One huge thing I’ve noticed is the increased amount of food allergies, and that is something I never heard of when we first started cooking 30 years ago. I never had those kinds of issues in the kitchen then, and today it’s an everyday occurrence.”

HB: How have you had to adapt your menu to accommodate food allergies?

SS: “To a few consumers they are life threatening while others you suspect they say they are allergic but what it really comes down to is they just don’t like something. But you can’t take any chances. Fortunately, we are very adaptable, it’s not hard to come up with a dish that’s gluten-free. As a fine dining restaurant it’s probably easier for us to be gluten-free because we don’t use a lot of packaged foods or foods that have additives and hidden gluten products. When you’re using fresh food and fresh ingredients it seems a bit easier to keep it in check.”

HB: What do you see as hot right now? Or what do you see on the way out?

Lee Chizmar: “For the past couple of years, I think the biggest thing has been finding a farm and planting your own produce. We plant our own on a friend’s farm near here and two years from now most of our produce will come from there. We just built a cheese cave in the basement of the restaurant in which we’re going to start making our own cheese. That’s a big trend right now at fine restaurants, being able to have agriculture in your area, which the restaurants own, especially with the price of gas. I see doing everything in house. Rather than having the same menu all the time, things change with the seasons and weekly availability.”

HB: We see in our research how so many people live and die by The Food Network. Why do think this is? Do you hear it?

LC: “It’s pretty incredible how much people talk about it. When I go out to the tables or someone invites me to a party, it’s a lot about restaurants, Food Network, farming, local agriculture and produce. One of the big conversations I hear people having is, ‘Where can I go to get some of these ingredients? Where can I buy this stuff?’ All of which I think is nice that people are actually starting to look for it at least in this area and other parts of the country.”

HB: How do you navigate consumers’ changing tastes?

SS: “I think people come in, check you out and if they like what you’re doing then they come back. Once they’ve built trust in your style or what you’re doing they’ll tend to be pretty adventurous, they give us permission to do what we want. There’s always going to be things chefs like more than regular diners; we’ll always try to sell the fresh anchovies or odd things that sound good to chefs but don’t sell well to customers. I’ve had this restaurant 18 years and have been cooking in New Orleans since 1979, so I know pretty well what will fly and what won’t; I know my customer base really well.”

HB: Is there something you see going on in the food world that really turns you off?

SS: “I would say over manipulation of food.”

LC: “The chain restaurant. Everything is in mass quantities; their sauces are in bags, a lot is frozen. As far as cooking goes, there’s a lot of reheating, things have been prepared on a mass level. It’s an assembly line, a factory: push people in and push people out.”

HB: Do you ever think that the menu entrees you create and serve may one day end up on grocer’s shelves?

LC: “The one thing that’s good about what we do is that some things would be very hard to mass produce to a point where you can really tell the difference. Take hollandaise sauce as an example. It lasts about three hours once it’s made fresh; it takes a lot to make it. Knorr has it in a package. It’s not even comparable. Fresh hollandaise is one of the best things in the world. Good food can be done on any level. You have to make an extra effort and perhaps use more local products.”

SS: “Some of it absolutely. Definitely family pizzas, and the whole organic, vegetarian thing. Even Stouffer’s and Healthy Choice seem to be creating restaurant dishes. You may see something in a local grocery store, take the muffuletta sandwich. The main thing that makes a muffuletta a genuine muffuletta is the olive salad that goes in it. That’s a local product that definitely was not developed for a grocery store first—it was a culinary creation.”

HB: With all your success, what’s your philosophy for staying ahead in the game?

SS: “Old dogs can learn new tricks. I don’t want to think that I’ve done all that I can do. I want my cuisine to stay fresh, inventive and moving forward. It’s fun to be creative and try to do more with less. It’s fun to think of different things and not rely on more traditional stuff.”

LC: "We're always trying to raise the bar. Every day needs to be better than the last one. Find the best product that you can. Let mother nature do all the work and then don’t do anything to mess it up. That's what we shoot for.”

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How do chefs dine when it isn't their turn to cook?

Stepping out of the kitchen and transforming from culinary masters to consumers, Chefs Susan Spicer and Lee Chizmar share their not-so-shameful food vices.

"I don’t even bother to disguise myself when I go through the drive-thru! I still love Popeye’s fried chicken, and I just discovered that the gravy on the mashed potatoes is one of the tastiest things. Another favorite is Haagen Daaz coffee ice cream. If you just kept handing me pints of it I would eat until my stomach exploded. Ice cream is the ultimate comfort food to me, it’s my favorite thing."
—Chef Susan Spicer

"As far as shameful vices go, I don’t have many – probably a good thing. Sometimes late at night pizza. We have an Italian restaurant behind us & they do a cheese steak stromboli that is really, really good. It probably takes 5-6 years off your life with each bite!"
—Chef Lee Chizmar