Getting up to speed on modern restaurant lingo

The food world is never stagnant, and new creations happen at a rapid pace. Just a tick over ten years ago there was no such thing as a Cronut, seven years ago the Impossible Burger didn’t exist, six years ago ruby chocolate was born, and the list goes on. It’s difficult to keep up with food trends and new food words that appear in the lexicon. Food writer Jill Dupleix understands and is here to help, giving us a primer on 11 recent innovations or unusual ingredients you might encounter on a modern restaurant menu.

She starts with the Coravin, which is a system that allows you to pour wine without uncorking the bottle by using a fine needle. This prevents exposing the wine to oxygen and allows restaurants to serve a larger variety of wines because they no longer worry about it going off. Next up is fioretto, a hybrid of broccoli and cauliflower that has long, thin stems and is topped with small florets that have a “lovely nutty flavour”. One term is not new but is rather an old-fashioned word that has been dusted off and is shining on menus once again. Gueridon is “tableside service in which waitstaff carve, serve or cook the food from a trolley.” I do not believe tableside service ever fully went away but calling it by this name is new to me.

Only one word on the list was familiar to me: hasselback, which is a preparation of potato where thin slices are cut just over halfway through a potato and fanned out, producing crispy edges and allowing flavors to soak into the potato flesh. I’ve been hasselback-ing all manner of vegetables for some time. Again, this is not a new term as hasselback potatoes have been around since at least the 1950s but it has only recently been resurrected and splashed on everyone’s social media feed because they are so photogenic.