Food

Menu maven Nancy Kruse shares her take on emerging and evergreen trends

These are the flavors, ingredients, techniques and items with staying power through 2022 into 2023.

Menu guru Nancy Kruse, who writes the State of the Plate column for Restaurant Business, keeps a close watch on trends in chain and independent restaurants.

She is seeing that several favorites that gained popularity in the last two years—like chicken sandwiches and cauliflower—are still going strong, showing up with global flavor twists. And burgers and pizza will always be platforms for creativity with broad appeal. Kruse believes that the more familiar an item, the more adaptable it is for innovation.

Nancy Kruse
Nancy Kruse

But forward-thinking culinarians are playing around with less familiar ingredients and flavors, taking vegetables to new heights, exploring the potential of food texture and smoke and elevating staples, like butter, with chef-inspired touches. Listen as Kruse talks about the mega trends and emerging trends impacting menus now.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe on Spotify

Also, we are now on Alexa. Log into your Amazon account, look for “Menu Feed podcast” to enable the skill. Once it’s enabled, all you need to do to listen is say, “Alexa, play ‘Menu Feed.’”

Members help make our journalism possible. Become a Restaurant Business member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.

Multimedia

Exclusive Content

Financing

Once a skeptic, Domino's embraces third-party aggregators

The Bottom Line: The pizza chain’s deal with DoorDash appears to be working as expected, according to the data firm M Science. Those aggregators have become vital for Domino’s market share, and other chains too.

Food

Lime Fresh Mexican Grill carves out a new pizza category on its menu

Behind the Menu: The Miami-based fast casual partnered with a Florida hot sauce company to launch scratch-made Mexican pizzas with local flavor.

Emerging Brands

Dillas is ready to leave the emerging brand category behind

This 11-unit drive-thru quesadilla concept took a year off of growth to work out some kinks. Now co-founder Kyle Gordon feels the brand is ready to become the next Raising Cane's.

Trending

More from our partners