Chef Chatter
Chef Chatter: Vegas chef on what's hot for 2019
Shaun King, the executive chef at Momofuku Las Vegas, predicts 2019 menu trends.
November 2, 2018
Editor's note: Chef Chatter is a series featuring chefs-authored blogs. If you'd like to write a Chef Chatter blog, send your idea to editor@fastcasual.com.
Momofuku at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas is known for creating new and exciting dishes for their guests, and Executive Chef Shaun King has some interesting menu predictions and believes fast casual and serverless brands are the wave of the future.
Q: What do you predict will be the hottest trends of 2019?
A: Dry-aged poultry and pork, higher-end quick service restaurants, three-ingredient dishes and showcasing exceptional products. I also believe there will be more house-fermented hot sauces, aging in toasted grains or barley, cold-pressed juice and serverless restaurants.
Q: Which ingredients will we see more of next year?
A: More house-fermentation, unique grains, aging of poultry and pork and koji.
Q: Which presentations will we see more of next year?
A: There will be a shift back to the classics. Less tweezers-focused food, molecular gastronomy and micro-greens and more focus on origin and stories of certain dishes.
Q: Are there any current trends that you believe will continue into the new year?
A: Activated charcoal is gone, but toasts and large-format dining will continue. Large-format dining is like a celebration for the table and we are all in this together. Cooks also take great care in large-format entrees, as they usually take hours to produce.
Q: What are your thoughts on seafood trends?
A: We will start seeing a greater variety of unusual seafood offerings, such as squid, cuttle-fish, geoduck and roe. Uni is everywhere now, but that wasn’t the case a few years ago. People are getting more adventurous and letting the chef run their dining experience.
Q: Are there any dessert trends that you believe will become more popular?
A: I think we will start seeing more juxtaposition with savory in sweets—for example, bone marrow, puffed beef tendon, chicken skin and fermented products like miso and koji.
Q: Regarding cocktails, what are some flavors we will see more of next year?
A: More rum-focused bars and less gin. Rum is so complex and I believe it has a more rounded palette in which to create cocktails. I also think there will be more sherry and fewer mules…hopefully. Regarding drinks in general, I think we’ll see a resurgence of more “natural” approaches (i.e. unfiltered wines, beer and sake).
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