When you think about breakfast, you think about eggs, right? But eggs on a dinner menu? Eggs as features that dress up standard main courses? Eggs instead of sauces?
That's what's happening around hundreds of menus these days. Clever chefs are creatively adding eggs to both lunch and dinner dishes … and the reasons are pretty clear:
- They're a cheap way to dress up a dish.
- They're highly photogenic, so bloggers zoom right in on them.
- They add an element of culinary surprise.
- If they're properly runny, then oozing yolks can double as a lip-smacking sauce. Or provide a sauce over a sauce - something rich and soothing over something with vibrant acidity. Yum!
But what's the appeal to consumers? Here's where it gets interesting.... because consumers look at unexpected eggs in main courses as:
- A great way to add a voluptuous mouth-feel to a dish.
- A symbol of home; a symbol of comfort food – especially when the eggs are local or organic or come with some sort of pedigree.
- A symbol of safety and reassurance in tough economic times.
- A symbol of self-gratification: Screw the cholesterol – we'll have oatmeal tomorrow.
In this report, we'll show how eggs are being used to add value to otherwise very simple dishes.
We'll show how eggs are being applied to upscale dishes to make them seem more sophisticated. We'll talk a bit about how eggs are adding culinary muscle to a new breed of sandwiches.
And we'll show how chefs are deploying the familiarity of an egg to merchandise some odd-ball dishes that ordinarily would be difficult to sell.
Full story:
www.baumwhiteman.com/eggtrends.pdf Photo: London EaterBAUM+WHITEMAN creates high-profile restaurants around the world for hotels, restaurant companies, major museums and other consumer destinations. Our projects include the late Windows on the World, the Rainbow Room, the world's first food courts, and five three-star restaurants in New York. Presently we are creating five F&B venues for a new Starwood property in Punjab, a multi-story, multi-tenant restaurant venture in New York, and working on a two-hotel development in Mumbai. We have run trends seminars for Taj Hotels, Mumbai; Starwood Asia- Pacific, Bangkok; Certified Angus Beef Convention, Scottsdale; Culinary Institute of America, Napa Valley; Les Dames d'Escoffier Convention, Philadelphia; Club Corporation of America Convention, Austin. We were keynote speakers at the New Directions conference for Restaurant-Hospitality magazine, and at the Protein Summit for Hotels magazine.BAUM+WHITEMAN LLC
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