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New on the Menu

Articles on new and innovative food and beverage items trending across the independent restaurant landscape

New on the Menu: Corn ribs and mapo mac & cheese

Plus a corn chowder with bone marrow, shrimp with ouzo and a Puebla-style tlayuda

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

June 11, 2021

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Overthrow Hospitality has, for years, been quietly running bars all over New York City with meatless menus. The customers don’t seem to miss the animal protein, and their chefs have become very creative with vegetables, like the corn “ribs,” that are being served at the company’s newest cocktail bar, Etérea.

Also in New York, the team that brought Morgan’s Texas-style barbecue to Brooklyn has opened Tiny’s Cantina a few blocks away. Originally conceived of during the pandemic as a takeout-friendly tlayuderia — a tlayuda is a type of Oaxacan pizza, sort of — it opened as the city was opening up and became more of a taqueria with a full bar. But there’s still a tlayuda on the menu, reinterpreted by Poblano chef Cenobio Canalizo.

Nice Day is another restaurant that opened in New York during the pandemic — a takeout spinoff of fast-casual Chinese concept Junzi Kitchen. They’ve revamped their menu, including a dish that mashes up two comfort foods: Mac & cheese and mapo tofu.

Meanwhile, in Nashville, Kristin Beringson is the new executive chef of Henley, where she’s serving curried corn chowder with a chunk of bone marrow. And in Chicago, the fourth location of Avli has opened and features a traditional dish of shrimp with ouzo, with the not-so-traditional addition of smoked feta cheese.

Related:New on the Menu: Cereal shots and chickpea loaf

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected] 

Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

About the Author

Bret Thorn

Senior Food Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Senior Food & Beverage Editor

Bret Thorn is senior food & beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality for Informa’s Restaurants and Food Group, with responsibility for spotting and reporting on food and beverage trends across the country for both publications as well as guiding overall F&B coverage. 

He is the host of a podcast, In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn, which features interviews with chefs, food & beverage authorities and other experts in foodservice operations.

From 2005 to 2008 he also wrote the Kitchen Dish column for The New York Sun, covering restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves in New York City.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after spending about five years in Thailand, where he wrote articles about business, banking and finance as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality’s staff in 2016 while retaining his position at NRN. 

A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thorn also studied traditional French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. He spent his junior year of college in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University and Beijing University. While in Beijing, he also worked for ABC News during the protests and ultimate crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thorn’s monthly column in Nation’s Restaurant News won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column.

He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council, or IFEC, in 2005.

Thorn wrote the entry on comfort food in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2nd edition, published in 2012. He also wrote a history of plated desserts for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, published in 2015.

He was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

A Colorado native originally from Denver, Thorn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bret Thorn’s areas of expertise include food and beverage trends in restaurants, French cuisine, the cuisines of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, restaurant operations and service trends. 

Bret Thorn’s Experience: 

Nation’s Restaurant News, food & beverage editor, 1999-Present
New York Sun, columnist, 2005-2008 
Asia Times, sub editor, 1995-1997
Manager magazine, senior editor and restaurant critic, 1992-1997
ABC News, runner, May-July, 1989

Education:
Tufts University, BA in history, 1990
Peking University, studied Chinese language, spring, 1989
Nanjing University, studied Chinese language and culture, fall, 1988 
Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine, Cértificat Elémentaire, 1986

Email: [email protected]

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-thorn-468b663/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bret.thorn.52
Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
Instagram: @foodwriterdiary

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