Sponsored By
New on the Menu

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

New on the menu: Street corn arancini and cacio e pepe dumplings

Plus Peruvian tempura, fine-dining pot pie, and a Martini with house-made brine

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

September 13, 2024

5 Slides

There is a budding trend, still kind of small, in the cocktail world to offer a little snack that’s designed specifically for a particular drink. You can read about it here, or take a look at the Meritage Martini at Ember Steak in this gallery, which comes with a parfait of lobster, avocado, and caviar.

Arancini, the fried Sicilian risotto balls, are a popular appetizer at Italian restaurants and a pleasant passed hors d’oeuvre at cocktail parties. Mexican street corn, or elote, has been transformed from a casual hand-held snack to quite a common side dish at American restaurants. Dante de Magistris combines them at The Wellington in Belmont, Mass.

Peruvian food is now popular enough that even sub-categories of the cuisine are being highlighted, particularly Nikkei, which is a term for Peruvian food with Japanese influence. It can be had at the latest location of Mission Ceviche in New York City, where shrimp tempura is brushed with a mayonnaise spiked with rocoto chile.

A bit uptown from there, the relatively new location of Bourbon Steak, a Michael Mina concept, is dishing up lobster pot pie. 

And in Chicago, at the cocktail bar Common Decency, chef Mark Steuer is making gluten-free gnudi and simmering it in a sauce inspired by the Roman pasta dish cacio e pepe.

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected] 

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

Subscribe to Our Newsletters
Get the latest breaking news in the industry, analysis, research, recipes, consumer trends, the latest products and more.

You May Also Like