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Menu Talk with Pat and Bret

Menu Talk with Pat and Bret is a collaboration between Restaurant Business senior menu editor Pat Cobe and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality.

The Restaurant Hospitality holiday party, Yelpers’ favorite restaurant, and a brasserie at Grand Central

Menu Talk: Pat and Bret chat about recent eating adventures and share an interview with chef Daniel Garwood of Acru in New York City

Bret Thorn, Patricia Cobe

December 10, 2024

On this week’s podcast, Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality, said that the holiday season is actually a quiet time for him, with fewer media events as restaurants are busy serving paying customers, so the only party he went to this week was the holiday party of his own company, Informa, where he drank Martinis and ate some interesting spring rolls — one topped with trendy chili crisp and another with Southeast Asian aromatics like makrut lime leaf.

Pat Cobe, senior menu editor of Restaurant Business, was at the party too, and noticed how many Espresso Martinis were being ordered.

She also found other events to go to, including one at Meduza Mediterrania in the Meatpacking District, which was, in fact, Yelp’s top restaurant. It was very trend-forward and Eastern Mediterranean dips and passed lambchops.

She also checked out a new restaurant at Grand Central Terminal, Grand Brasserie, where she enjoyed a very French trout amandine.

Then Bret shared clips from an interview with Daniel Garwood, who is chef at Acru, a restaurant that opened in New York’s West Village in October.

Originally from Australia, Garwood arrived in the United States in 2022 and landed a job as sous chef of the popular modern Korean restaurant Atomix before being put in charge of Acru where, among other things, he is making steak out of dry-aged dairy cows.

Related:The Top 10 Menu Talk episodes of 2024

Menu Talk is a collaboration between Restaurant Business Senior Menu Editor Pat Cobe and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality. You can subscribe to it wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the Authors

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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