Trends in Gastronomy 2025: My Wishlist

What I wish will happen in 2025 in restaurants and eateries

Last month we looked into 2025 forecasts, based on trends and perceptions in the gastronomic world. This time, I present to you…

My 2025 Wishlist: All the things I would like to see.

My 14-Points Wishlist for 2025:

1. Walking the Sustainability Talk

2. Non-Alcoholic Options and Pairing First

3. Cultural Elevation, Not Appropriation

4. Gentle Cooking: Water Instead of Fire

5. The Return of The Services: Waiters Recognition

6. Death to the Alternative Small Plates Place

7. The Demise of The Prizes, Listicles, and Awards

8. Nutritive Hedonism

9. Cultural Breakfasts

10. Service for One and the Death of Small Plates for Two or More

11. Down With Restaurant Coming With Instructions

12. Fun Dining

13. Yes to Silent Service and Eloquent Paper Menus

14. Plant-Based Creativity and Tradition

    

1. Walking the Sustainability Talk

I am over the talk about sustainability as a fancy label, together with “farm to fork” and “zero waste”: most restaurants that use these words in their descriptions are not walking the talk.

For instance, I refuse to believe a restaurant is sustainable if it serves red meat or large fish (tuna, salmon).

Exceptions?

Indigenous restaurants, where meat and animal products are the basis of nutrition, and where you cannot pop into a supermarket and get fresh groceries and a chunk of tofu.

I refuse to believe a restaurant is sustainable if it employs underpaid migrants without regularising their contracts as dishwashers or runners or does not use seasonal, locally sourced products.

Ultimately, I refuse to believe a restaurant is sustainable if they are not minimising their waste, almost reducing it to zero

HIGHLIGHT: Restaurant Sem, Lisbon and Restaurant Fava Tonka in Porto

2. Non-Alcoholic Options and Pairing First

I want to open a menu and find kombucha, infusions, and other non-sugary and non-alcoholic drinks available by the glass and as part of a pairing.

I want the choice of drinks for non-alcoholic drinkers to be more than water or sodas. I want to slowly see commercial sodas (Coca-Cola, Pepsi) leave the menus and our lives, as they are plentiful with harmful ingredients and should not be considered edible anyway.

HIGHLIGHT: Little Red Door, Paris

3. Cultural Elevation, Not Appropriation

I am sick and tired of those restaurants based on a confused fusion of gastronomies where there is blatant cultural appropriation aimed at the “shock factor” without any afterthought about the cultural significance of a plate. Just because two ingredients are smashed ungracefully together on top of a traditional dish of another culture doesn’t mean creativity. It implies a lack of “reading the room” in this time and age.

I want culturally relevant restaurants that use traditional and innovative dishes in a cherished, respectful manner aimed at elevating all cultural and gastronomic aspects with some disregard for the palate and expectations of Western and WASP customers.

An example? Any creation by Sami Tamimi. Any. And he (and Ottolenghi) move literally in Earth's most dangerous cultural and social common ground. If they can be respectful, how can others not?

I have in the pipeline not one by two very witty, incredibly caustic articles about this theme that I can only say. Please stay tuned for a front-row seat into some writing, nobody tearing apart the most beloved ideas harboured by 50Best.

HIGHLIGHT: Ovina Yetu, Angola

4. Gentle Cooking: Water Instead of Fire

Water-based cooking needs to get back in style.

Hot Pots instead of charcoal grills.

Gentle cooking preserves all nutritive ingredients of food, minimises the damage inflicted by direct fire and creates a refined, elegant, flavorful and aromatic cuisine.

Whereas charcoal grilling is an essential cooking technique for Neanderthals, cooking with water requires time, skills, and savoir-faire.

A culinary and gastronomy for the refined, not for those who like greasy fingers and charcoal-clogged nostrils.

Chefs are NOT ON FIRE, but BOILING HOT.

You can read more about my snobbery towards fire cooking here.

• Poaching fish and vegetables (and meats and eggs) is a sublime art.

• Simmering, steaming, boiling: water-based cooking is my favourite way of cooking, and even more so, my preferred way of receiving a cooked dish.

• Chawanmushi, steamed dumplings, simmered vegetables in their broth: gentle cooking can bring out subtle flavourings. Not everything we put in our mouths has to be a fucking punch in the face.

• Instead of charcoal grilling and fire everywhere, usually with abundant salt and generous sauces, let’s try a more elevated cuisine that better preserves an ingredient's flavours and nutrients.

• Water is the future - and I suspect that water, not fire, will be such a precious resource that it may come back in gastronomy, too. It will be scarce - more than caviar, the real one.

HIGHLIGHT: Michelin HK-Macau

5. The Return of The Services: Waiters Recognition

I would love for chefs and cooks to stay in the kitchen and waiters to be left alone while caring for dining room customers. I would love to see how waiters can regain the dignity of this profession. You do not need to go full Horcher or Epicure to guarantee perfect service.

But that would be a good start.

Heck, I would like the kitchen to be hidden behind a glass door so I do not come out of a restaurant smelling like a person working there was me. An example of this nonsense is all the “fire”-based prehistoric restaurants for affluent people, like Smoke Room in Madrid.

6. Death to the Alternative Small Plates Place

Closely connected with the above is my wish for a sudden implosion of all those restaurants whose business model is:

• Blackboard with unintelligible scribbles but very understandable inflated prices (reasonable for tourists from the US and Nordic countries, unaffordable for locals),

• Waiters-cooks that crouch down or sit at your table to take the order,

• Small FUCKING plates to share where you have to spend a lot of money to be fed small portions in a random and often inconsequential order,

• Small FUCKING plates to share. I want the appetizer-main-dessert liturgy back.

• Small FUCKING plates to share.

7. The Demise of The Prizes, Listicles, and Awards

It seems that Chefs only live to be awarded something - anything from “reputable” (hahaha) lists like Micheli to pay-per-presence ones like 50Best to obscure, local awards.

As long as there is a prize.

I am so fucking tired of these guides, lists, and awards. Seriously. Half of the gastronomic writing is devoted to this silliness, and half the restaurant workers' minds are geared toward this or that prize.

I had to endure Chef’s talk lately where he (formerly working at a Michelin restaurant who won the star when he was Head Chef, and immediately after put him out of the door) banged on endlessly about receiving an award, and when the Repsol and Michelin evaluators were coming, and what did they eat…

I wanted to stab him, seriously, but I only had wooden cutlery, so I sat there instead, fuming.

These people have too much power over the feeble minds of chefs, many of whom are primarily elementary beings, unable, for instance, to delve deep into philosophical thought and develop a sort of blasé attitude or stoicism.

I want these prizes gone, but we will probably go through mass extinction before this happens.

8. Nutritive Hedonism

I want to overcome the dichotomy that seems to exist between hedonism and healthy eating. In this time and age where we know almost everything about food science and human nutrition, in which we can create every texture, flavour and sensation in a plate, having a separation between hedonism and health reeks of Ancién Regime and the old world.

I want a decadent, delicious and gluttonous meal that is at the same time balanced, plant-based, and nutritious, with plenty of vegetables, protein sources and delicious carbohydrates.

9. Cultural breakfasts

I am a bit sick and tired of “all-day breakfast places” inevitably serving WASP food: pancakes, croissants, avocado toast, granola, smoothie bowls, eggs benedict, scrambled eggs, salmon, and cream cheese bagels.

I want traditional Japanese breakfast to be available. I want Indian and Pakistani breakfast. Moroccan breakfast. Chinese breakfast…and so on! I am completely over the white WASP colonisation of breakfast, especially in hotels.

You cannot believe how disappointed I was in November when I splurged on breakfast at the Ritz in Lisbon only to find out that they had removed the “Japanese” options and that miso soup was no longer available. They had left the sushi and sashimi, but their charm disappeared with the steam of miso soup.

I want more cultural variety at breakfast.

Croissants eaten by a white girl influencer with a French hat are out. Ethiopian Injera fit-fit eaten is in!

HIGHLIGHT: Dalle 8, Milano

10. Service for One and the Death of Small Plates for Two or More

I would love to be able to go to the restaurant alone and manage to eat correctly without spending a fortune on small plates to share. Taking one alone is too little for one, but two is too much food. So you either go out hungry or waste food.

Let’s go back to thinking of diners as individual units for which food has to be prepared and ensure you can feed one customer; there is no need to constantly and forever present “small dishes to share”.

Fuck you. Small dishes to share, fuck you.

I want to order one plate and eat it.

11. Down With Restaurant Coming With Instructions

“Do you know how the menu works?” or “Are you familiar with our concept?” are two sentences that make me want to stand up, leave and never return.

It is a fucking restaurant. I order food, you make it, eat it, and pay.

Do not complicate this shit.

12. Yes to Silent Service and Eloquent Paper Menus

I am sick and tired of going out to eat and feel like I am in a church with a strict liturgy.

I, the paying customer, have to listen to a series of sermons from waiters, sommeliers, and even chefs who present dishes, wines, and other such items. You know what? Just print a menu and leave it on the table. Then, gracefully fill my glasses and plates and be that invisible magician who makes everything work from backstage.

But for the love of your profession, stop this stupid nonsense of coming to my table and interrupting my conversation to explain a plate.

We fucking know how food works and we ordered it.

Shut the fuck up.

I am there to eat, not to pump your ego.

13. Fun Dining

Closely connected with the above, I want fun dining back.

You know, those restaurants we used to go to before social media ruined it all for us, when we went there, ate and had actual fun?

I remember a mediocre Mexican restaurant in Trento, now closed, that was the place to go when you wanted to have a fun night. The food was meh, but you felt good - the music was dope, the ambience was fun, drinks were always quick to come, and nobody bothered you with explaining how the food worked unless you specifically asked how to fill your tortilla.

HIGHLIGHT: RYOSHI, Lisbon

14. Plant-Based Creativity and Tradition

I want to see more restaurants exploring plant-based traditional food.

Yes, we know you can make Carbonara, a “traditional” food from this past century. How about you try adapting an actual ancient recipe to the modern taste?

Or what about recuperating Sardinia’s filindeu - the rarest pasta dish on earth? It beats your shower of Alba truffle that everyone and their cousin can buy.

Also, I want to see plant-based creativity explode. The imagination is unlimited, and the vegetable world is the most interesting laboratory for experimenting with flavours, textures, and more! Beyond fermentation, there is an entire universe for transforming products and combining them into new creations.

elevenmadisonpark

A post shared by @elevenmadisonpark

Ok, we know you can roast a pigeon or braise a steak. Want an applause, tiny baby?

Transform a vegetable into a creation. Please give me a turnip with the dignity of the King Soleil. Embellish a beet like you’d do a wagyu steak. Then we talk.

Make an authentic soy-based bolognese that I cannot tell the difference—a mushroom into bottarga. Make me DREAM. Because dear, whatever you think of, I have already eaten it. And possibly better. So, make me FLY.

Like the Kekoji Lab guys making ham out of beets, actually. Or Andrea Leali, making vegetable culinary the centre stage of innovation.

You can achieve stardom like Eleven Madison Park, or you can move back and forth, laterally and vertically like Alain Passard.

Push innovation like Chef

Chef Alexis Gauthier

- there is so much unchartered territory to uncover and discover that your research will be an infinite source of joy. It beats any little research of pleasing a crowd of pigeon-eating Michelin-or-other-guide-reviewers. And beats the pleasing of a drove of lobotomised foodies.

Gauthier says it all:

In an era defined by climate crises, shifting consumer values, and a growing demand for ethical consumption, the restaurant industry faces a pivotal choice: cling to tradition or reinvent itself for a sustainable future. My restaurant, a once-traditional Michelin-starred French fine-dining establishment in London’s vibrant Soho chose the latter.

I had a vision, so I embarked the restaurant on a radical transformation, stripping all animal products from our menu and redefining luxury dining through a lens of ethics, innovation, and environmental stewardship.

Here I explain our metamorphosis—from a bastion of classic French cuisine to a pioneering plant-based powerhouse—exemplifies the principles of embracing fate, controlling agency, and thriving through adaptability, offering a blueprint for long-term success in an unpredictable world.

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