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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: Brown rice mousse, low-waste lobster and mackerel in fish sauce caramel

Plus cheesecake-inspired ice cream and a giant board of steak

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

July 29, 2022

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Steakhouses traditionally have been places where guests each get their own large, individual hunk of protein and then share sides of creamed spinach, scalloped potatoes, roasted mushrooms etc., but in recent years, starting before the pandemic, operators were seeing younger guests ordering multiple steaks and then sharing them. Brad Wise, owner and chef of Rare Society in Santa Barbara, Calif., is apparently responding to that behavioral shift with his Executive Board, three cuts of beef cooked on the restaurant’s grill fired by Central Coast oak and served on a lazy Susan.

At Bar Spero, which is slated to open soon in Washington, D.C., chef Johnny Spero is serving a frozen dessert that is inspired by the gooey cheesecake he enjoyed in the Basque country.

Korea, France and New York City are the inspirations for the menu at Lysée, a dessert “gallery” in New York, where owner Eunji Lee’s signature dessert features a mousse flavored with Korean brown rice, two different types of French cookies and New Orleans pecan praline (because why not?). 

A few blocks away, a completely different Korean chef, Sol Han, at a completely different restaurant in Manhattan, LittleMäd, is serving up a tomalley-to-tail low waste lobster dish as part of his tasting menu, complete with kimchi made with knuckle and claw meat.

And at Fish Cheeks, a Thai restaurant a bit farther south in Manhattan, new chef Dustin Everett is serving up grilled mackerel in fish sauce with green mango salad.

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

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