Food trends where you are

[garbon]

A Japanese ramen place just opened in Porter Square (Cambridge, Mass.) and a friend wanted to go a couple of weeks ago.  A tiny little joint with huge lines out the damn door, constantly; pretty impressive.

My mother was telling me something like this but she actually didn't know what type of Asian food it was.

[The Larch]

I haven't even figured out exactly what food and beverage products contain gluten (...)

Basically everything that contains wheat and similar cereals like barley and rye. I had a teacher on a field trip which was a quite extreme celiac and he couldn't even use cutlery that had been used for stuff he couldn't eat.

Funnily over here there's a huge supermarket chain that has almost every conceivable item available for celiacs because the daughter of the owner is one.

[Gups]

From the Grauniad

So Yanqui hotdogs, who will has the better posh burgers? Shake Shack or Five Guys?


-----------------------------
A tweeted picture of George Osborne tucking into a takeaway from the upmarket chain Byron late at night while completing details of the spending review may have prompted ridicule this week, but the chancellor was bang on trend in buying a "posh" burger.

The mushrooming of upscale burger joints, especially in London, is set to escalate next week when two US companies open their first UK outlets within 24 hours of each other – and just 320 metres apart.

Five Guys, America's fastest growing restaurant chain, which counts Barack Obama as a fan and is said to have half the market for posh burgers, opens its first non-US outlet on Thursday in Covent Garden. And a day later New York's Shake Shack will make its London debut four minutes' walk away.

Both companies claim to have known nothing of the other's intentions and were quick to try to downplay any suggestion of competition between them. Randy Garutti, chief executive of Shake Shack, said Five Guys "do something very different to what we do". "We don't talk about competition because we think there is enough to go around," he said.

Five Guys intends to open five outlets in the UK – four of them in London – by October and between five and 10 more every three months after that, in a joint venture with the Carphone Warehouse co-founder Charles Dunstone. John Eckbert, the UK managing director, who works with Dunstone, said Five Guys had a "very respectful" relationship with Shake Shack.

"We have yet to find someone in the US that we believe is really like us," he said. "We think the burger is as good as we can make it." The simple Five Guys menu and style were more akin to the operation of the sandwich chain Pret A Manger, he said.

It is a boom time for high-end burger chains. Eckbert said research showed that almost a third of the US burger market was taken up by "better burger" outlets. In the UK, homegrown companies such as Byron, the Meat chain and Honest Burger have grown rapidly on the back of soaring demand. This month it was reported that Byron, which launched five years ago and now has 34 restaurants, had been withdrawn for sale after bidders failed to meet the £100m asking price.

Tom Barton, who with two business partners runs the critically acclaimed Honest Burger, is working on plans for the company's third restaurant in two years, having started the first for £8,500. He said the burger trend was based on consumer demand for simple, quality food.

"I think everybody has always had this interest in burgers but unfortunately burgers have always been generally pretty average. For me it has been a very simple meal done very badly so it has been stuck in its way like that for a very long time," he said.

Mike Palmer, a restaurant consultant, said people wanted to "consume experiences" and now had a much more advanced idea of what they wanted to eat compared with in the recent past.

One of the most successful of the new breed has been the Meat chain, which started out as a burger van touring London and now, five years later, is preparing to open its fourth outlet, in Brighton with 110 seats. The co-founder Scott Collins said turnover last year was £8m, of which 21% was profit. This year the company projects turnover of £10m.

Large players have also caught on. The Soho House Group opened Dirty Burger in Kentish Town last year and it has so far exceeded expectations, according to the group's director of restaurants, Nick Canton.

The proliferation of restaurants has led to suggestions that the market could become over-saturated, especially with the new arrivals. Collins predicted a "war-off" between the two, which are both located close to a Meat branch.

"I don't think people are going to stop eating good burgers and go back to bad burgers, so as long as these companies keep evolving I think there is plenty of room. I think people will be trading up – McDonald's eaters, Burger King eaters will go on to a better burger," he said.

[Eddie Teach]

5 guys is "posh"? 

Plenty of burger joints out there where you pay twice as much and have to tip.

[garbon]

5 guys is "posh"? 

Plenty of burger joints out there where you pay twice as much and have to tip.

Yeah I'm not sure how shake shack or 5 guys are posh.  I mean when you order take out at shake shack, they pour extra fries into the paper bag.

[garbon]

That said, I think I prefer shake shack as the portions are smaller. Taste-wise I think burgers are similar though 5 guys has better fries.

[Barrister]

My wife went to Five Guys recently here in Edmonton (which means London is certainly not getting the first non-US Five Guys).  She said the burger was okay, nothing special, but loved their fries.

[Gups]

Posk compared to MaccieDs or BK

[garbon]

Posk compared to MaccieDs or BK

Seems like a silly qualifier then.

[Eddie Teach]

My wife went to Five Guys recently here in Edmonton (which means London is certainly not getting the first non-US Five Guys).  She said the burger was okay, nothing special, but loved their fries.

They're alright. I like Chili's burgers better. Or BK's Angry Whopper(which describes how I feel that they keep taking it off the menu  ).

[crazy canuck]

My wife went to Five Guys recently here in Edmonton (which means London is certainly not getting the first non-US Five Guys).  She said the burger was okay, nothing special, but loved their fries.

Five Guys have been here for years.

I think its the Euro/Brit usual mistake of forgetting that North Americans are not all Americans...

[Valmy]

I think its the Euro/Brit usual mistake of forgetting that North Americans are not all Americans...

Eh plenty of people over here, like viper, seem to forget that Brits are not all English so it all evens out.

[Syt]

Vienna has recently seen an influx from the Vapiano chain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapiano

Vapiano is a German fresh casual restaurant chain offering Italian food. The concept is a pizza and pasta bar, where food is made to order. Vapiano also serves made-to-order salads and dessert and has a bar with alcoholic beverages available. There are 97 restaurants all over the world, 45 of which are located in Germany where the concept was invented in 2002.[1][2] Vapiano has its headquarters in Bonn.

Vapiano employs a unique interface for customers to order and pay for their food with. Each diner is provided an RFID chip card (even if dining together to avoid customers charging one card and waving another when exiting) that the customer waves in front of the counter when ordering food and drink. When the dinner is finished, the card is waved in front of the register and the bill appears on the screen. All dough and pasta are manufactured on-site in a glass room so that customers can watch while waiting in line. All of the herbs and salad greens are grown in an enclosed space in the dining area. It is commonly known as "The V".

Vapiano was created by a group of US entrepreneurs. It offers a dining experience that combines fast food and a more extravagant experience, with distinctively modern Italian decor and high quality food options, including hand-tossed pizzas and freshly made pasta that they use in their dishes.
History[edit]

Vapiano was founded by Kent Hahne, Klaus Rader and Mark Korzilius in 2002, the first restaurant opened in October 2002 in Hamburg. Mr. Hahne is now expanding VAPIANO full-time and with a group of experts he is responsible for worldwide franchise sales, support and communications.[3]

The world's biggest Vapiano is located in Vienna, Austria.

[The Larch]

Fancy burgers and US diner style places have slowly started to appear over here in the last few years as well.

[Ed Anger]

I hate those chairs in that picture.