The Top 25 Food Culture Trends That Defined the Past 25 Years

Explaining a world before apps and the internet to people born past the mid-1990s can feel like delivering a dispatch from the Mesozoic era. In those days, if someone wanted to go to a restaurant at a particular time and have some inkling as to what was on the menu, they might have to rifle through a glossy magazine or a thick yellow book and dial a telephone — or even stop by in person.

Cookbooks were the provenance of restaurant chefs, food experts anointed by publishers, or junior leagues and church congregations. Food videos required the imprimatur of a TV network, and if someone whipped out a camera at the table, it was most likely focused on a dining companion’s face and not a Bloody Mary decked with an entire cheeseburger.

The 21st century and its ever-evolving technology ushered in an era of democratized food culture and opportunities for connection like never before. Suddenly, chefs across countries and continents were able to exchange ideas more freely. Diners and home cooks could track and document trends, book aspirational reservations, exchange recipes and techniques with one another (and even celebrity chefs and bartenders), order ingredients and equipment, and become arbiters and creators of food culture themselves.

Here are 25 inventions, ideas, inflection points, and people who have shaped the past quarter-century of our eating and drinking lives.

Related: The Top 25 Food Trends of the Past 25 Years

01 of 25

Everyone’s a critic

In 2001, eGullet splintered from Chowhound — the vibrant and heavily moderated bulletin board co-founded in 1997 by Jim Leff and Bob Okumura — creating online dining forums where food enthusiasts from around the world could share their restaurant experiences, with well-known chefs participating to offer behind-the-scenes insight. —Kat Kinsman

Yelp.com launched in 2004, and one year later, anyone was able to use it to publish a review about a restaurant they visited — for better and for worse. All of a sudden, restaurant criticism was not exclusive to the professionals. Anyone could be a critic, and those amateur reviews became how many of us determined where and what to eat. Restaurant reviewing turned into a hobby for some, and a blood sport for others: the internet became flooded with every type of niche food blog you could imagine.

But the democratization of food reviews was a double edged sword. While platforms like Yelp gave restaurant owners more opportunities to hear feedback from real diners (including the voices of diverse diners underrepresented in food media) it also created more opportunities for restaurants to be unfairly slammed — and sunk — by a slew of negative reviews And now, amateur food reviewers have an even larger presence on Instagram and TikTok, where content creators like Keith Lee can determine the success or failure of a restaurant with one single video. But restaurant owners are not powerless — they can always respond to the reviews, apologizing or explaining the situation, and they can even partner with content creators in the hopes of receiving positive press. —Amelia Schwartz

Related: The Fine Art of Writing a Yelp Review

02 of 25

Chefs get real

NBC’s The Restaurant starring 1999 F&W Best New Chef Rocco DiSpirito launched chefs into the reality TV era, a departure from the cooking demonstration and travelogue shows previously prevalent on Food Network and PBS. Rather than the dishes and destinations, the interpersonal drama of the chefs themselves became the main course. —Kat Kinsman

Related: Rocco DiSpirito Will Give Your Cooking Video 3 Seconds

03 of 25

Meals on wheels

SeamlessWeb (which launched in 1999) became one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the U.S. By 2005, it was available to individual users, and the company eventually acquired Grubhub, becoming the meal delivery app powerhouse it is today. The 2012 debut of Instacart wasn’t the first time delivery services had used tech to dispatch gig workers to grocery stores, but it quickly became the most prominent and enduring. —Kat Kinsman

In the years between 2013 and 2016, apps like DoorDash, UberEats, and GrubHub remade the delivery economy, providing a one-stop interface for ordering from nearly any restaurant. The need for restaurants to hire delivery drivers was completely eliminated; instead, food is delivered by gig workers paid by the app. Third-party delivery apps saw a surge in sign-ups and revenue during the pandemic, and spurred many innovations like ghost kitchens, grocery delivery, and even robots that bring food directly to your door. Today, the apps are a must-have for most restaurants (even some with Michelin stars), but they come with onboarding, marketing, and hefty commission fees, making restaurants’ already slim profit margins even slimmer. —Amelia Schwartz

Related: Delivery Apps Are Deliberately Making It Harder to Tip

04 of 25

Food nerds unite

Hardware engineer Michael Chu built cookingforengineers.com as a place to store the recipes and notes he’d been keeping on his Palm Pilot, inadvertently ushering in a new era of cooking-nerd forums. In 2006, food writer Ed Levine founded the James Beard Award-winning Serious Eats, which evolved into the gold standard of science-based cooking, and helped propel the career of writer and restaurateur J. Kenji López-Alt. —Kat Kinsman

05 of 25

Farm-to-table takes off

Helmed by 2002 F&W Best New Chef Dan Barber — who had been working as co-chef of Blue Hill in Manhattan’s West Village with fellow 2002 BNC Michael Anthony —Blue Hill at Stone Barns opened in a former cow barn on the Rockefeller dairy farm in Pocantico Hills, New York. It was a bold bet on the public’s interest in farm-to-table dining and food education, but a lucky one, as moviegoers reeled in horror at the fast-food health hazards depicted in Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me. —Kat Kinsman

Related: These 8 Food & Wine Best New Chefs Quietly Changed the Way America Eats

06 of 25

The food blogging boom

Personal food blogs took off, further democratizing who got to publish recipes and food criticism, and creating a new income stream for at-home content creators. Julie Powell, who had been blogging her way through every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking since 2002, published Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen about the experience. It became the basis of a 2009 film starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.

In 2005, Ben Leventhal and Lockhart Steele published a trio of blogs that formed the basis of the Curbed Network: Racked (fashion), Curbed (real estate), and Eater (New York dining and nightlife). In 2008, Darron Cardosa — now a frequent F&W contributor — began posting as The Bitchy Waiter, drawing a following as one of the first bloggers to chronicle life as a front-of-house worker. —Kat Kinsman

Related: ‘Bitchy Waiter’ Darron Cardosa Talks Tipping, Washing Gravy off a Steak, and Why He Chased a Customer Down the Street

07 of 25

Cooking competition bonanza

Iron Chef America (an offshoot of the 1990s Japanese show Ryōri no Tetsujin) premiered on Food Network in 2004 and Top Chef — anchored by judges 1991 F&W Best New Chef Tom Colicchio and F&W special projects editor Gail Simmons — arrived on Bravo in 2006, ushering in a new era of food competition shows and insight into professional cooking techniques. Guy Fieri won The Next Food Network Star and starred in Guy’s Big Bite in 2006, followed by the launch of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives in 2007 — the year he began his reign as the undisputed king of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival. —Kat Kinsman

Related: Guy Fieri Is Living Proof That You Should Trust Your 10-Year-Old Self

08 of 25

Farms, food chains, and transparency

Michael Pollan published The Omnivore’s Dilemma, heavily featuring Polyface Farms proprietor Joel Salatin, who had been writing how-to books for aspiring farmers and homesteaders for a decade. Nonfarmers flooded farmers markets, newly inquisitive about the origins of their food and armed with a bounty of questions they were now empowered to ask. By 2011, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s satirical Portlandia skewered diners who pepper restaurant servers with questions like “Is the chicken local?” —Kat Kinsman

Related: Why Vegetarians Are Eating Meat

09 of 25

The dude-food era

Peak “dude food” excess arrived with bacon everything, pork belly, the KFC Double Down, and Epic Meal Time — a YouTube show celebrating high-calorie, meat-centric, alcohol-fueled cuisine. By 2008, The New York Times ran a story titled “The Fat Pack Wonders if the Party’s Over” and within several years, many of the article’s subjects had faced health reckons. In 2010, F&W ran a story on “macho vegetables,” using the now-cringeworthy term “he-gans.” —Kat Kinsman

Related: The 25 Restaurant Dishes That Defined the Past 25 Years

10 of 25

Molecular has its moment

2002 F&W Best New Chef Grant Achatz published The Alinea Cookbook in 2008, documenting the recipes and processes used at his then three-year-old restaurant and putting the tools of molecular gastronomy in the hands of fellow chefs and adventurous home cooks alike. Blogger Carol Blymire chronicled her way through the recipes on her popular site Alinea at Home. In 2011, former Google chief technology officer and patent portfolio developer and broker Nathan Myhrvold published the 2,438-page Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, which won multiple James Beard Awards and spawned Modernist Cuisine at Home the following year, along with kits for spherification, gel noodles, and more. —Kat Kinsman

Related: Grant Achatz’s Brain Food

11 of 25

The food truck that could

In 2010, Roy Choi was named a F&W Best New Chef, exemplifying a shift in the profile of chefs lauded by mainstream publications. He also provided a blueprint for restaurants’ use of social media, as he leveraged Twitter to announce the location of the Korean-Mexican fusion Kogi BBQ truck. In 2014, Choi advised actor and director Jon Favreau on the movie Chef; in 2019 the two paired up for The Chef Show on Netflix, and in 2023, they opened The Chef Truck at Park MGM in Las Vegas. —Kat Kinsman

Related: Street Food Was Roy Choi’s Destiny — and With His New Cookbook, He’s Building a Healthy Legacy

12 of 25

School lunches under the spotlight

In 2010, Michelle Obama introduced Chefs Move to Schools as part of her overall Let’s Move! campaign to create healthier meals in schools, in partnership with Epicurious. Jamie Oliver and Ryan Seacrest’s Channel 4 show Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, which also aired in the U.S., sought to overhaul school lunches and combat childhood obesity in Huntington, West Virginia. Reaction to both efforts was mixed, with some pundits lauding the push toward nutritional awareness and healthy food access, and others decrying perceived overreach, classism, and body shaming. —Kat Kinsman

Related: This Chef Walked Away From Noma to Feed Kids, Seniors, Patients, and Prisoners

13 of 25

Chefs become activists

José Andrés founded the NGO World Central Kitchen in 2010 in response to earthquakes in Haiti and soon deployed food resources to disaster zones around the world. In 2013, Tom Colicchio served as an executive producer on his wife Nancy Silverton’s hunger documentary A Place at the Table and began advocating for various causes on Capitol Hill. In 2020, Colicchio joined forces with chefs and restaurateurs including Sam Kass, Erika Polmar, 2000 F&W Best New Chef Andrew Carmellini, Ashley Christensen, Sean Brock, 2019 BNC Kwame Onwuachi, Camilla Marcus, Amanda Cohen, Kevin Boehm, Donnie Madia, 2009 BNC Naomi Pomeroy, and Andrew Zimmern to form the Independent Restaurant Coalition in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. —Kat Kinsman

Related: If Restaurants Go Away, Everything Will Collapse

14 of 25

Chef memoirs become blockbusters

Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir Blood, Bones, and Butter was published in 2011 and hailed by many as a gritty successor to Anthony Bourdain’s 2000 classic Kitchen Confidential. This usered in a new era of raw, personal chef memoirs such as 2016 F&W Best New Chef Iliana Regan’s Burn the Place, 2019 BNC Kwame Onwuachi’s Notes from a Young Black Chef, Marcus Samuelsson’s Yes, Chef, and 2006 Best New Chef David Chang’s Eat a Peach. —Kat Kinsman

Related: A Rogue Chef Tells All

15 of 25

MAD makes its mark

The inaugural MAD Symposium was held in Copenhagen in 2011, helmed by René Redzepi and Noma team, which held the top spot on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Chefs, farmers, business leaders, policymakers, and culinary thinkers gathered over the course of two days for discussions on “Planting Thoughts” —the role of edible plants in a region’s cuisine. Central to 2004’s New Nordic Manifesto created by Redzepi and chef-activist Claus Meyer, it’s a topic Redzepi believes is essential to the future of food cultures around the world. Subsequent themes included “Appetite” (2012), “Guts” (2013), “What’s Cooking?” (2014), “Tomorrow’s Kitchen” (2016), “Mind the Gap” (2018), and “Build to Last” (2025). Thousands of hopeful attendees apply for spots each year. —Kat Kinsman

16 of 25

Chefs branch out

In 2011, David Chang ventured into media with the irreverent, chef-centric James Beard Award-winning Lucky Peach magazine, under the aegis of indie publishing darling McSweeney’s. He eventually split from co-founder Peter Meehan in 2017 and joined forces with Lucky Peach editor-in-chief Chris Ying to form Majordomo Media, which produced podcasts and streaming series that include Dinner Time Live, Ugly Delicious, The Dave Chang Show, among others. Along with Anthony Bourdain’s investment in the production company Zero Point Zero and publisher Roads and Kingdoms, it’s a bellwether of chefs branching out to own equity and creative control in food media. —Kat Kinsman

Related: David Chang Talks About Chili Crunch Controversy, Microwave Snobbery, and Guy Fieri

17 of 25

The bromance is over

Soylent meal replacement products hit the market in 2013, an early harbinger of the Silicon Valley’s bro-forward biohacking movement that prioritizes nutritional efficiency over pleasure. Perhaps non-coincidentally, Time published its now-infamous “Gods of Food” cover story featuring David Chang, René Redzepi, and Alex Atala — and no women. In response, Kerry Diamond launched Cherry Bombe, a media platform “celebrating women & cool creatives in the world of food and drink,” with a print magazine that eventually branched out into events and podcasts. —Kat Kinsman

18 of 25

From ‘Chef’s Table’ to ‘Hot Ones’

Chef’s Table premiered on Netflix in 2015, chronicling the careers of chefs such as Massimo Bottura, Dan Barber, Francis Mallmann, Niki Nakayama, Ben Shewry, and Magnus Nilsson, in lush, slow-motion detail. Around the same time, First We Feast’s Emmy-nominated Hot Ones premiered on YouTube, with host Sean Evans interviewing celebrities as they eat increasingly spicy wings. A decade later, the show still attracts A-list talent, eager to avoid the “Wall of Shame” depicting the participants who fail to complete the gauntlet of sauces. —Kat Kinsman

19 of 25

The phone eats first

It’s difficult to imagine what today’s food culture would look like without smartphones. The first iPhone was released in 2007, and the built-in camera meant that anyone could capture “food porn” (let’s perhaps leave that phrase in the early 2000s?). Then Instagram launched in 2010, giving us a platform to post these food photos. Most were shared to our small circle of friends and followers, but occasionally, a photo was so delicious-looking that it took on a life of its own, driving real-world trends like rainbow foods, over-the-top shakes, and other “camera eats first” creations.

Smartphones have also brought on new levels of efficiency for restaurant workers. Hosts and managers can access their reservation platforms using their phones and tablets rather than a pen and paper, and at many restaurants, guests can simply tap their phone to pay. During the pandemic, smartphones became essential, allowing guests to prevent the risk of spreading germs by scanning a QR code to view the menu. —Amelia Schwartz

Related: I’m a Longtime Waiter and This Is the Biggest Mistake People Make When They Photograph Their Meal

20 of 25

The great restaurant reckoning

In 2017, the #MeToo movement sparked a long-overdue reckoning with toxic kitchen culture and the abuse of women and people of color. High-profile chefs and operators like Mario Batali, Ken Friedman, John Besh, and others faced public allegations of sexual harassment (and in some cases more), resulting in many stepping down or stepping away entirely away from the empires they’d built. Many restaurants — for the first time ever — engaged the services of HR professionals, established codes of conduct, and created systems through which bad behavior can be reported. —Kat Kinsman

Related: What Should Happen to the Spotted Pig

21 of 25

Self-care in kitchens

In 2016, in the wake of the suicide of friend and colleague Ben Murray, restaurateurs Mickey Bakst and Steve Palmer found Ben’s Friends, a support network for people in the hospitality industry dealing with substance use issues. In 2017, Southern chef Sean Brock went public about his intervention, rehab, and sobriety journey in a New York Times profile, “Chef Sean Brock Puts Down the Bourbon and Begins a New Quest.” Anthony Bourdain’s death by suicide in 2018 cracked open the mental health conversation in hospitality, inspiring a wave of wellness programs and other health-centric initiatives across the industry. —Kat Kinsman

Related: We Need to Talk About Anthony Bourdain

22 of 25

The biggest restaurant disruption of our time

During COVID lockdowns, restaurants — along with the rest of humanity — were plunged into unprecedented uncertainty. Hospitality workers contended with ever-changing protocols and safety threats, disrupted supply chains, cash flow and government aid crises, and a sometimes hostile public. Though the plastic barriers and dining sheds have mostly disappeared, scars from the loss of colleagues and customers and the violent economic impact remain. —Kat Kinsman

Related: 21 Ways Restaurants Could Change Forever, According to Chefs

23 of 25

TikTok takes off

The smartphone app, TikTok, launched in 2017, becoming a forum for short-form cooking videos. Thanks to the “For You” page algorithm, pretty much anyone can go viral — and those viral videos can shape culinary trends for years to come. Think about the tomato feta pasta, a recipe video by @feelgoodfoodie that started with, “Because of this recipe, the grocery stores in Finland ran out of feta cheese.” Soon enough, American grocery stores ran out of feta cheese too — sales for blocked feta increased by 117%. Sure, we might move on quickly to the next trend, but we’re happy that something as simple (and delicious) as cherry tomatoes, feta, and pasta, can get people excited about cooking. —Amelia Schwartz

Related: Please Don’t Try These Social Media Food Trends at Home

24 of 25

Celebrating Black and Brown culinary creators

In February 2019, Korsha Wilson’s Eater essay “A Critic for All Seasons” landed like a grenade, laying bare a truth that Nikita Richardson had also called out in Grub Street the year before: someone with Black skin like hers would have a different experience in a restaurant than someone who did not, and having more Black critics and writers would expand what was covered in food media. It was time — past time — and heralded an ongoing wave of Black-created mainstream media like Toni Tipton Martin’s Jubilee, Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene, the Stephen Satterfield-produced Netflix series High on the Hog based on Dr. Jessica B. Harris’ book, and even Ghana to the World, which Wilson wrote with chef Eric Adjepong. Nearly seven years later, restaurant criticism is increasingly the realm of content creators, the most prominent of whom is a Black man named Keith Lee. You can read all about him in the New York Times, where Wilson is a frequent contributor. Richardson works there, too.

In 2021, Food & Wine partnered with Kwame Onwuachi (who wrote about the lack of critical diversity in a F&W essay “A Jury of My Peers” in 2019) and BET founder and hotel magnate Sheila Johnson to present the inaugural The Family Reunion. The multi-day festival celebrating Black and Brown chefs, winemakers, producers, and culinary talents now takes place annually at Johnson’s Salamander Resort in Middleburg, Virginia. That same year, chef Gregory Collier and his wife and business partner Subrina Collier kicked off the BayHaven Food & Wine Festival in Charlotte, North Carolina to highlight local Black hospitality alongside chefs and experts from around the world. —Kat Kinsman

Related: A Jury of My Peers

25 of 25

The Bear in the room

In 2022, The Bear debuted quietly on FX/Hulu and became a cultural phenomenon. The series, created by siblings Chris and Courtney Storer, follows fictional F&W Best New Chef Carmen Berzatto as he takes over his brother’s Chicago sandwich shop, and contends with a chaotic home life and the damage of abusive chefs and toxic kitchens, including, potentially, his own. The show’s cast and crew have received 49 Emmy nominations and 21 wins, and the Storers received a 2024 F&W Game Changer nod for their realistic depiction of the toll that restaurant life can take on a human being — as well as the extraordinary joy. —Kat Kinsman

Related: Meet the Brother-Sister Duo Behind ‘The Bear’

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