It’s tiki o’clock somewhere. More like everywhere! The tiki torch is burning brighter than ever, proving that the fun, kitschy trend may be a little retro but is also completely relevant.

A big part of tiki’s allure is escapism. Funny how rum-tastic drinks like zombies, mai tais, beachcombers, siren songs and mind erasers can take the edge off. That’s what Matt Spencer had in mind when he opened his new San Diego tiki place, The Grass Skirt.

“Tiki is something we’re pretty passionate about here,” Spencer says. “The Grass Skirt will combine the fun, lighthearted, escapist nature of tiki culture with creativity and food and beverage quality.”

That last part — food and beverage quality — is the key to tiki’s viability. Craft tiki cocktails with artisanal rum and fresh-squeezed juice elevate the experience of sipping through an umbrella.

And the best new tiki menus are pupu platters gone to culinary school. Honey-soy marinated beef skewers with pineapple and ginger aioli, chicken “sidecars” on sweet Hawaiian rolls and regional treats like fried cheese curds and Minnesota potluck favorite pickle rollups star at Psycho Suzi’s Motor Lounge in Minneapolis.

Meanwhile, some Cleveland restaurateurs are using tiki as inspiration. The future promises more tiki mashups like the one at Porco Lounge, where owner Stefan Was is pairing tiki with meatballs.

Was partnered with chefs Brian Okin and Adam Bostick of Cork and Cleaver, Graffiti Social Kitchen and Dinner in the Dark to create Polpetta at Porco Lounge, a tiki-meatball mashup. Okin got the idea while visiting New York City, where meatball concepts have shown staying power and buzz appeal.

Making your own sausage and charcuterie? Great! Pickling your own veggies? Pretty cool. But the true cutting-edge trend-of-the-moment is making your own flour. Bakers and chefs who do this swear it can exponentially change the quality of pastries, breads and any recipe calling for flour.

One such innovator is Ellen King, baker/historian and owner of Hewn Bakery in Evanston, Ill. Like other bakers, she sees the value in getting local grains and turning them into flour in-house.

She’s taking it even further and going all-in attempting to preserve the truly ancient art of baking bread. King and the bakery are part of The Great Midwestern Bread Experiment, an ambitious, long-range project collaborating with a crop scientist from Washington State University and a fifth-generation farmer to produce authentically preindustrial loaves of bread.

“It will probably be three years until we’re able to get a loaf that’s really good,” King predicts. Why? It’s an exacting process. The bread experiment involves time travel back to the early 1900s, before — some would argue — all the goodness was stripped out of wheat. The group is combing through historical recipes that use grain varieties that were, to put it simply, not messed with.

How interested are people in learning more about indigenous culture and food? Ask the “Sioux Chef,” Sean Sherman. His restaurant startup project just became the most-backed restaurant venture ever on Kickstarter, raising almost $150,000. He hopes to open in Minneapolis next year.

Indigenous foods that Sherman had lost touch with while growing up on a reservation are what the restaurant will focus on. No stereotypical fry bread, either.

Sherman works “microregionally,” he says, focusing on the foods you could find walking around a lake in Minneapolis like natural wild rice and tuberose.

“We built a curriculum around indigenous foods. Corn and beans and potatoes, amaranth and quinoa,” he says. “People were producing things so naturally without fossil fuels. We’re re-imagining what a kitchen can be.”

Even Francis Ford Coppola is getting in on the act, with his new Werowocomoco concept in Geyserville, Calif. The film director himself has assumed chef duties at the restaurant, where the menu includes fry bread tacos, venison chili, cedar plank salmon and rotisserie prairie chicken.

The future is clearly about embracing new technology, and restaurants are inundated with an ever-growing choice of options to help manage everything from mobile ordering to mobile payments, digital ordering kiosks, tabletop devices, digital menu boards and more.

Technology can also help reduce the burden of rising labor costs. According to a new report from Applied Predictive Technologies (APT), 30 percent of restaurants identified increasing labor costs as a threat to their business. So now, many restaurants are preparing for new labor costs by trying new operational strategies like better training programs and also digital ordering.

Software like Tipping Point from US Foods is designed to help servers get more tips by being more knowledgeable about what they’re serving. Uploaded videos describe menu items with ingredients, pairing ideas, talking points and when/where to suggest to guests.

One tech caveat that we’re hearing from experts: Avoid oversaturation and keep your focus on your operation. With all technology, operators should carefully consider which tech investments are actually increasing profits and improving the dining experience and which are duds that won’t yield a return on investment.

Poke, with its Hawaiian ethos, fresh flavors and ability to fit perfectly into a bowl, has grabbed diners’ attention in the last year, and it’s a safe bet for next year, too, as new concepts are just beginning to explore where one can go with poke and ceviche as well.

In Fort Lauderdale, the Poke House, a fast-casual eatery led by former director of SBE Hospitality Memphis Garrett, is bringing the healthy, fresh, affordable poke trend to South Florida by taking the Hawaiian tradition in a new direction. Your basic poke bowl consists of sushi-grade tuna in soy and sesame over rice.

But at the Poke House, it’s all about customization: Choose your protein (tuna, salmon, hamachi or tofu), base (white rice, quinoa or kale) and then things really get deeply interesting with more than 20 sauces and toppings, including aji Amarillo lime, chipotle mayo, crispy lotus, black radish and more. Plus, there are composed bowls for those opting out of DIY, and each is inspired by a different region, such as the Venice Beach Cali bowl with fish marinated in salsa verde and served with avocado, baby heirloom tomato, lotus and nori. Other regions are as far-flung as Florida, Peru and Korea.

Similar flights of fresh fish fancy are happening across the country at Como Ceviche, which made a big splash opening last month in San Diego’s East Village. The focus is on including all sorts of international takes on ceviche.

Ceviche hits a lot of customers’ cravings all the same time, says co-owner William Lopez.

“Ceviche is a versatile dish that answers the call from consumers who’ve been leaning towards food that’s nutritious, sustainable and authentic,” Lopez says.

Chrome, fake ferns, mauve...do we really miss the ’80s aesthetic for restaurant interiors? Yes! Tiring of rough-hewn, reclaimed wood and cold, minimalist dining rooms with bare pendant lights, diners could be warming up to places like Fern Bar. Named for the type of restaurant where crowds of yuppies and preppies sidled up to ornate bars with antique lamps and fake ferns, London’s Fern Bar is the best possible kind of throwback because it’s an unexpected reversal from the current era of restaurant design that’s too often starkly minimalist or trying-too-hard rough-hewn hipster.

But don’t start burning your reclaimed barn doors and smashing your mason jars just yet.

Stephen Francis Jones, who designed Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Beverly Hills, says there will be a setting and a space for a variety of restaurant design trends in 2017.

“What’s most important is how adjacencies of spaces work,” says Jones, who recently designed the office-park lifestyle/dining hub Foundry & Lux in South San Francisco (pictured) and is currently working on design for a coffee house franchise in Kenya. “But that whole [rustic, reclaimed] look has come out of the fact that people are reusing older spaces…sometimes I’ll get a project in a brand-new facility and there’s nothing ‘reclaimed’ about it, but people still want that. It’s kind of ironic how that works.”

Reclaimed vs. slightly fake reclaimed aside, Jones hesitates to declare any design trends officially “in” or “out.”

“There are applications for everything,” he says, referring in particular to pendant lights. “Sometimes pendants are there to take up volume, like if you have a space with a really high ceiling.”

Jones does have a prediction for the coming year, however: Porcelain, as in porcelain that can be stamped and printed to look like other materials, such as wood flooring.

While the barbecue compass has long pointed to well-established barbecue meccas in the South, some unlikely barbecue destinations are emerging. Northern cities like Cleveland, Chicago and Brooklyn have been putting themselves on the map with styles that aren’t so set in stone.

Before Michael Symon opened Mabel’s BBQ in Cleveland this past summer, he dutifully researched regional barbecue, picking up tasty best practices along the way. Quite a few other serious barbecue spots have opened up in Cleveland recently as well.

So what exactly is “Cleveland-style barbecue,” as Mabel’s is billed? Symon’s definition includes a sauce with iconic Cleveland ingredients like Bertman’s ballpark mustard and Eastern European seasonings. The meat is smoked on local fruitwood.

Not having a set-in-stone style to either be true to—or rebel against—allows new embers of creativity to spark in places where barbecue legends are still being written.

That freedom and fluidity are major qualities that Barry Sorkin of Smoque in Chicago likes about charting new territory in barbecue. His barbecue spot quickly gained appreciative fans when it opened almost a decade ago. Last summer, Sorkin set up an outpost as one of the best-loved Windy City spots at Chicago’s massive Revival Food Hall.

“I think what’s starting to happen is chefs are starting to recognize that barbecue is a food where you can apply all kinds of things,” Sorkin says. “Ten years ago, barbecue was about a few regional places and the sauces we all know. But now you’re seeing people getting more creative with the method of smoking meat and applying different ethnic flavors and other culinary techniques.”

The freestyle philosophy allows barbecue entrepreneurs like Sorkin to adopt an overall broader philosophy that relates to playing with more flavor profiles.

“Barbecuing is just a way of cooking food,” Sorkin says. “There’s no way it should be married to just a couple of different flavors of sauce.”
Sorkin has been checking out his barbecue brethren in Brooklyn lately, he says, and gives major props to Hometown Bar-B-Que, where Billy Durney has been making

Jamaican jerk baby back ribs and lamb belly that’s worth writing home about.

Plant-based proteins, dairy replacements and nut butters are all gaining momentum.

“Nut butters are growing,” says Brian Darr, who helps manufacturers stay ahead of the curve as director of Datassential’s Trendspotter publications. He points to a 158 percent increase of hazelnut spread on menus in the last year, going hand in hand with growth of breakfast sales. “Chefs around the country are starting to use nut butters to cook with, and in the retail environment you’re seeing a lot more nut butters on the shelves.”

Plant proteins are also appearing on more menus, with jackfruit leading the way as “vegan pulled pork” and aquafaba (the liquid in a can of chickpeas) being whipped into vegan meringues.

Black-eyed peas are in the inception phase of the food trend hierarchy, according to Datassential, which means they are starting to catch on here and there but growing fast. And lentils are now in the adoption phase, growing 15 percent on menus since 2012.
Customers are also seeking out alternatives to dairy, and products like almond milk, soy milk and coconut milk have a firm foothold in Americans’ refrigerators. Cheese alternatives—made with cashews, for example—are also now in the inception phase.

A big part of dining has been shifting away from the dining room and onto individual couches in front of Netflix. For restaurateurs who want in on this trend (and whose customers are demanding it), the devil of delivery is in the details, according to Applied Predictive Technologies: Logistics, in-house delivery capabilities, third-party delivery providers and quality all must be taken into account. But doing it right can pay off.

Restaurants stand to see new sales, bigger checks and happier customers.