“I’ll have what she’s having.” A memorable punch line, but not much of a menu strategy — unless you believe that best-selling qualifies as a cuisine.
And yet I keep seeing the same dishes over and over, often on menus whose identities are defined mostly by popularity: goat cheese salad, a riff on Buffalo chicken wings, Caesar salad, avocado toast, mac and cheese reboots and their upscale cousin, cacio e pepe. Chili crisp on top of everything but dessert.
Chef David Chang single-handedly transformed Brussels sprouts from a sad fall-season also-ran to a year-round star when he opened Momufuku in 2004 in New York City — the addition of bacon and kimchee will do that — and to this day variations on that amped up little cabbage are a menu staple far beyond Chang’s empire. We’ve graduated from a quest for the unique to menus crowded with versions of familiar favorites, as more and more of us seem content with less and less, choice-wise.
I will not call out a single restaurant by name because they’re in enough trouble as it is, between an uptick in operating costs and a downturn in the number of diners who’ll get off the couch at mealtime. Tariffs could knock avocado toast off the popularity list unless Mexico gets an unlikely exemption, and profitable wine lists will shrink. Restaurants are understandably more risk averse than ever, so I wish them profits and survival even as I turn away from the ones that ride the culinary slipstream.
Homogeneity is an awfully polite euphemism for the national agenda right now, as the federal government ushers people of color out of the U.S. and encourages people whose color is white to come on in. Nothing is immune to the exclusionary mindset, not the arts, sports, medical research and healthcare; not even daily life, where sameness takes hold in more subtle ways.
The mash-up hit parade menu is a pendulum swing away from where we were just a few years ago, when a hard-core definition of authenticity ruled, and a clear link between a chef’s background and the menu was as essential as knife skills. No more. Anyone cooks anything, as long as it has a proven track record: In a single night a chef might be a pizzaiolo, a New England lobsterman, a wings- or guac-master.
I’m not recommending cultural food purity — it would limit me pretty much to my grandmother’s brisket and kugel, if I were a chef — but there has to be a sweet spot between that attitude and lowest common denominator food. A dish’s origin story should involve something more interesting than the number of units sold.
I often turn for refuge to ethnic spots, long a traditional portal for immigrants who build their families’ future on dishes they grew up with, places where I’m unlikely to encounter generic options. And yes, I am aware of the sad irony: Authenticity, in this case, only adds to these restaurants’ precarious state because owners, workers and diners who weren’t born here are vulnerable to ICE showing up without a reservation.
The threat is everywhere, but announcing one’s roots on a menu, right now, feels riskier still.
There’s an ever-expanding row of food stalls on a busy street near where I live, and at first I saw them as incubators for ambitious cooks serving an array of international dishes. The food truck Evil Cooks is now a brick-and-mortar operation whose owners were 2025 James Beard semifinalists for best chef, California region, their second time on the list. It’s a nice dream; it could happen again.
But lately I walk by even if I have other dinner plans, just to see that everyone is still there — the taco operation, the shawarma guys, the Korean stand, the new Peruvian stall. The visibility that was these eateries’ best asset now seems like their biggest drawback.
I rely on old standbys, too, places that figured out who they were years ago and have stuck with it. There’s a nice logic when they introduce dishes; the new stuff plays well with others rather than making me scratch my head at the disconnect.
I imagine that a proponent of the greatest-hits menu will say it’s diversity on a plate, but I don’t buy it. To me, it’s constraint masquerading as diversity. We pull back and pretend otherwise, and the narrower our field of vision becomes, the larger the terrain we define as not us, not ours.
I appreciate that sometimes we’re after comfort food when we go out to eat, that what we crave is an experience that dredges up happy memories of the same dish we’re staring it, which is one reason classics keep selling.
I’m as happy as anyone to stand in line for a bagel sandwich here, there or everywhere, if I so choose. Or to take my pick of any of the four blister-crust pizzas within five minutes of my front door. I just don’t want a Top 10 mentality to be the default. I don’t always want to have what she’s having.
Karen Stabiner’s most recent book is “Generation Chef: Risking It All for a New American Dream.”
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