Why you shouldn't get caught up by the food buzz

March 12, 2016, 12:15 a.m.

I love hitting a city and finding myself in the restaurant that has the buzz, but the hottest places to dine don't always serve the best food.

I love hitting a city and finding myself in the restaurant that has the buzz. The hottest places to dine don't always serve the best food. But travel for me is always about the people: sometimes I'd rather watch and be part of the performance than eat.

I'm about to board a plane for Tokyo and I've been looking for somewhere a bit kooky to dine.

Backtrack a couple of weeks to The Future Laboratory's Food and Drinks Future Forum held in Melbourne. London-based trend forecasters Chris Sanderson and Martin Raymond gave a mesmerising presentation to the food industry about international trends in food and drink, including sharing their list of 10 of the most innovative restaurants and food outlets, in terms of design, around the world.

One of these was Tetchan, by architect Kengo Kuma, in Tokyo. The popular yakitori bar uses recycled materials such as LAN cables to give the room a shaggy, distressed look.  Melted pieces of translucent waste acrylic form a bar that looks like it has been hewn out of a glacier. To my eye, it looks like Jackson Pollack went mad with spray insulation, but it seems fun and worth the trip to Tokyo's outer suburbs.

Wherever I travel, I've noticed the rise of the chocolate shop as art installation. Most of us worship at the temple of cocoa, so it's entirely predictable that the chocolatiers are increasingly designing retail outlets that are reverential.  On The Future Laboratory's list is BbyB​ by Nendo​ in Tokyo, a chocolate shop designed as a kind of 3D version of the Antwerp-based brand's minimalist packaging. Visitors can browse 30 different flavours of chocolate in Perspex drawers that create the feel of a gallery space.

Tea tasting is also pitched as a religious experience these days. T Lounge by Studio Pha in Prague feels like a cathedral. It's bathed in beautiful light from a central glass ceiling dome that evokes a spiritual and meditative mood. Ribs of pale timber filled with tea canisters wrap around the walls, facing a shrine where visitors can sample tea.

In Mexico City there's Tomas by Savvy Studio, where individual teas are organised by a complex graphic system of scientific labelling that categorises their origins, key attributes, and benefits. An experiential bar allows customers to feel, smell and taste different varieties to create their own "tea moment".

Other trend-setting culinary spaces identified by The Future Laboratory include the prettily pink Sketch by India Madhavi in London, a "feminine brasserie" which must feel like dining inside a raspberry marshmallow – a bit retro and perfect, I would think, for ladies who lunch.

Mary Wong by Fork, in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, eschews traditional Asian motifs for nostalgia for Soviet-style design. So, if you're ever in Rostov-on-Don and feel like Chinese food, you know where to go.

Also on the nostalgia wave is Old Tom & English by Lee Broom in London's Soho, a cosy encapsulation of the trend for home-away-from-home eateries. It channels a living room of the '60s, where guests are friends invited to sip a cocktail, enjoy a bite, and linger.

If your home is hippy trippy eccentric, you'll feel right there at Ojala by Andres Jaque in Madrid. A series of interconnected spaces, each with its own individual ambience and design ethos, it reflects the cultural melange of its neighbourhood. A suspended garden, a "greenhouse", a bar in the form of a mini house and an artificial beach all feature as part of a collaborative cultural mash-up.

Jelmoli Food Market by Interstore Design, Zurich, is a department-store-as-food-market reincarnation that taps into the Millennial's desire for convenience, local produce and "curated" collections. All the visual merchandising features seasonal themed food alongside the season's key fashion looks.

The most fascinating to me is Hueso​ by Cadena + Asociados​, in Guadalajara.

This restaurant's name translates into English as "bone", and a creepily beautiful array of more than 10,000 cast-aluminum animal bones decorates its walls, with buckets of bones on tabletops.

Anatomical drawings, scientific specimens and knives sit alongside hanging bones and skulls, creating a macabre cabinet of curiosities for diners. The menu features unusual meats, offcuts and bone marrow. I'm not a fan of the Paleo diet, but it's still influencing dining options. Expect lots of bone broth on menus in 2016.

The thing about trends in food and design – they're transitory. So enjoy your reverential "tea moment" and roast bones while you can.

The story Why you shouldn't get caught up by the food buzz first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.

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