New Nostalgia

Longing to escape pressure-cooker lifestyles, millennials are reliving the past, rediscovering their childhood recipes and diving into their grandmothers’ cookbooks.

These culinary blasts from the past are setting the scene for
the future:

• A resurgence of “old-fashioned” comfort food and fun childhood snacks, from pies and prime ribs to meatloaf, casseroles and nuggets (with a modern, healthy twist, of course).
• Restaurants like Chez Ma Tante in Brooklyn are recreating Victorian dishes like kedgeree for the new age. Bouillon Pigalle in Paris, a modernized version of the 19th century “bouillons”, serves old-school cuisine at cheerful prices for the common folk. 
• Old cooking techniques, such as those from the Appalachian and Ozark regions, are being revived. It’s all about foraging for ingredients such as ramps, creasy greens, black walnut beans, berries and mushrooms to produce dishes like leather britches and preserves.
• The DIY movement is in full swing, from yoghurt or cheese making to curing, smoking, pickling and fermenting.
• Tailor-made nostalgia features heavily in Heston Blumenthalʼs future dishes, which rely on a guestʼs food memories to create a highly personal Ratatouille-style moment.
• Tiny, new-fangled kitchen gadgets which promise to do 100
  things may have been all the rage, but thereʼs a newfound interest in Grandma’s single-use vintage kitchen tools, whether for their history, design or ability to last several lifetimes.

This is an excerpt from CatchOn’s fourth Future of Food report, “The Field Guide to Millennial Foodies”. As Asia’s leading food PR agency specializing in brand strategy consulting, often enough we get asked for insights. Being a creative agency in the food scene also means weʼre usually busy spicing up brands, cooking up ideas, stirring up media interest,  making the unsavoury palatable… and always on the hunt for whatʼs next. 

Catherine Feliciano-Chon