A meatball restaurant. A lasagna restaurant. A boutique devoted to mayonnaise. On Chow.com, Rebecca Marx looks into the explosion of single-subject restaurants in New York and the Bay Area and notices that they all seem to serve nostalgic foods:
The rise of mac 'n' cheese cafes and all-mayonnaise shops dovetails not only with the rise of haute stoner food but also the latest Internet bubble. One CHOW editor calls the grilled cheese sandwich the tech industry's fooseball table, adding that it has become symbolic of "the infantile, devil-may-care young programmer culture."
If you consider food trucks "one-trick ponies," as Marx likes to call them, SF is just as guilty of following this trend as New York.
Of course, in most of the world, much of the food consumed outside the
house is cooked by single-subject restaurants -- dumpling stalls, tamal
vendors, the woman who sets up her burner on the corner every morning to
dish out pho. But in a restaurant culture where most restaurants have
dozens of items on their menus, the idea of a rice pudding shop like Loving Cup or the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen comes as a twist.
Are mac and cheese shops like Homeroom
going to become as ubiquitous as pizzerias and BBQ shops? And could San
Francisco support a mayonnaise boutique, or would it have to at least
stock ketchup, too?
