Hot Summer, Cool Dishes

While summer traditionally provides an opportunity to chill out, menu innovation never takes a vacation. Chefs have been turning up the heat on some cool new items, and the past few weeks have seen the introduction of dozens of dishes that celebrate the season. Wendy’s Summer Berry Chicken Salad made with fresh blackberries and strawberries and finished with blackberry vinaigrette is one example, and Applebee’s Grilled Watermelon and Spicy Shrimp Salad with house-made creamy mint-Greek yogurt dressing is another.  Indeed, this summer has seen a plethora of items notable for their inventive use of ingredients:

• Umami Burger’s Negroni BBQ Burger is a nod to the classic cocktail that’s come back into fashion; it’s topped with kale slaw tossed in bacon vinaigrette and crowned with an unexpected Campari-and-cola barbecue sauce. Carl’s Jr. has been experimenting with boozy burgers, too. A few months back, the chain promoted the Midnight Moonshine Burger with White Lightnin’ Sauce and is currently testing a Budweiser Brew House Bacon Cheeseburger with Budweiser Beer Cheese, an item likely to score a direct hit with the chain’s target millennial male diners.
• On a less alcoholic but equally audacious note, Shake Shack has shaken up the frozen dessert category with the Butter Coffee Blend Concrete introduced exclusively at its Mall of America location. Made with vanilla custard, butter-coffee caramel sauce and shortbread cookie, the item sounds like a sly send-up of the brief butter-coffee boomlet.
• Meanwhile, pizzaiolos have been having a field day with fruit, as with Your Pie’s award-winning Peach Prosciutto Pie. In addition to the titular ingredients, it also sports a trio of Italian cheeses—ricotta, mozzarella and Parmesan—and freshly chopped basil. The Elvis Pizza from &pizza in Washington DC is a dessert offering that features chocolate-hazelnut-peanut butter spread, bacon, grape jam and bananas.

While menu mashups are year-round tactics in a chef’s bag of tricks, several are especially striking this summer, like the Montreal-meets-Mumbai Tikka Masala Poutine at Desi Galli, an Indian restaurant in New York City. The item gets bonus points for its smart use of chickpea flour, which makes the dish vegetarian. Then there’s Burger King’s zany Mac n’ Cheetos (pictured), which combines  two of our favorite orange-colored foods into cheese-stick form, is guaranteed to generate buzz and to put the food police on high alert. And finally, serious props go to Quality Eats in New York City for its Cracker Jack Old Fashioned made with Cracker-Jack-infused rye. Yes! Literally awash in creativity and with a definite cool factor, it’s a great illustration of sizzling hot  innovation behind both the bar and the stove.

Photo courtesy of Burger King