The Cleveland Dining Trends We Love, and Hate

Bring on the salads Credit: Chopt Creative Salad Co.

We’ve lived through fast-casual everything, sheet pans, mason jars, smash burger ascent, smash burger oversaturation, resurgent emphasis on interior design and dozens of other trends we dug, and disliked, over the years. As 2024 comes to a close, here’s what we’d like more and less of.

Sell: Metal Stools & Chairs
We get it. The industrial-chic look was all the rage in the 2010s, a vibe that featured exposed brick, slick concrete floors and exposed HVAC. And, yes, cold, minimalistic and uncomfortable metal furniture. We see the appeal: these items typically are a fraction of the cost of attractive, ergonomic and well-made barstools and dining room chairs. But in a city that experiences six months of polar darkness, we’ll take whatever shreds of coziness you can muster.

Buy: Daring Dining
If you’re in the mood for burgers, pizza, tacos, fried chicken or steak, you are living in the Golden Age of Dining Out. The world is your oyster. The sky’s the limit. The future’s so bright, you gotta wear shades. But if maybe you don’t want to eat those items, these are bleak times indeed, my friends. Be bold. Be different. Swing for the fences. Now more than ever diners need compelling reasons to leave the house.

Buy: Leaving the House
Dining is a bi-lateral arrangement. Chefs and owners agree to offer good food and serve it in a well-run establishment. In return, diners commit to patronizing those businesses, buying the food and drink, and tipping the staff. The entire system breaks down when diners stay home and order delivery. Not only does this approach result in subpar food, it shifts a considerable amount of money from the restaurant owner to the out-of-state tech companies.

Hold: Shareable Plates
In the before times, a server would deliver a plate to each diner seated at the table. On this plate would be an entire meal earmarked for one single human person. If that guest was feeling particularly generous, he or she was free to share bites of this, spoonfuls of that. How quaint. These days every dish that leaves the kitchen is placed in the middle of the table, thus launching a feisty tabletop skirmish for the spoils.

Sell: Ridiculous Serving Platters
At the same time that shareable-plate restaurants are reaching their zenith, tables are getting smaller and smaller. Do you see the hitch? When a server says something like, “We recommend two to three items per diner,” I look down at the table and think, “In what physical world is this supposed to happen?” Making matters much, much worse is a desire to out-platter the next place, with food being dispatched on heavy stone slabs, in cast-iron skillets and aboard surfboard-size wooden planks.

Buy: Ohio Wines
The strides that winemakers in the region have been making in recent years is nothing short of extraordinary. At long last, Ohio’s reputation as a viticultural area that produces only sweet wine is eroding with each barrel and bottle that leaves the winery. As Ohio wine-drinkers continue to move on from sickly-sweet wine, so too do the growers and viniculturists who decide what to produce. And now, more than ever, those labels are appearing on local lists.

Buy: Chopped Salad Bars
People want healthy, but they demand customization. Back in the day, soup and salad bars were all the rage, with untold linear feet of wholesome ingredients tucked beneath the relative safety of the sneezeguard. These types of places largely vanished long before Covid, but chains like Chopt have thrived for decades. Given that the formula is a relatively straightforward one, you’d expect to see a million copycats. Chopt, in fact, will join the Cleveland market in the coming year, as will local startup Greens Salad Co. Sounds like room for more.

Buy: The All-Night (or Very Late-Night) Diner
When journalists describe a topic as “evergreen,” they imply that the story has timeless – or at least recurring – appeal. The demand for diners has been an evergreen topic around here since the early-2000s, when these Hopper-esque haunts began disappearing in droves. As the numbers of late-night revelers continued to plummet, so did the demand for post-bar hangouts. But the desire is there and so are the numbers, albeit wedged into a smaller piece of pie. Do it right – and locate it wisely – and it will kill.

Buy: Free Happy Hour Snacks
Would it kill you to put out a bowl of popcorn? Has the peanut-allergy crisis pushed the beer nut to the brink of extinction? Nobody is expecting complimentary beef sandwiches at the bar ala Morton’s, but a dish of olives, a bowl of pimento cheese, heck even a chafing pan of weenies would go a long way to filling the void. Consider this a win-win proposition as the simple gesture of hospitality has been proven to boost bar sales.

Buy: Current Online Menus with Prices
Knowledge is power. Diners in search of information will invariably hit Google and a restaurant’s website when seeking information such as location, days and hours of operation, and food offerings. Menus lacking up-to-date prices are a particular annoyance to diners, who loathe pecuniary surprises upon arrival. We understand that this is not a set-it-and-forget-it situation given dynamic inventory prices, but the matter is important enough to warrant the hassle.

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