Fusion isn't a "trend" anymore, it's just dinner.‍

Korean beef, Middle Eastern lamb, whatever mash-up you've been quietly obsessed with, apparently that's not risky anymore, it's expected. So if you've got a dish on the menu you've been treating as the weird one, the one you don't push because it's "not for everyone", maybe push it. People aren't looking for safe. They're looking for interesting.

"Value" doesn't mean cheap.

The report basically says diners aren't price-shopping, they're worth-shopping. Translation: if your $34 dish doesn't tell people why it's $34, they'll just assume you're ripping them off. Doesn't matter if it's slow-cooked for nine hours and the cut's from a single farm. If that's not somewhere on the menu or in your captions, nobody knows.

Using the "ugly" cuts of meat is cool again.

Whole-animal, nose-to-tail, secondary cuts... all good for your margins and actually makes for better content than another tenderloin shot. "We use the whole animal" is a better story than "here's our steak".

People want to order five small things, not one big thing.

Share plates, snacky formats, grazing... still climbing. Good news for you: more dishes on the table means more photos, more reasons to post, more reasons for someone to drag a friend along next time.

Slow and visible cooking = trust.

Smoking, curing, ageing: whatever takes time and looks good on camera. This one's basically free marketing if you film it.

Smaller, tighter menus win.

Straight from the report: hero dishes, focused menus, clear positioning. Big menu = bad menu. We've been banging this drum for a while, nice to see MLA catch up.

None of these are new ideas. They're the same five things dressed in 2026 clothing: tell the story, don't hide the good stuff, keep it simple. The venues that win this year aren't doing anything wildly different. They're just better at saying out loud why what they're doing is good.