What was considered fancy food in the 80s?

Sushi, I suppose? It wasn't in every supermarket yet.

Blackened cod

OP’s fathers hung dick.

Veal scallapini?

Soft shell crab?

Calamari?

Clams

R1- Is correct. I remember seeing these upscale Sushi places in Manhattan in the mid 80's. Sushi roll was still exotic and trendy at that time. Nouvelle Cuisine was also FANCY and trendy in the mid to late 80's

Angel Hair pasta... squid ink pasta...

Scrod. Thai food. Sea bass and it's fake cousin Chilean sea bass. Spanish wine.

Frusen Glädjé

Baked Alaska

Caviar "purses." The purse was basically a dumpling/raviolo type of thing.

Very small portions of very expensive ingredients became trendy.

It was also the decade where food presentation became important again if you were being fancy.

R11, that actually looks pretty good.

Sun dried tomatoes found their way into an endless number of recipes and menu items. I’m surprised people didn’t put them on corn flakes.

Salads with raspberry vinaigrette.

Chicken Marbella was THE dinner party dish in the 80s.

[quote]Veal scallapini

Oh, dear.

Bread Bowls with dips

Anything that could be called "Nouvelle American"

Fettuccine Alfredo was everywhere and starting to taste like pasta with wallpaper paste.

Chocolate chunk cookies.

Not fancy but trendy were Buffalo wings.

Swordfish steaks and tuna tartare

Not really fancy, but required at 80's luncheon: Tri Colored Pasta Salad.

And blackened swordfish, R2. Add brie to the list. Stinky cheeses started making an appearance.

Chicken cordon bleu?

Ambrosia!

R22 I think of the Fancy Chicken Twins (cordon bleu and Kiev) as a 70s thing.

R24 I was born in 1978 and my family did not do fancy. We were wonderfully working class, and Dallas was as close as I ever got to upscale.

Pesto (pine nuts, basil, etc.) first came into popularity in the 80s.

Swordfish meatloaf with onion marmalade, grilled free-range rabbit with herb french fries, squid ravioli in a lemongrass broth.

Shoot, I did it wrong.

Coq au vin

NEW Coke

Gelato

Aurora's Chicken Pepperoni

Veal Oscar and chicken Cordon Bleu were the rage at the country club

Warm artichoke-parmesan dip.

Nutrasweet.

I was going to say pesto, but someone already mentioned it. Cooking out of Marcella Hazan, Martha Stewart, and Alice Waters was very popular in the 1980s. I think I had Lasagne Bolognese for the first time in 1980. I know it was the first time I made my own pasta.

I had Fettuccine Alfredo a number of times in the '70s. It was my introduction to Parmigiano-Reggiano, so I remember it very well. There was a restaurant at the corner of Florida and Connecticut where we used to go, and you could get the cheese at Larimer's.

I started making my platters look pretty after seeing Martha Stewart do that in [italic]Entertaining[/italic], usually with flowers, when she was still just a New York caterer based in Westport. It was my first cookbook with photos. It still smells of its printing chemicals every time I open it. My favorite recipe was for her cranberry tart on a nut crust. I've made hundreds of them by now.

[quote]I know it was the first time I made my own pasta.

Yes! Pasta machines were de rigueur for 80s food snobs.

Croissants were everywhere

Frozen yogurt

Salad bars

I went from a fancy 1970s restaurant (R164) to a French place in the 80s. Nouvelle cuisine that moved to cuisine minceur (similar, but lighter versions of nouvelle). The food was similar but sauces were now mostly reductions and they "finished" dishes (never topped!). Pastas came in every possible shape, Caesar salads were then topped with chicken or shrimp, much smaller portions of heavy beef dishes, and vegetables were cooked just through, not done to death. A huge departure was in desserts--many more fruit-based creations, cream, chocolate "decadence" type dishes. By the end of the 1980s French was fading and new Italian was the rage.

GoGurt

Pudding Pops

Snackwells

Fruit Pizza was becoming well known.

R41 Was that what passed for “fancy” in your neck of the woods?

Pasta primavera was first offered off-menu at Le Cirque and went nationwide in the mid-70s.

Riunite on ice ... Riunite so nice

Aw, R45-La Lucci was so lovely when she still had her birth nose. Still love her, though!

Salad all-stars:

Endive, radicchio and arugula

Fruit salad served in a watermelon carved to look like a basket or some sort of animal.

Cheesecake shops were the height of sophistication. I remember my boss's wife calling me over to her house midday. I took cheesecake, praying she didn't make a move on me. My teacup rattled against the saucer while we chatted. Then at the soonest opportunity, I ran for the door. There were rumors her husband, my boss, taking liberties with his younger employees. Yeesh, I hated those days.

Fusion cuisine.

Spago’s

Gourmet pizzas like bbq chicken or goat cheese and fuck sausage.

Cajun dishes especially blackened catfish.

Sorry folks, that would be *duck sausage.

R51 we will allow the typo.

yes a fuck sausage is quite appropriate here at the DL

Quiche

Chocolate cookies with marshmallow center and lightly dredged fudge icing on top.

Flourless chocolate cakes.

Martini and Rossi Asti Spumante

ambrosia

Jello Puddin' Pops!!!

"Blackened" anything. Chicken, fish, etc.

Wine coolers. Or was that the 80's?

Expanding off of "blackened": Cajun _____. Usually some type of fish rubbed in Cajun spices, then "blackened."

Any desserts featuring white chocolate and raspberries. Fresh raspberries, especially in January when they cost a fortune at Balducci's!

Bagels

I seem to recall a lot of lobster-centric dishes. Lobster bisque, lobster ravioli, lobster salads, etc.

There was a lot of encrusting with peppercorns too, especially pink ones.

Definitely French Onion Soup.

R62 I never understood how Cajun cooking, which is as humble as it gets, became so chic.

Coffee brewed at home.

How else would you drink coffee at home, r68?

Baked brie.

Eggplant Parm-ee-jarn (as the Americans pronounce it)

Broccoli.

[quote]Definitely French Onion Soup

No, that was popular way before the 80s. In the 50s, even...maybe before that, even.

[quote][R11], that actually looks pretty good.

Ah, so DLers admire ugly food as well as ugly men.

R69 instead of instant

R47 Oh God yes. Radicchio was everywhere. I hated it then and I hate it now.

In the 1980s, bars had good Happy Hours. You go in and buy a drink and they had free hot food: nachos, pigs in a blanket, chicken fingers. I was in college and my friends and I would go in and buy one drink apiece and pig out on the food.

Grey Poupon

In restaurants...

Surf and Turf (More high end if it was Lobster Thermidor.)

Baked Alaska.

At home:

You grandparents could probably whip up a better menu in their sleep.

I remember my aunt's making "potato skins" for a party in 1985. She had been to Chicago and had them in a restaurant or something. Basically, a hollowed out half of a smallish baked potato, with a little potato left attached to the skin, topped with greasy melted cheddar cheese, fake "bacon" bits, sour cream, and scallions. My great grandmother sniffed "we used to slop the hogs with this" when she was refused to take one.

Also for gatherings, Knorr dried vegetable soup mix with sour cream, water chestnuts, and spinach, served in a hollowed out pumpernickel loaf, with the hollowed bread ripped into pieces to dip in the dip.

R76 And Polaner All-Fruit.

Japanese restaurant was a high end trend, not just sushi.

Imitation crab and fake mayo rolls, using cheap white rice was a 90's thing.

2000's, it was a lot of poor quality fish rolls with low quality hot pepper dynamite sauce, aka Sriracha sauce.

Anything that could be stuffed into an avocado was considered super chic in the 80s.

Baked Alaska was big in the 50s and 60s.

Did Buffalo Wings get big in the '80s or was that later?

Potato Skins were popular, too.

Colon-Blow

R85, Remember oat bran everyplace, and granola bars which were slightly healthier versions of candy bars touted as cure-alls. Was oat bran ever proven to be super beneficial or just oatmeal?

Cocaine.

I want to time travel back to the 80's. This thread is making me nostalgic.....and hungry.

Slim Fast.

"A shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and then a sensible dinner."

This always seemed like an unwise, carb and calorie-loaded idea. But I remember the television commercials so well.

It's easy to be snarky about this stuff. That bizarre isle at any drug store of Slim Fast dessert drinks and candy bars seems like it's been around for decades so people must buy this stuff. But I'm wondering if anyone here actually had any weight loss success on "The Slim Fast Plan?"

The concept of "healthy eating" or eating to lose weight was very different in the 80's than it is now.

I feel like we now know more about how the body processes food and what leads to weight gain and high cholesterol.

Or do we?

Corn syrup. The 80's is when this ingredient really took off and started being put in everything.

[quote]But I'm wondering if anyone here actually had any weight loss success on "The Slim Fast Plan?"

I lost a bit of weight by doing it for three months. It's not anything special.

[quote]Did Buffalo Wings get big in the '80s or was that later?

I think that started in the 80s when the "sports bar" restaurants started gaining popularity. TGIF, Applebees, Ruby Tuesdays all had them.

R93 TGI Friday's/Applebee's/Bennigan's... not fancy, but oh I do miss these places. So 80's!

As Moe from The Simpson's so aptly categorized the restaurant genre: "If you like deep fried foods and a bunch of crazy crap on the walls."

Were Wolfgang Puck and California pizza 80s or 90s trends?

Frozen yoghurt - or did that begin in the 70s?

I didn't even try it until 2010.

California pizza was an 80s thing.

[quote]TGI Friday's/Applebee's/Bennigan's - ... not fancy, but oh I do miss these places.

They're all still around ... well, maybe not Bennigan's.

Puck opened Spago in 1982.

I brought Slim Fast shakes to school. I made them at home with milk and brought them to high school in glass jars.

I was a miserable, miserable teenager: fat and gay in Ohio.

Nachos became very popular in the 80s.

Also, big pretzels with toppings. Obviously, NYC had street vendors that sold big pretzels long before the 80s, but suddenly every suburban shopping mall had a pretzel stand with toppings like mustard, caramel, etc.

Wasn't there a Southwestern cuisine trend in the mid-to-late 80s? You know, Hatch chiles and blue corn and upscale versions of Tex-Mex dishes like tamales and enchiladas.

Not trying to be elitist here, but OP did specify "fancy" in his query. I hardly think many of the aforementioned foods here qualify. Compared to the 70s installment of the thread, this one is missing the mark. Nachos, pretzels, yoghurt, and Slim-Fast don't qualify.

[quote]Wasn't there a Southwestern cuisine trend in the mid-to-late 80s? You know, Hatch chiles and blue corn and upscale versions of Tex-Mex dishes like tamales and enchiladas.

Yes. My friends used to jokingly say about me then, "Oh, he'd put cilantro on ice cream." Decades later, I found lime-cilantro sorbet, and I just love it.

[quote]Nachos, pretzels, yoghurt, and Slim-Fast don't qualify.

They did back in the 80s. The Reagans and the Bushes bankrupted all of us. Nachos, pretzels, yogurt and Slim-Fast were our fancy food.