Everything Is a Kids Menu Now

Buttered pasta: the height of culinary sophistication. Photo: Getty Images

The other night at a new Manhattan restaurant, I ate a bowl of soft ricotta gnudi under a blanket of salty Parmesan cream. There were some mushrooms and the requisite black truffle somewhere in there, but the pleasure of this dish was so uncomplicated and gentle that I wouldn’t even use the overworked phrase “mac ’n’ cheese for grown-ups” to describe it. This was more elemental. This was buttered noodles, what a parent might make to help a third-grader get over a bad day on the playground. Dessert was a slab of vanilla custard under a sheath of puff pastry that might as well have been a Hostess Pudding Pie from the ’80s. I ate it all, happily, and reverted in some ways to my own third-grade self. This effect was surely by design. The city has seen a spate of openings that offer exactly this experience of easy, Middle American indulgence: pasta topped with Ritz crackers, hush puppies and fried saltines, McNuggets for the platinum-card set, “big ol’ meatballs” with thick stacks of lasagna, cocktails that taste like Girl Scout cookies, and strawberry Jell-O pie to finish or maybe a literal pudding cake.

Following comfort-food trends is like tracking Eric Adams investigations: There are so many, and a new one seems to pop up each day. But then a development that feels like real news arrives. Something has shifted within the city’s kitchens. The mid-aughts boom of made-over home cooking saw chefs apply a fine-dining lens to familiar flavors and ideas: duck meat loaf, revisionist Caesars, offal burgers, deconstructed eggs Benedict. Now, chefs are re-creating childhood food memories more or less exactly. It’s haute nostalgia for anyone who grew up in the suburbs.

Earlier this summer, the director Richard Linklater lamented his own industry’s reliance on marketing “films for 12-year-olds” to everyone. The message is “stay a kid forever” as studios figured out “it was probably more profitable to just make films for kids and the kids in all of us.” Where we once had The Sopranos, we now have The Sopranos but with bad guys from Batman. Is The Penguin “good”? Depends on whom you ask. It’s definitely a crowd-pleaser with ideas originally intended for kids repackaged for adult consumption. Are “five-cheese pizza rolls” — $18.50 at the Corner Store in Soho — any different?

(The ongoing Orlando-fication of Manhattan is similarly difficult to ignore: Raising Cane’s showed up on city corners seemingly overnight, L.A.’s ChainFEST just took over Randalls Island, and Rainforest Cafe — Rainforest Cafe! — announced a midtown pop-up. One wonders if a Volcanic Cobb Salad will taste the same on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building as it does inside Michigan’s Great Lakes Crossing mall.)

The snob reaction to all of this may be to complain that a lack of culinary imagination has taken over the city’s restaurants. Who’s going to invent the next — I don’t know — frozen foie gras with litchis if customers are all cramming into nouveau diners and lining up for croissants? What difference does it make, Carmy Berzatto? Culinary trends reflect the public’s taste — most chefs want to cook food that people will order and like — and right now, we want Samoa sundaes.

Maybe we’ve even earned them. Have you read the news lately? Each push alert — war, famine, climate change, AI, more Trump — is a little reminder that we may not be around much longer. We should probably eat some pudding cake while we have the chance.