Sara Rush Wirth

Top indie trends Avocado toast with salmon belly Sep. 23, 2019 San Francisco restaurant Cliff House (No. 75) put an upscale twist on the still-popular avocado toast. The seafood-focused concept named its avocado toast with mesquite charred salmon belly its most successful menu addition of 2018.

I may be the in-house tech expert at Restaurant Business, but this month—as RB’s Future Issue drops—I return to you with dispatches from my experience as a new kind of restaurant consumer. Earlier this year, I ate at restaurants a few nights a week and socialized over cocktails and apps. You know, the “typical millennial” habits. Then I had a baby in May, and my lifestyle did a 180. Now, takeout has become a staple.

This year’s class of social media standouts found surprising ways to break through on popular platforms, reinvent their voice on established ones and gain footing in the “brand”-new worlds of Snapchat, Instagram and more.