"They Basically Disappeared In The Late '90s": 24 Menu Items That Were "All The Rage" Way Back When, But Are Nonexistent Today
Nothing makes me more nostalgic than recalling the days of "fancy" dinners at the local chop house in my town, fully equipped with a smoking section and salad bar. So, I was very intrigued when redditor u/igotplans2 asked folks of the r/AskOldPeople community to share the dishes that were once popular in restaurants but then disappeared. Here are some of the "trendy" menu items that older generations recalled from way back when.
1. "Nobody serves beef stroganoff anymore."
2. "Blackened everything. It seemed like chefs were working overtime to figure out what they could make in a Cajun blackened version."
— u/igotplans2
"I credit the original Cajun gourmet, Justin Wilson, for this. In the late '80s/early '90s, when more and more people were getting cable TV, he had a few different shows that reached coast to coast. He was maybe not iconic, but he was pretty popular and inspired people to have a taste of the culture and cuisine he fondly promoted."
— u/Ok_Athlete_1092
3. "Potato skins were pretty big in the '80s."
u/hippy2zippy / Via reddit.com
— u/bg370
"I would order loaded potato skins as my meal until they basically disappeared in the late '90s."
— u/Nagarkot1
4. "I can't think of a specific dish, but there was a period in the '90s when pesto was EVERYWHERE, and so were roasted red peppers."
— u/Professor-genXer
"Sun-dried tomatoes were freaking EVERYWHERE for a while there."
— u/GraceStrangerThanYou
5. "Quiche in the late '70s and the '80s. Every fern bar restaurant like TGI Fridays featured quiches, and people were cooking quiches. The popularity of quiche even inspired the title of the book Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. That book inspired the humorous meme of 'Real Men Don't (fill in the blank).'"
u/peepee_dancer / Via reddit.com
6. "Steak Diane. Particularly, made the correct old-school way: flambéed tableside."
— u/MooPig48
"I used to flambé table side in the late '70s/early '80s. Steak Diane was my favorite. Then it just sorta dropped off menus everywhere."
— u/MetalPlaygrounds
7. "Salad bars. In the '80s, every restaurant had one, even some fast-food burger places like Wendy's."
— u/MarshmallowSoul
"Ah, the Wendy's solarium. The epitome of fine dining in the '80s."
— u/80sWereAMagicalTime
8. "Beef Wellington, at pricier restaurants. It's hard to find now, but not too hard to make at home for the right occasion."
— u/newleaf9110
9. "Fondue."
u/No_Lack_7636 / Via reddit.com
— u/sretep66
"There was a whole-ass fondue restaurant in downtown Royal Oak, Michigan, in the '90s. Cheese for the appetizer, then meat and/or shrimp in oil for the main, and chocolate for the dessert. Tasty, but it took hours."
— u/TeacherPatti
11. "Bananas Foster and the whole tableside performance flambé craze from the '70s. Maybe some places still offer that? I haven't seen it on a menu in forever."
13. "German chocolate cake used to be everywhere, and I haven't seen it in decades."
u/imedrgrs678 / Via reddit.com
14. "Crêpes as an entree was popular in the '70s, filled with chicken or crabmeat in a sauce."
— u/Uvabird
"The first restaurant I remember going to as a kid with exotic-looking houseplants everywhere was a '70s creperie. I didn't see another place that did crepes primarily for over 40 years."
— u/Quaranj
15. "Trout amandine. I miss it. I'm a terrible cook, so I can't make it myself."
u/stoatymcstoatface / Via reddit.com
— u/sillyconfused
"I grew up in Louisiana, and we had this everywhere! I always order it now when I see it on a menu."
— u/poissonerie
17. "The Monte Cristo: a turkey, cheese, and raspberry jam sandwich fried up like French toast with powdered sugar on top — '80s food deliciousness."
u/unclecactus / Via reddit.com
19. "I will submit Swedish meatballs, which I actually just got done making for dinner. I don't know if it died out, but I never see it on the menu anywhere."
u/sverremagnus / Via
—
"Only at Ikea."
— u/beaujolais98
20. "Please travel back in time with me to the '60s, and let's talk about baked potato 'fixings' being brought to your table in that thing with a connected metal bowl. Sour cream? Coming up! And it was spun around that bowl so the server could spoon it into your potato. Cheese, bacon bits, and salad dressings were served the same way, including the rarely-seen (but then popular) Thousand Island and Roquefort dressings."
— u/ronmimid
21. "Chocolate mousse in a stem goblet. It was my favorite thing about eating out as a kid in the '80s. Then at some point, it was all crappy frozen chocolate cake."
22. "Around 1980, it seemed like every restaurant had fried zucchini and fried mozzarella sticks as appetizers."
— u/Intelligent-Rip-2270
23. "Liver and onions."
u/jibjeb86 / Via reddit.com
— u/300-02_F41-1
"I was a cook in the late '70s, and Thursday had liver and onion specials. Man, I still remember having to cook that nasty stuff. The only people who ordered it were old people."
— u/nbfs-chili
24. "'A diet plate that had a hamburger patty, a lump of cottage cheese, and canned peaches."
— u/splattermatters
"This, but with a pineapple ring instead of the peaches, is like a nostalgic meal that reminds me of my grandmother. It was years before I realized she was always on a diet."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Woman accused of triple murder says foraged mushrooms may have been added to meal
Erin Patterson, the woman accused of murdering three guests with a meal laced with death cap mushrooms, told her trial on Wednesday she may have inadvertently added foraged mushrooms to the lunch because her duxelles tasted 'a little bland.' On the third day of evidence on Wednesday, Patterson was taken through the events of July, 2023, when she's accused of deliberately adding lethal death cap mushrooms to a Beef Wellington meal she cooked for four guests, including her parents-in-law, at her house in the small Australian town of Leongatha in rural Victoria. Patterson has denied three counts of murder over the death of her in-laws, Don Patterson and Gail Patterson, and Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson. She also denies attempting to kill a fourth lunch guest, Heather's husband, Ian Wilkinson, her local pastor. Taking Patterson back to the days before the lunch, defense lawyer Colin Mandy SC asked where she'd bought the ingredients. Patterson said all ingredients came from Woolworths, a major Australian supermarket. Patterson said she found the recipe in a cookbook, which she followed with 'some deviations.' For example, she said she couldn't find a beef tenderloin log, so she bought twin packs of individual steaks. The recipe had called for mustard, which she didn't use, nor did she use prosciutto because Don 'doesn't eat pork,' she said. On the Saturday morning of the lunch, she said she fried garlic and shallots and chopped up the store-bought mushrooms in a food processor. She cooked the sauteed mixture, known as a duxelles, for perhaps 45 minutes so it was dry and didn't make the pastry soggy, she said. Patterson told the court she tasted the mixture, and as it was 'a little bland,' she added dried mushrooms that she'd previously stored in a plastic container in the pantry. Asked by Mandy what she believed to be in the plastic container in the pantry: 'I believed it was just the mushrooms that I bought in Melbourne,' Patterson said. 'And now, what do you think might have been in that tub?' Mandy asked. 'Now I think that there was a possibility that there were foraged ones in there as well,' she said, her voice breaking. Patterson told the court that Ian and Heather Wilkinson ate all of their meal. Don finished what Gail hadn't eaten. Patterson only ate about a quarter or third of her Beef Wellington, because she was talking a lot and eating slowly, she said. After lunch, they cleaned up and sat down to eat an orange cake that Gail had brought. 'I had a piece of cake, and then another piece of cake, and then another,' Patterson said. 'How many pieces of cake did you have?' Mandy asked. 'All of it,' Patterson replied. She said that amounted to around two-thirds of the original cake. 'I felt over full, so I went to the toilets and brought it back up again,' she said. Patterson has previously told the court that she had battled bulimia for much of her life and was self-conscious about her weight. Patterson said she felt nauseous after the lunch, and later that evening, took medication for diarrhea. The next day she skipped Sunday mass due to the same symptoms and still had diarrhea later that day. That night, she said, she removed the pastry and mushrooms from the leftover Beef Wellington and put the meat in the microwave for the children to eat for dinner. The next day, Monday, she thought she might need fluids so went to the hospital, where a doctor told her that she may have been exposed to death cap mushrooms. Patterson said she was 'shocked and confused.' 'I didn't see how death cap mushrooms could be in the meal,' she said. Earlier Wednesday, Patterson told the court she hadn't seen websites that purported to show the location of death cap mushrooms near her house. She said she was aware of death cap mushrooms and had searched online to find out if they grew in the area. She said she found that they didn't. Patterson also told her trial on Wednesday that she foraged for mushrooms at the Korumburra Botanical Gardens in May 2023, and may have picked some mushrooms near oak trees. The court has previously heard that death cap mushrooms grow near oak trees. Patterson said she would dehydrate any mushrooms she didn't want to use immediately and store them in plastic containers in the pantry. She said that around that time she also bought dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer in Melbourne. Because they had a pungent smell, she said she put them in a plastic container in the pantry. Mandy asked: 'Do you have a memory of putting wild mushrooms that you dehydrated in May or June of 2023 into a container which already contained other dried mushrooms?' Patterson replied: 'Yes, I did do that.' Later in proceedings, Patterson recalled a conversation she had with her husband, Simon, as his parents were gravely ill in hospital. She said she mentioned she had dried mushrooms in a dehydrator. 'He said to me, 'Is that how you poisoned my parents, using that dehydrator?'' she told her trial. She said his comment caused her to do 'a lot of thinking about a lot of things.' 'It got me thinking about all the times that I'd used (the dehydrator), and how I had dried foraged mushrooms in it weeks earlier, and I was starting to think, what if they'd gone in the container with the Chinese mushrooms? Maybe, maybe that had happened.' Patterson also told the court she was responsible for three factory resets of her phone. Her son did the first. She said she knew there were images of mushrooms and the dehydrator in her Google photos. 'I just panicked and didn't want them to see them,' she said. Asked who she was talking about, she said: 'The detectives.' Patterson's evidence is continuing.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Australian woman accused of triple mushroom murders breaks down in court
By Alasdair Pal SYDNEY (Reuters) -An Australian woman accused of murdering three of her estranged husband's elderly relatives with a meal laced with poisonous mushrooms wept as she was questioned over expletive-laden messages about the victims on Tuesday, in a case that has captivated the country. Erin Patterson, 50, is charged with the July 2023 murders of her mother-in-law Gail Patterson, father-in-law Donald Patterson and Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson, along with the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson, Heather's husband. The prosecution alleges she knowingly served the guests Beef Wellington that contained lethal death cap mushrooms at her home in Leongatha, a town of around 6,000 people some 135 km (84 miles) from Melbourne. Patterson denies the charges, with her defence saying the deaths were a "terrible accident". She faces a life sentence if found guilty. Appearing as a witness for her own defence, Erin Patterson was questioned on Tuesday by her barrister Colin Mandy about a series of expletive-laden messages sent to friends regarding the Patterson family. The court previously heard the relationship between the accused and her estranged husband, Simon Patterson, deteriorated shortly before the alleged murders due to a disagreement over child support. "I wish I'd never said it. I feel ashamed for saying it and I wish that the family didn't have to hear that I said that," she said of the messages, that the court has previously heard in the prosecution's case. "I was really frustrated with Simon but it wasn't Don and Gail's fault," she told the court through tears. Erin Patterson is the first witness for the defence after the prosecution rested its case on Monday, following a month of evidence from witnesses, including relatives and medical, forensic and mushroom experts. The accused began her testimony on Monday afternoon. It is unknown how long she will give evidence for or whether she will be cross-examined by the prosecution. The trial, which began on April 29, has seen intense interest from Australian and international media, with podcasters, journalists and documentary-makers descending on the town of Morwell, around two hours east of Melbourne, where the trial is being held. State broadcaster ABC's daily podcast about proceedings is currently the most popular in the country, with two others also high in the charts. The trial continues.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
Australian woman accused of triple mushroom murders gives evidence
By Alasdair Pal SYDNEY (Reuters) -An Australian woman accused of murdering three of her estranged husband's elderly relatives by serving them a lunch laced with poisonous mushrooms began giving evidence during her trial on Monday, in a case that has gripped the nation. Erin Patterson, 50, is charged with the July 2023 murders of her mother-in-law Gail Patterson, father-in-law Donald Patterson and Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson, along with the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson, Heather's husband, in a case that has gripped Australia. All four fell ill after a lunch of Beef Wellington, mashed potatoes and green beans, the court has heard. Prosecutors allege the accused laced the meal with highly poisonous death cap mushrooms at her home in Leongatha, a town of around 6,000 people some 135 km (84 miles) from Melbourne. Erin Patterson denies the charges, with her defence saying the deaths were a "terrible accident". Beginning her evidence towards the end of the day's session, Erin Patterson said on Monday her relationship with estranged husband Simon Patterson had been in difficulty shortly after they married in 2007. "We could never communicate in a way that would make each of us feel heard and understood," she told the court. She had also grown apart from Simon's parents, Donald and Gail, at the time of their deaths, she added. "I had felt for some months that my relationship with the wider Patterson family, particularly Don and Gail, had a bit more distance or space put between us," she said. Earlier on Monday the prosecution rested its case, following a month of evidence from witnesses, including relatives and medical, forensic and mushroom experts. Simon Patterson gave evidence earlier in the trial, characterising the relationship between him and the accused as strained at the time of the alleged murders. The trial, that began on April 29, has seen intense interest from Australian and international media, with podcasters, journalists and documentary-makers descending on the town of Morwell, around two hours east of Melbourne, where the trial is being held. Erin Patterson is expected to resume her evidence on Tuesday, when the trial continues.
