The New Yorker:

By Hannah Goldfield

Rare is the food trend that doesn’t garner backlash and the designation “overrated”; cf. cupcakes, cronuts, and kale, all mentioned in Sophie Brickman’s Talk of the Town storylast week about the food-trend chronicler David Sax. Rarer still is the food trend that garners such immediate and absolute derision as “artisanal toast,” a category that seems to apply to any stand-alone restaurant or café menu item consisting of high-quality, crisped-up bread topped with something simple (like “small-batch” almond butter) and not called crostini or bruschetta.

Back in January, John Gravois, a writer for the California magazine Pacific Standard, set out to investigate the source of the craze in San Francisco, where he’d been watching it gather steam. What he discovered was an origin story that was fascinating and heartwarming enough to become a segment on This American Life; I won’t spoil it for you. But Gravois’s skepticism of the trend itself went beyond finding it overrated—he was practically appalled by it. The first line of his article describes the toast-making process with scorn: “All the guy was doing was slicing inch-thick pieces of bread, putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them.” Later, he writes, “I rolled my eyes. How silly; how twee; how perfectly San Francisco, this toast,” and quotes the manager of the café where he first noticed it: “Tip of the hipster spear.”

Go to link