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I didn’t know what I was walking into when I said yes to Tour the Trends, and that’s kind of the point.
I met the host through the Zoomba group at FEED this year, right after relocating to Chicago. He asked if I wanted to join this year’s tour, and I said yes without hesitating. What I didn’t realize until later is how coveted the event actually is. People fly in for it and wait all year for it to drop, and they don’t tell you where you’re going until you show up.
The Not Knowing Is the Best Part
About a week out, I got one address and a meeting time. That was it. The rest of the day unveiled itself, restaurant by restaurant, as a surprise. There were places on the itinerary I’d been trying to book for weeks and couldn’t get into. Kitty’s Cosmopolitan Club was one of them, and suddenly we were just walking in.
Where My Two Worlds Finally Collided
I have a restaurant operations background that I don’t often get to bring into my higher education work. This tour let those two worlds meet in a way that doesn’t happen often.
Nothing on the day felt shocking exactly, but the level of design intention at every stop stayed with me, down to where they sourced the marble for a bar top. Having the designers and owners there in person changed how I took it in. Hearing them explain their own thinking let me see each space through their lens, and that storytelling was honestly my favorite part of the day.
One detail I keep coming back to: at one bar, the bar top was raised to the same height as the customer instead of tucked down low, so you could watch every part of your drink being made. I would never have noticed that on my own. It took being surrounded by people who spec kitchen and bar equipment for a living to point it out.
Learning From the Room, Not Just the Restaurants
Part of what made the day valuable was who I was walking through it with. I don’t specify kitchen equipment myself, so being on the tour with people who do that daily was its own education. They kept pointing out equipment and layout choices I’d have walked right past, that bar top being the clearest example. At each stop, the owners and designers also walked us through their space in person. So you had two layers of expertise at once: people who build these spaces professionally, reacting in real time, alongside the people who actually built it explaining their own thinking. Getting both in the same room isn’t something I experience often.
The Stops That Stuck With Me
Kitty’s Cosmopolitan Club and Crying Tiger both stood out for how thoughtful the design curation was. But Zarella’s, a Chicago tavern-style pizza spot, is the one I keep thinking about. It managed to feel like a modern pizzeria without losing any warmth, like being in someone’s kitchen. That says something about Chicago: the city wants to push food forward, but the people here are approachable, and they want their food to feel approachable too. Zarella’s didn’t need to reinvent the pizza, just do tavern-style really well.
Then there’s Susu, whose kitchen was featured on The Bear. They built the space with a glass wall straight into the kitchen, so you can watch full dinner service happen in front of you. I could have stood there for hours just watching.
What This Means for Campus Dining
A lot of what I saw is commercial foodservice at its most current, and I kept drawing lines back to higher ed.
Students are demanding authentic global cuisine right now, and we need to understand what that actually means rather than approximating it. The restaurant industry sets that expectation, so meeting it on campus means paying attention outside our own walls.
The thing that matters most to me is storytelling. When someone opens a restaurant, every choice is intentional, and there’s a real story woven through the space. We don’t do that in higher ed nearly enough, and that’s what students actually connect with. We’re getting better, but we still aren’t saying clearly enough: this space is intentional, and here’s the story behind it.
Campus dining also serves a captive, recurring population, unlike a city with a thousand options. But that doesn’t mean students want less say in how they use a space. They want to feel part of something while still choosing how they show up to it. I’d love to see higher ed lean further into functional spaces where one student can sit alone and still feel part of the environment, not isolated from it. That’s an area where we’re underutilizing both our design and our captive audience.
If I had to name one thing for a client conversation, it would be color and texture. People are tired of beige, and the more a space can speak to you, the more they’ll want to be in it. Pair that with adaptability: trends move fast, so maybe the answer isn’t committing a space to one branded identity forever, but building something that can rotate through different offerings. People want choice.
Would I Tell a Colleague to Go?
If someone on the fence asked me whether this is worth the time, my honest answer starts simple: you get a full day of eating and drinking. Who says no to that?
But the bigger reason is this: the tour shows you what’s working at its absolute best right now, and staying close to what’s emerging matters for our whole industry. Gen Alpha’s expectations around dining are already different, because this is what’s new to them. If we’re not paying attention to where commercial dining is headed, we’ll miss where our own students are headed too.
About the Author
Eavan Jennings is a consultant with Envision Strategies, bringing a restaurant operations background to her work in higher education dining.hile preserving the connections that matter?
