Beverages like these were huge at the show. See if we liked them. | Photo by Benita Gingerella
The team at Restaurant Business and Nation’s Restaurant News spent all four days at the National Restaurant Association Show, owned by our parent company Informa Connect. As a team, we took about 620,000 steps during the four-day event.
It’s not just the exhibition, one of the country’s largest. We have dinners with friends from across the country, attend parties like Menu Masters or the Gold and Silver Plate Awards and enjoy the greatness of the city of Chicago. It’s a lot.
Now that it’s over, it’s good to get our assessment of the event, the food we tasted, the events we attended and the show’s overall performance. So I asked my colleagues to give me something they liked and something they did not about the 2026 National Restaurant Association Show, and they did not disappoint.
Like: The lack of plant-based items. Every year we get a taste of the trends in the restaurant industry. Some years these trends feel like fads—like, say, frozen yogurt. In recent years, that fad has been plant-based meat, and it was everywhere at the show. Fake eggs. Fake sausage. Fake burgers. Fake chicken. Fake this. Fake that. All made from plants. All heavily processed. Some were better than others. But it was all just too much, and the public was just not as ready for it as were suppliers. The products mostly disappeared this year as the public moved onto the newest fad, protein everything.
Bonus like: Cedar Crest Ice Cream. I can do a bonus because I’m the editor and I’m writing this thing. But I’m not going to let an opportunity pass to boast about the best thing I’ve eaten at the show in, probably, years. That ice cream was absolutely amazing. I would eat that stuff forever.
Dislike: Noisy parties. Maybe I’m old. But I spent too much time yelling trying to talk to people at points. If I want to go to a concert I’ll go to a concert. If I want to go to a club I’ll go to a club (actually I’ll probably just go home and read or watch Netflix). But it’s hard to meet and talk with people when you can’t hear yourself think.
Jonathan Maze
Like: Talking to operators and exhibitors. Our favorite thing every year is talking to people about the challenges they’re seeing and the solutions they’re offering to ease some of those challenges. On the operator side, the past few years have seemed more collaborative from an information-sharing and curiosity perspective and that observation was reiterated by several people I talked to. Such willingness to provide best practices or advice illustrates that no matter how cutthroat and competitive this industry is, it’s still remarkably cooperative.
Bonus like: Cheese. Shout-out to all the cheese suppliers for keeping me satiated.
Dislike: Afternoon sessions. I was craving more educational sessions in the mornings. It seemed like they were afternoon heavy, which made them hard to fit in and I couldn’t siphon as much information as I wanted to!
Bonus dislike: My feet hurt.
Alicia Kelso
Like: Pastry. This pastry puff with a melted Oreo inside from Dimitria Delights. Self-explanatory.
All cookies should come baked in pastry. | Photo by Joe Guszkowski
Dislike: Unworking machines. The coffee machine in my hotel room didn’t work. Coffee machines in hotel rooms never work. Someone should look into this.
Joe Guszkowski
Liked: Tractor. I enjoyed trying all the different flavors of beverage company Tractor’s Haymaker drink line. The drinks, which contain apple cider vinegar, struck a nice balance between tangy and sweet. They also had one of the prettiest booths at the show.
Dislike: Dirty sodas. Speaking of beverages, I am over the dirty soda craze. This year it seems like every other booth was offering their own version of the drink. I prefer my soda sans half and half, cold foam or whatever else they’re adding to them these days.
Benita Gingerella
Like: The Arab dessert kunafa (sometimes spelled knafeh) at the Alkanater booth in the South Hall. It’s basically griddled soft cheese topped with shredded phyllo dough and chopped pistachios, and then doused with a sweet syrup tinged very lightly with rosewater. It wasn’t easy to eat with a plastic fork. Happily, you couldn’t throw a meatball without hitting a vendor offering sustainable cutlery. With knife procured, I was able to enjoy my daily kunafa.
Kunafa. | Photo by Lisa Jennings
Dislike: Not enough pickleball. There we were with not one, but TWO available pickleball courts and plenty of people looking to play. I hated that I could only work one game in a day. Between the kunafa and the very important taste test of every ice cream vendor in McCormick, I wish I could have played more.
Lisa Jennings
Like: Cold foam. I liked all the different ways you can jump into the cold foam trend. There were products that dispensed flavored foams on dirty sodas and coffees and equipment that aerated milks into fluffy cold foams. An operator can go low-tech or high-tech.
Dislike: The carnival barker at the Plate Drop. He was soooo loud and right near the Informa booth.
Patricia Cobe
Like: Chili crunch. I liked the Bombay chili crunch from Taste of India — taking a trendy Chinese condiment and reworking it to fit an Indian flavor palate.
Dislike: Plant-based meat. I steered clear of the shrinking supply of plant-based meat analogs because I already know I don’t like them.
Bret Thorn
Bonus like: The Chicago lakefront at dawn. There is nothing quite like an early May morning on Lake Michigan. I will not debate this. See for yourself, and see you all next year. –JM
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