Who ordered the upgrade?

Chefs put truffles on burgers. They tried to glow-up the hot dog. Now, there's caviar with fried chicken. It's surprisingly good

- VIR SANGHVI

Sometimes, a simple snack/sandwich/street food becomes trendy. Great chefs get involved, prices shoot up and other restaurants begin imitating the variations the famous chefs have introduced.

Something like that happened to the burger around three decades ago. Daniel Boulud made a splash at his casual DB Moderne restaurant in New York, serving high-priced burgers. Gordon Ramsay made a burger with foie gras. Joel Robuchon put sliders (small burgers) on the menu. And soon, chefs were putting black truffles and other luxury ingredients on their burgers.

That trend is now dead (or at least I hope it is) but it has left its imprint. For a while, I thought the hot dog would get the same treatment. In London, Karam Sethi of the JKS group opened Bubbledogs, which paired hot dogs with champagne. And in New York, Daniel Humm invented the Humm Dog with a bacon-wrapped beef frankfurter and a truffle sauce. (Humm served it at NoMad, which he then owned, and it turned up all over the world, including, for a while, at a stall Humm opened by the lake in Zurich!)

But the hot dog never took off in quite the same way and I waited to see what the next relatively humble food to get the upmarket treatment would be. My money was on fried chicken which has long been an obsession of mine.