Some weeks I read the new menu items rolling out across the country and I feel like a kid with his face pressed against the window of a pastry shop. This is one of those weeks. Nation's Restaurant News just highlighted a batch of dishes that made me sit up straight in my chair, and I want to talk about two in particular that tell you something about where restaurant cooking is right now.

First, the Mediterranean nachos. I know what you are thinking. Nachos are Mexican, they belong to the great tradition of Tex-Mex, why would you go messing with that? My grandmother, God rest her, would have had strong words about putting hummus on a tortilla chip. But this is where I think American food culture does something Italian cooking sometimes refuses to do. It plays. It takes a form everyone recognizes, the layered chip-and-topping situation, and it asks, what if we told a different story with the same grammar? Pita chips instead of tortilla. Feta, olives, maybe some roasted red pepper. The structure stays familiar but the soul travels somewhere new.

Is it authentic? No. Is it interesting? Yes. And sometimes interesting is enough to get me to pull up a chair.

The second thing that caught my eye is more my territory. The Royal in Alexandria, Virginia, and the St. Regis San Francisco have both introduced a cocktail that evokes a butter lettuce salad. Let me say that again. A drink that tastes like salad. My first reaction was suspicion, I will not lie to you. I have watched too many chefs put things in cocktails that have no business being there. Then I thought about what a butter lettuce salad actually is when you strip it down. Green, slightly sweet, a little mineral, clean. If you can capture those notes in a glass with the right spirit and a thoughtful acid, you might have something genuinely surprising. The kind of thing you remember three weeks later at another bar and wish you could order again.

And there is a matcha crème brûlée floating around out there too, which is the kind of East-meets-West mashup I have a soft spot for. Crème brûlée is one of those desserts that works because it is perfect in its simplicity. Custard, sugar, fire. Adding matcha does not reinvent it, it just gives it a slightly bitter, grassy edge that cuts through all that richness. My nonna would have wrinkled her nose. I would eat the whole thing.

What I like about all of these is the willingness to try. Not every experiment needs to become a classic. Most will not. But the ones that do, the ones that earn a permanent spot on the menu, they start as someone in a kitchen going, what if we did this differently? That curiosity is the same thing whether you are in a trattoria outside Naples or a hotel bar in San Francisco. The ingredient changes. The instinct does not.