Got this the other day from my devoted reader Dizzy: "I've got a favor to ask. Can you help me out with something? I am wondering why restaurants seem to be shying away from serving ketchup on their burgers. When I go out to a chain restaurant, one along the lines of a Chili's or Outback, I order a lot of burgers and they seem to come with onions (which I take off), tomatoes, lettuce, mustard and sometimes mayo. But never ketchup. It seems like that marks a change - they used to come standard with ketchup, right? My dad (also a big burger guy) is also wondering about this as well. I told him that I would write you, the bestest foodie on the planet, and have you find out what's happened to the ketchup on our burgers? Please, do tell. P.S. y.b.d.n.k.i.t.g.a.i.i."

Not sure about that whole P.S. part, but now that he mentions it, ketchup has been MIA, especially in upscale burgers, which seem to have adopted a ketchup-it-yourself approach. Not sure what it means. Even that fancy chipotle ketchup is an elective.

Another mysterious disappearance is that of the spoon. Not as in, "the fork ran away with." The fork is right there where you expect it, as is the knife. Just no spoon. Zagat Buzz tried to get to the bottom of it: "We wondered if there was something more to the spoonless trend. And it turns out there is, according to Dr. Brian Wansink, the director of Cornell's Food and Brand Lab who's currently on leave to run the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, in Washington, DC.

Wansink said that his team at Cornell learned that "while place settings don't seem to have much of an effect on the way people order it definitely changes how people perceive a restaurant." They conducted a study of business diners "who don't blink at spending $30 on an entree," in which they asked participants to look at dozens of different settings and rate them by features like how expensive that restaurant would be. 'Settings without spoons were seen as more 'European' and were rated as slightly more elegant than most settings that had spoons,' Wansink said."

One more trend, one I could do without, is the ascendance of the square plate. Plain white, big lip, impossible to balance your knife on. There are the long rectangular white plates on which a trio of something comes (tartares, creme brulees, etc.), but the square white plate might contain anything. Vaguely Asian-feeling, they're meant to be hip and possibly space-saving on a small table, most prevalent in a small-plate restaurant.