What will be the hot foods of 2015? What restaurant trends will be dictating our eating habits? Is the burger boom over?

All good questions which we will try to answer. Or at least we will try to answer some of them.

Just don’t hold your breath for genuine insight.

On previous evidence, the 5pm Dining blog has not demonstrated superb powers of forecasting. In general, our tips have varied between laughably inaccurate and wildly off the mark.

Occasionally, we have got something right but we’re putting that down to luck rather than judgement.

So, instead of gazing into our crystal ball, we’ve looked into what assorted food industry experts have predicted and listed the most interesting ones.

We’ve left out the more worthy stuff – apparently hybrid veg such as BrusselKales are set to be big news but who cares?

The sources we have looked at include Olive magazine, The Telegraph, NPR, Lost in Catering and, as always, the influential Baum + Whiteman report.

Bug brunch

Eating insects is only going to get bigger. You’re unlikely to see Marcus Wareing et al start running a bug-tasting menu any time soon but ingredients such as cricket flour are already being used to bulk up protein bars.

Have it your way

Whether you want to call it bespoke, hacked, personalised or simply ordering off menu, it seems as though those influential Millennials want their food prepped and served just the way they like it. In Olive, Tony Naylor points towards Big Fernand, a new French burger chain which has just opened in London. They offer 3,840 different permutations on the meat patty, bun, topping formula.

Souping

Yes, it’s a thing now. Juicing is like, so last year. Or was it the year before? We forget. Anyway… souping, all the goodness of juicing plus all the fibre which can be lost in the juicing process. And nothing says ‘delicious’ quite as emphatically as ‘added fibre’.

Technogrub

As you know, restaurant booking and even pre-ordering is easy through 5pm.co.uk. To paraphrase Mr Buzz Lightyear, get ready for all that guest-facing technology to start going to infinity and beyond. Pre-booking specific tables; ordering via in-house tablets; paying by smartphone and even face recognition software that can tell a waiter where you are standing in a busy bar are all being trialled.

On-trend ingredients and techniques

Rotisserie chicken (see the just–opened Spit/Fire in Edinburgh; smoked and pickled foods; green juices, more seaweed, coconut sugar (coconut water is over apparently); wild food such as venison; British charcuterie, bitter flavours (more Negronis!), savoury ice cream.

Finally, it seems that oysters are back; a fact that makes the 5pm Dining blog very happy.