To say I am over small plates would be wrong. I was never that into small plates to start with.
Although I thwart my partner’s every opportunity to order and eat the one thing they want, halving or, at least, tasting whatever they choose from a menu unless it’s logistically impossible, I have long been sceptical about the idea of making food smaller so that more people can eat it.
Perhaps this is just gluttony. Perhaps it is my contrarian impulse to be sceptical of new trends until they prove they are worth their salt. Perhaps I’m a curmudgeon who needs to accept that, for some people, going out for a meal less about the food itself than the company. Or perhaps it is all down to one dish I had in August 2018. Perhaps it is all about The Boeuf Bourguignon.
The small plate phenomenon took off in the 2010s. Inspired by Venetian cicchetti and Iberian tapas, it replaced traditional ‘starter, main, dessert’ service with a flexible menu of bar-snack to starter-sized portions that we could mix and match. Amplifying informality without compromising the quality usually reserved for more traditional dining, small plates gave us good food in a relaxed, social setting unencumbered by formal servers, starched tablecloths or too many forks.
In 2016, around the same time as my move to Newcastle and the final year of my PhD, small plates appeared firmly on my culinary horizons. While tapas was familiar territory thanks to trips to London with my father as a child (good) and student meals at La Tasca (bad), this was exciting. What had only been the stuff of Guardian restaurant reviews had finally marched North, bringing with it a sense of novelty, specialness, and invention.
My excitement, alas, was short-lived.
It was a birthday dinner at a French bar and restaurant that had recently opened under a railway arch, ticking all the boxes for a couple of hipster millennials with a city to explore from their first ‘just the two of us’ flat. Birthday dinners were our annual ‘posh nights out’; the sort where one-pan chickpea stews eaten in a draughty Tyneside living room gave way to high heels, picking the second cheapest bottle on the wine list, and a general sense that we were, for the night, proper grownups. What we ate was, as I recall, very pleasant, though much of the detail escapes me. I remember being charmed by a vegetarian course that might have involved stuffed courgettes or peppers, I imagine I hoovered up some cornichons and assorted cheesy things, but my abiding memory is of only one thing: the ‘small plate’ of boeuf bourguignon.
A deceptively simple beef stew braised with wine, stock, herbs, and a few baby onions and mushrooms, boeuf bourguignon is a hearty meal to be enjoyed with a cheap carafe of red in a poky bistro after a freezing walk along the Seine. Its spiritual home is beside a mountain of boiled or mashed potatoes drenched in a Normandy dairy’s worth of butter that still somehow still manage to soak up gallons of jus. It is an abundant labour of love (or, better, a simple recipe thrown together in a slow cooker) to pile onto friends’ plates when they come for dinner. A boeuf bourguignon should leave you breathlessly full, turning your stomach into a blast furnace that warms you from the inside out for the next six hours.
A boeuf bourguignon should stick to your ribs. As a ‘small plate’, it can barely stick to one.
Some rare foods can occupy any imaginable height, depth and breadth without losing themselves in the process. Like a pastry-cased fractal, there is no size at which a pork pie is fundamentally wrong, it is merely a bigger or smaller version of its perfect self. The only disharmonious thing about a pork pie so large it could be seen from space or one that could fit on the head of a pin would be the lack of appropriate knife with which to slice it. Defying logic, despite its ever-changing pastry : jelly : filling ratio, the pork pie always retains its platonic ideal unless you mess about too much with the recipe.
Other foods only work within a smaller bell curve. If altered, they become something other than themselves. Mince and dumplings reimagined as an amuse bouche might be fun, but it will never truly be mince and dumplings. Plate-sized blini piled with the same proportion of smetana and caviar or smoked salmon as you’d find on their miniature form would quickly become unbearable; too salty, claggy and nauseating for even the maddest oligarch. Although I have experienced successful reimaginings of the hearty and simple into the refined and dinky – a special bao, a deluxe fish finger sandwich, a fine-dining twist on a jaffa cake – their success always lay squarely in having evolved enough from their original form.
If you enlarged a mouse to the size of an elephant it would explode. If you shrank an elephant to the size of a mouse, it would freeze to death. Mince and dumplings, blini and boeuf bourguignon follow this same principle: served at the wrong scale, they will die.
Whether small plate culture exploded in the north east over the next few years or whether I simply became more aware of it after the bourguignon, our restaurant scene soon felt increasingly peppered with half-sized crockery. There was Thai tapas, Asian fusion tapas, Tex Mex tapas. There were ubiquitous flatbreads, mini pizzas and sweet potato fries designed to soak up bottomless prosecco brunches. Menus for foodie establishments became short lists of nouns (always printed in lower case) followed numbers without pound signs, only one decimal place, and small print advice to order at least three dishes. They sprouted new pages, inevitably headed by expensive chunks of bread from the same local, bougie bakery and followed by plates of similarly expensive dip, and no meal was complete without a few seasonal vegetables or locally-caught fish fried in tempura. Eventually, there was even the Small Plates deal at Wetherspoons.
Most noticeably, though in no way a bad thing, was the evolution of ‘going for a curry’. Something I had experienced as a traditional mix and match with your dining partner affair since the 90s was gradually replaced with street food menus explicitly marketed as sharing experiences. Ordering as a table rather than an individual was front and centre of this new way of eating, where our belated discovery of puri, aloo tikki and vada pav gave us collective amnesia about decades of meals that started with a chorus of ‘you want poppadoms and pickle, right?’, ‘d’you want to share rice and a naan?’ and were punctuated by the clinking of spoons into an array of bowls that almost completely covered the yellow or burgundy tablecloth. While the dishes we were eating had changed, the model of shared dining had – it seemed to me – always been on the table.
This is not to denigrate the small plates or sharing dishes of any culture or cuisine. I am, by nature, a butterfly diner who delights at seeing multiple tiny things she can try all at once. Spanish tapas, Italian cicchetti, Levantine mezze, Indian tiffin, Eritrean stews on cartwheel-sized injera, Chinese family-style dining and bubbling vats of hotpot accompanied by plates of meaty cookables all hold a place in my heart. I have dragged my partner through endless back streets to get specific bite-sized snack food on more holidays than he likely cares to remember (I recall fondly a whole baby octopus on a stick in Venice, a pork crackling-topped puff pastry and a pumpkin Danish in Zagreb, Roman suppli and Polish paczki to name a few).
But something unusual was happening where dining out in Britain was concerned. The previously un-tapased was now the already-tapased or not-tapased-yet. There seemed to be no limit to what we might shrink and share.
After a decade and a half of small plate ubiquity in British restaurants, many and far better writers than I have shared their frustrations with the model. After so long, it can be tiresome to read another menu that ‘suggests’ how many dishes to order per person, rather than giving us the option of simply picking our own dinner without needing to navigate someone’s gluten intolerance, someone’s vegetarianism, and everyone’s unspoken bank balance. God forbid another waiter walks me through the ‘concept’ of sharing food with another person, as though humanity had evolved not through hunting, gathering and eating things together around a fire but through ordering single-serve dishes from some primeval McDonalds.
For a while it was hard not to think that small plates had become a subtle way for restaurants to fill the coffers emptied by the pandemic. It was a gimmick that could turn customers into useful idiots. We were ready to pay more money for an unknowable but likely bijou amount of food because it was fashionable, and were easy prey for servers who encouraged us to over-order in the name of ‘experience’. For other restaurants, adding some half-hearted small plates on a new sheet of paper felt like keeping up with the Joneses.
Sometimes the small plate was good. Sometimes, it was a boeuf bourguignon with heart failure.
At the same time, in the late 2010s digital and media landscape, longform content had finally given way to clickbait and shortform videos. As smartphones became omnipresent in our lives, more and more moments became voids to be filled with scrolling. Irrespective of our age or background, we no longer needed to concentrate or go out of our way to be entertained. We merely needed a browser and a few apps. Pleasure – or what we instinctively reached for in the pursuit of pleasure – was less likely to be a languorous immersion in a singular experience than a rapid-fire and instant assault of visual and auditory stimuli. Big, unruly sheets of a physical newspaper had been replaced by access to infinite global news ready to be read or watched through a six-inch screen. Long train journeys with no more than a book and a view were now unthinkable without headphones and streaming. A once mundane toilet break now could be a three-minute tour of an Oscar winner’s walk-in-wardrobe, a panda sanctuary in Chengdu, and the UN General Assembly Hall.
By miniaturizing our pleasures into thirty-second, digital encounters in this way, we stripped away much of their inherent risk. With boundless content ready to be algorithmically delivered into our pocket universes, to experience an image or video that bored or, worse, displeased us was no longer a problem. Within seconds, we could simply scroll to something else. Even longer forms of experience like TV or film no longer carried the same degree of commitment or jeopardy. If, after a few minutes of browsing, we realised we had chosen something we didn’t like, no problem. We could simply move back a couple of screens and try something else, rather than grudgingly sucking up the effort and money we had wasted on our latest trip to Blockbuster and wondering what else to do with our night.
If our sensory experiences were increasingly copious and snack-sized, and our virtual lives, now indistinct from our ‘real’ lives, were buffets from which we could pick multiple items without the danger of making a ‘bad’ decision, why should we be expected to choose only one main course when we went out for dinner? Why shouldn’t we have five at once? Why invest time and emotional effort in choosing just one option that we hoped might be good if we could minimize the risk with some variety and a few backups, just as we could on our screens? Sure, these dishes might be smaller, but wouldn’t the experience be bigger, better and safer for having several at once?
Perhaps the explosion of small plates wasn’t dining’s tapasification, but its tiktokification.
In the real and digital worlds, small plates also looked more exciting. Our eyes attuned more to OLED screens and their bright colours and shapes than the delicate tonal shifts of a view through a single window or the quiet harmony of a Cézanne pear, multiple dishes simply gave us more to see. If it is true that we eat with our eyes as well as stomachs, an array of dishes might better sate a visual appetite that is both fed and fuelled by the thousands of digital images we see every day. Similarly, our small-plate laden tables gave us more to show. They were often a feast not only for our eyes, but for those of our friends, families and followers on Instagram feeds and Facebook profiles, irrespective of how the food might have tasted. Deliberately or subconsciously, the abundance we showed off in our small plates photos said as much about our aspirations as our appetites. ‘I am not limited to just one choice in this once unattainable practice of fashionable dining and trying lots of dishes,’ they seemed to say, ‘I, like the rich and influential, can afford to have it all.’
Where once we looked, then ate, now we looked, photographed, posted, then ate, pausing first to feed our digitised meals into the open mouth of a social media machine for likes or influence. In doing so, we made the small plates concept all the more desirable, powering an online foodie feedback loop. We craved what we had seen, so more restaurants sprang up or rebranded with little dishes ready to satisfy us. Another head appeared from the small plates hydra.
Eventually, this ‘little bit of everything’ culinary and aesthetic culture even made its way into the domestic sphere. The tired parent’s treat dinner of a ‘picky tea’, once a mini-buffet of frozen party food, cheese, and odds and ends from the fridge eaten in front of the TV became a desirable, Instagrammable ‘grazing plate.’ The cheese and crackers we put out as snacks for film or drinks nights became cornucopia of hand-rolled prosciutto and mortadella rosettes and curated smorgasbords from our friendly local fromagerie, sprinkled with herbs, flowers and arranged around the picture-perfect cracker assortment that wove its way across our ‘charcuterie boards’. Our little domestic lives became further backdrops against which a buffet could be displayed for the infinite digital world.
But food content, like all content, is nothing unless it is shared. It requires other people. So does the small plates menu.
I wonder whether our taste for small plates is, above all, a product of our media economy, where more and more experiences are designed as shareable content with the real-life, haptic experience as an afterthought (see the restaurants of the late 2010s apparently built to monetise a flower wall rather than a kitchen). Or is the small plates boom instead – or perhaps also – a reaction against this digital-first culture? Is it only natural that we want to share our dinners and establish human connection wherever we can in an increasingly atomized world? Sitting at the same table has been a symbol of trust and togetherness for millennia; eating from the same dish is a moment and gesture of true intimacy. However ubiquitous or ill-conceived some small plates might be, they might therefore help to meet the social and spiritual need so many of us feel for physical, rather than simply digital, connection. Do we crave the ‘tiki mezze’ or ‘organic desi tapas’ not for our tastebuds, but for our souls?
Perhaps. But of one thing I will always be certain.
No matter how much you want human connection, a boeuf bourguignon should only ever be a main course.