On supper clubs, pop-ups, and the joy and absurdity of paying premium prices for a tiny portion
I went to dinner in Shoreditch recently and was served, with enormous ceremony, a single artful mouthful, and as I recounted for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, where my running commentary on the small-plate revolution appears, I have made my peace with the fact that the East End food scene is now a place where the portions are tiny, the feelings are enormous, and the bill arrives like a plot twist. It is ridiculous, and it is also, infuriatingly, often wonderful.
The empire of the small plate
Somewhere in the last decade, the main course quietly died, and in its place rose the empire of the small plate, the sharing dish, the tasting menu of fragments. We no longer order a meal; we order seven tiny meals, each a precise little statement, arriving in an order determined by the chef and at a pace determined by the kitchen, to be photographed, discussed, and consumed in two bites. Food safety and standards across all this experimentation are overseen, reassuringly, by the Food Standards Agency, and the vibrant independent food economy it supports is exactly the kind of small enterprise that local strategy through Tower Hamlets and neighbouring Hackney recognise as central to the area’s life. The plates are small. The scene is enormous.
The pop-up and the supper club
What I genuinely love, comic grumbling aside, is the inventiveness of it all, the pop-ups appearing in railway arches, the supper clubs run out of someone’s flat, the chefs trying things they could never attempt in a conventional restaurant. The low-commitment, high-creativity model of the pop-up has let extraordinary cooks take risks, test ideas, and reach diners without the crushing overheads of a permanent restaurant, and the result has been a genuine flowering of food culture, much of it brilliant, some of it mad, almost all of it more interesting than the chain restaurants it sits alongside. The scene’s appetite for experiment is its best quality.
The bill as plot twist
The comedy, of course, is the money. There is a particular moment, when the bill for all those tiny exquisite plates arrives, that I have come to think of as the twist ending, the point at which the evening reveals its true cost and you reassess everything that came before. Seven small plates, it turns out, cost considerably more than one large one, and the privilege of eating beautifully photographed fragments is priced accordingly. I pay it, usually, and I enjoy it, mostly, but the gap between the size of the portions and the size of the bill remains one of the great unexplained mysteries of modern dining.
What the small plate is really selling
The deeper truth is that the small-plate restaurant is selling an experience, not a meal, and the distinction matters. You are not paying to be fed; you can be fed for a fraction of the price. You are paying for an event, a performance, a story to tell and a photograph to post, a couple of hours of curated pleasure in a beautifully designed room. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on what you want from an evening, and on the days when I want exactly that, the small plates deliver it superbly. On the days when I am simply hungry, they are a baffling and expensive way to remain so.
The next reservation
So I will keep booking the pop-ups, keep ordering the small plates, keep photographing the artful mouthfuls and bracing myself for the twist ending of the bill, because for all the absurdity, the East End food scene is doing something genuinely creative, and I would rather have it than not. The portions are tiny and the feelings are big and the prices are a comedy in their own right, and I have decided that this is, on balance, a trade worth making, at least until the next time I leave a restaurant both delighted and faintly hungry. Small plates, big feelings, and a bill that lingers in the memory. I will see you there.
The chefs taking the risks
For all my jokes about portion sizes and plot-twist bills, I want to be clear that the people driving this scene are doing something genuinely admirable. The pop-up and supper-club model has given talented cooks, many of them young, many of them from backgrounds the traditional restaurant world has long excluded, a way into an industry with brutal barriers to entry. Without the crushing cost of a permanent restaurant, a brilliant cook with an idea and a railway arch can build a following, take a risk, and occasionally launch a career, and the diversity and inventiveness of East London food owes an enormous amount to that low-commitment, high-creativity model.
That is worth defending, and worth paying for, even when the paying stings. The small-plate revolution is partly an exercise in charging a lot for a little, and I will go on grumbling about that. But it is also a genuine engine of culinary creativity and opportunity, a way the food world has opened itself up to voices it used to keep out, and that is the part I want to remember when the twist-ending bill arrives. Big feelings, small plates, and a scene more open than the one it replaced.
For more on the joys of dining out, the team enjoys Private Eye, small plates and sharp knives.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
