On the tyranny of small plates and the dinner you assemble yourself
I file this for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine from a Shoreditch restaurant where I have just paid a considerable sum for a meal I had to assemble myself from fragments. My other reports from the East London dining frontier are at my page, filed, like this one, slightly hungry.
The Tyranny of the Small Plate
Somewhere along the way, the restaurants of Shoreditch decided that the meal, that ancient and functional arrangement of a starter, a main, and a pudding, was over, and that the future was the small plate, the sharing plate, the assemblage of fragments that the diner must combine, in uncertain quantities and at uncertain cost, into something resembling dinner. I have just experienced this future, and I am here to report that it left me hungry, confused about the bill, and somehow validated, which is, I have decided, exactly the intended effect.
The small-plate restaurant operates on a principle of deferred responsibility. The kitchen does not serve you a meal; it serves you components, and the assembly of those components into an actual dinner is your problem. How many plates constitute a meal? No one will tell you. The staff, when asked, suggest airily that it depends, that three or four plates each is usually about right, a calculation that proves, when the bill arrives, to have been optimistic on the kitchen’s behalf and ruinous on yours.
The Mathematics of the Bill
The genius of the small plate, from the restaurant’s perspective, is the mathematics of the bill. Each plate is modestly priced, reasonable in isolation, a few pounds here, a few pounds there. But a meal requires many plates, and the many plates, modestly priced in isolation, combine into a total that would have bought a substantial dinner at a restaurant that simply served dinners. You have paid more for less, assembled yourself, and the small individual prices have concealed the large collective cost until the bill arrives to reveal it.
The guides that cover this scene, the likes of Time Out, describe these restaurants in the language of innovation and experience, the small plates framed as a sophisticated way to dine, a chance to taste more, to share, to graze. And there is something to this, a genuine pleasure in the variety, the sharing, the tasting. But there is also, beneath the sophistication, the simple fact that you have paid forty pounds for six small plates and left hungry, a fact the language of experience works hard to obscure.
The Validation
And yet I left validated, which is the strangest part. For the small-plate restaurant sells not food, exactly, but an experience, a sophistication, a participation in a certain kind of dining culture that marks one as discerning, adventurous, in the know. To dine on small plates is to demonstrate that one understands contemporary food, that one has moved beyond the bourgeois fixed meal, that one belongs to the culture of the curated, the shared, the assembled. The validation is the product; the food is the occasion.
This is, I think, the real transaction at the small-plate restaurant, the exchange not of money for food but of money for belonging, for the experience of dining in the approved contemporary manner, for the validation of one’s own sophistication. I paid forty pounds, and I received six small plates, and I also received the sense that I am the kind of person who dines on six small plates, which is, apparently, worth the price of leaving hungry.
The Hunger After
The defining experience of the small-plate meal is the hunger after, the return home still peckish, the raid on the fridge, the toast eaten at midnight to complete the dinner the restaurant declined to provide. This after-hunger is so common as to be a genre of its own, the Shoreditch diner finishing at home the meal they paid a fortune for out, the validation of the restaurant supplemented by the actual sustenance of the kitchen cupboard.
I have made my peace with this, the small-plate meal followed by the secret toast, the expensive validation followed by the cheap sustenance. It is, I have decided, simply how dinner works now, in Shoreditch, a two-part affair, the public performance of sophisticated dining and the private act of actually eating, the forty-pound experience and the midnight toast that completes it.
The Plate I Did Not Order
So I will continue to dine on small plates, to assemble my own dinners from fragments, to puzzle over the bill, to leave hungry and validated, to complete the meal at home with toast. It is absurd, this way of dining, expensive and insufficient and somehow compulsory, and I participate in it fully, a willing victim of the tyranny of the small plate, paying for the experience and the validation and not, it turns out, quite enough food.
The Bread Charge
No account of the small-plate restaurant would be complete without the bread charge, that masterpiece of the modern menu, in which the bread, that ancient gesture of hospitality, the thing restaurants once placed on the table freely as a welcome, has become a chargeable item, a small plate in its own right, sourdough at a price that would once have bought a loaf. The bread charge captures everything about the small-plate philosophy, the unbundling of the meal into chargeable components, the conversion of the free into the priced, the transformation of hospitality into revenue. One orders the bread, because one is hungry and the small plates are small, and the bread arrives, excellent and expensive, and contributes its share to the bill that the modestly priced components have conspired to inflate. I order the bread every time, knowing it is a charge for what should be free, knowing it is the kitchen monetising hospitality, and I order it anyway, because the small plates are small and I am hungry and the excellent expensive sourdough is, at least, actual food, a thing to fill the hunger that the curated fragments leave. The bread charge is an outrage, and I pay it gladly, the most honest item on a menu designed to leave me hungry and validated and considerably poorer.
The fixed meal, the starter and the main and the pudding, the dinner that actually filled you, is gone, at least in Shoreditch, replaced by the assemblage of fragments, the sharing plates, the curated grazing that leaves you hungry but discerning. I miss the fixed meal, sometimes, the simple sufficiency of it. But I would not admit this in Shoreditch, where to want a proper dinner is gauche, and where the correct desire is for six small plates, forty pounds, and the validation of having dined, hungrily, in the approved contemporary manner.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
