It’s lovely going out for dinner in London. It’s a gastro capital with cuisines from all around the world. One night, Indian, French the next, Peruvian, Ethiopian. You can travel the globe without leaving Hackney.
And since we now have the recipes, do we really need the people as well?
But one pernicious dining trend that refuses to go away and which I detest is “small plates”. My heart sinks and I become inwardly furious when I sit down and the waiter asks: “Have you been here before?” “No, it’s our first time.” “Well, we do ‘small plates’ and we suggest you order between three and 20 per person.”
A suggestion. Simply that. You're free to ignore it.
People think I’m a hipster, being an east London drag queen, but I’ve got nothing on the purveyors of “caulifower bites”. Suddenly you’re handing out a tenner here, a tenner there, for tiny saucers of pomegranate seeds, things sprinkled in petals and a random blow-torched lettuce leaf. Just give me a bloody dinner!
Just bloody order one - or go to a restaurant that doesn't do the small plate thing. There's plenty, even in Hackney.
I’m 53. I grew up in Kent in the 1970s in a perfectly normal working-class, borderline lower-middle-class household, the kind so wonderfully explored in Mike Leigh movies. It was the kind of home where the food was dished from the pan on to the plate. And then the whole plate was plopped in front of you and you were told to eat it all up – or you couldn’t go and watch Grange Hill.
And look how you turned out, despite that upbringing...
In small-plates hell, you end up trying to reconstruct a normal meal and paying twice the price for it. Death to small plates – that’s the hill I will die on. Unless you’re in Spain, of course; I love a spot of tapas, but that’s different.
Really? I fail to see how, unless you simply revere anything foreign over your heritage.
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