The other night, my wife and I went out to dinner with our friends Jen and Jay. Ordinarily, we like to keep things simple. We’ll head over to their cottage on the Chesapeake Bay. Jay will smoke meat or steam top-neck clams. We’ll dig a pit on the beach, gather dried driftwood, and do what grown middle-aged people tend to do: drink and burn things and pee under the stars. (Our wives bypass that last bit, ladies to the last.)
But now that we’re living through the Year of Trump, we decided to class things up. So we headed to yet another nearby restaurant that has fallen prey to the small plates revolution. I’ve always distrusted the term “small plates,” nearly as much as I distrust revolutions. It seems to have infected the restaurant world back during the tapas invasion of the early aughts, “tapas” being a Spanish word for “appetizer portions at entree prices.”
Small plates are perhaps the most insidious foodie trend of the last two decades. Worse than “architectural presentation,” when chefs, for a time, decided to stack all your food in a vertical tower, so that getting to your osso bucco was like playing a game of Jenga. It is more cloying than the cupcakes craze or wrapping everything in bacon (including cupcakes). Only a foodie could ruin something as faultless as bacon.
Since I’m a child of the American century who grew up in the Land of Plenty, small plates are an affront to my national identity. We’re Americans. We don’t graze like cows. We eat cows. Lots of them. Preferably wrapped in bacon and lacquered in cupcake frosting. We might not make much anymore, but by God, we still make lots of fat people. More of them, all the time. I was reminded of why the other day when filling up at Sheetz and seeing an advertisement above the gas pump for “Mac n’ Cheetos”—essentially fried mac and cheese covered in Cheetos dust. “For a limited time,” the sign warned, unclear if it was referring to how long you had to get them or how long you have if you eat them.
So before my first coronary, it was high time to give small plates another go. The restaurant was tastefully appointed and well lit, littered with pictures of crab-pickers and oystermen, bygone old salts who’d find it a wee bit pretentious that the family over there in the corner—Mom and Dad and Patagonia and Pumpkin Spice—were ravenously hunched over a plate of curried lamb meatballs with pickled cauliflower and pine nuts, each elbowing their way in (or “sharing” in small-plates parlance), trying to procure one precious lamb puck before they disappeared.
Our waiter, who wore Buddy Holly glasses and looked like he swaps “This American Life” podcast bootlegs with the guys in his PRI discussion group, informed us that small plates are for sharing, so we ought to get a lot of them. We did. But it didn’t help, much. Sure, the food was tasty. I really enjoyed my one-quarter of a fried green tomato. The two shrimp I had with the teaspoon of grits was so good, I asked Jen if she was going to pick her shrimp tail.
Even my Old Fashioned was delicious. I almost didn’t mind when a server asked if I wanted “bourbon or whiskey” in it. (Silly hipster, bourbon is whiskey.) Instead I just sent him off on an errand of utmost importance to small-plates types (“Could you please ask the bartender what farm this cherry is locally sourced from?”) while trying to extract my small pour of liquor from around the gargantuan hand-cut artisanal block of frozen water that made me feel like I was drinking off the Ekström Ice Shelf.
As I finished off my final two forkfuls of chimichurri butcher steak in sweet potato puree, which is to say my only two forkfuls, Jen excused herself to the restroom, then came back with a water-splattered top. “Even their sinks are small,” she explained. The bill, of course, wasn’t small—about the cost of tuition for a semester at a middling private school. Jay and I split it, as he asked, “So, where should we go for dinner?” We talked of doggy-bagging our locally sourced drink garnishes to make a fruit salad in the car. But the restaurant didn’t have to-go boxes, since nobody has ever had leftovers. I suggested maybe we should just hit a drive-thru.
Unlike our small plates, it was an idea we all gladly shared.
