Have You Dined With Us Before?

Please allow me to explain eating to you.

A while back Jeffery and Augie invited me to dinner in Silver Lake. It had been ages since I saw them and they love meeting up for a meal so I decided to let them choose a restaurant. When we arrived to the beautiful restaurant with wood-paneled walls and high ceilings, I was immediately charmed by the warm decor, the hip Eastside clientele (People wearing full-on outfits! Pants!), and of course by the chance to see friends I haven’t seen very much in the past few years.

The meal started like many in-person restaurant experiences I remembered from my past. I looked around the room, noticing nothing that would give me reason to fear this restaurant. Our conversation started off naturally enough.

“Thanks so much for finding a place!” I said.

“I hope you like it,” responded Jeffery.

“Honestly I’m good as long as it’s not tapas!” I joked.

Suddenly, a hush came over the restaurant as my friends looked on in awkward, bewildered silence. The maître d’ dropped his reservation book and clutched his pearls. The waitstaff stopped in their tracks and smashed plates of food in each other’s faces in protest. The chef looked out from the kitchen, grizzled, sweat pouring from his furrowed brow, his eyes narrowing into a glare so intense it could start an ice cube on fire. Fellow patrons looked upon me with pity and disgust, wondering if this was the first time I’d ever been outside.

Then, something even more terrifying happened. Our waitress approached. Being that this is LA, she was tall, statuesque, beautiful, intriguing, and mysterious. But the distraction of her beauty was only temporary. What followed were the six most spine-tinglingly terrifying words I have ever heard in my life:

“HAVE YOU DINED WITH US BEFORE?”

No, in fact. I hadn’t dined there before. But I already knew the horrible fate these awful words would decree.

“…Well all our dishes are designed to be served family style.”

[Meaning: food will be presentable when it is brought out but within seconds these lovingly-styled plates of food will be torn to shreds by the barbarians sitting around the table]

“We recommend 7-12 entrees per person to ensure you get enough food.”

[Meaning: Goodbye, all my money!].

“In the case of items such as crab cakes, which are annoying to cut, we will make sure to bring the exact WRONG number of them out to ensure it’s basically impossible for your party to not feel like rats on the Titanic battling for the last bit of cheese as the ship sinks. For example, if there are five people in your party, we will bring 3 crab cakes so you have to cut them into tiny pieces so everyone can just one tiny morsel, just enough to show you what you’re missing. ‘Why not bring five,’ you ask? Don’t be an idiot. This is not daycare. We can’t do every single fucking thing for you.”

Upon realizing I was a hater of shared plates eating, Jeffery immediately went into damage control.

“We can just order our own entrees, it’s no biggie!” Said Jeffery

“But I wanna share stuff!” screamed his husband Augie, who is British and therefore can’t always perceive when an American is having a complete and utter public meltdown (Complete and Utter Public Meltdown is standard baseline daily behavior for a British person).

“I’m not gonna, like, be the person demanding his own plate at a family style restaurant!” I said, knowing that everyone in the whole city now knew it, I garbage who’d never fine dined before.

And so we did kind of a hybrid. We ordered some shared appetizers but then ordered our own entrees. Which basically meant we ended up with WAY TOO MUCH FOOD.

It was a lovely meal and catching up with these two people I’d been missing for months was worth going against my culinary ideology. But I stand by my hatred of family style/tapas/shared plates dining. And I’m using those terms interchangeably here, mostly to connote a restaurant that instead of serving fancy individually-plated dishes decides it’s a cute idea to bring moderately sized troughs of food to your table and force you to fight over who gets to eat what like a bunch of ravenous piglets drenched in mud, filth, and misery.

I don’t know when my disdain for shared plates restaurants began. But I’ve never loved the idea of restaurants being lazy about individual plating and opportunistic about upcharging you by only offering tiny plates at “reasonable” prices that end up being unreasonable when you find out exactly how many you have to order to satiate your technically-pretty-average-if-I’m-being-honest appetite. So yeah, I stick by my disdain for family style restaurants. And here’s are the main reasons why.

BEAUTY!

I’m not going to a restaurant to scrape bits of food off a platter in the middle of the table. I go to a restaurant to eat beautifully-plated food, made by someone else, in a composition created by someone else. If I wanted to compose my own plate, I would do so in the comfort of my own home, which coincidentally isn’t full of patrons screaming their goddamn heads off because the acoustics are terrible in here. My issue with items plated for “family style” dining is that by the time they hit your plate, they’ve been mangled and destroyed and look uglier than if you’d just made them yourself (alone, in your home, crying).

NUMBERS.

I’ve never been to a family style restaurant where the plates match up to the number of people in the party. Meatballs are a classic example because no one wants to eat PART of a meatball. It’s a food designed to be eaten by ONE person. But it always kind of works out that you have to frantically cut these “sharable” portions awkwardly into tiny mashed up slivers (usually with a dull butter knife). Sauce gets everywhere. Expensive clothes are destroyed. Lives are ruined.

TINY OILY BITS.

My hatred of family style/tapas/shared plate (WHAT DO WE CALL THIS?) style dining is confined only to the United States. Tapas taste good when you’re literally anywhere else. Like if you’re having a beer in Barcelona, patatas bravas and jamón are delicious. The second you get onto American soil, any small appetizer-based meal tastes disgusting, gives you a stomach ache, instantly causing you to hate your life. I think this is because chefs feel like they need to make smaller plates richer, saltier, and smothered in oil so they seem satiating. But they’re not satiating me, they’re just making my stomach hurt and giving me acne.

Also, now that I think about it, tapas work with the way Europeans eat more than how Americans eat. In Europe you’re either going for a drink and a snack or some dinner that lasts eighteen hours but somehow magically costs less than $100. In the U.S., if you’re at a restaurant for a more than five hours there’s absolutely no way you’re getting out of there for less than $1000 (per person). So while it makes sense to sit at a cafe in Madrid for five hours eating small plates, it doesn’t make sense to try and smash that experience into the short amount of time allotted by American restaurants, which I’m guessing have to flip tables pretty quickly because their rent is too high and everything in this country is expensive and stupid and annoying.

FOOD FIGHTING!

Family Style dining, whether it be small tapas-like plates or larger dishes meant to be shared, leads to a confrontation that I did not come here to have. I do not do well with people fussing over things. It causes my brain to shut off immediately. For example, if you’re gonna make a big deal out of wanting to pay for the meal, I’m not going to argue I’ll just let you pay for the stupid meal so you shut up. If I say I’m paying for the meal, just let me do it so I will stop talking. The back and forth on this type of argument makes me wanna crawl out of my skin because always seems slightly disingenuous. It’s the same with splitting the last bits of food. I hate it when people are like “YOU TAKE THE LAST COOKIE!” because it puts you the spot and makes you feel like if you take it you’re greedy and fat and gross will die alone because of your gluttony. But if someone tells me “YOU TAKE THE LAST COOKIE!” I will take that cookie just so we can stop talking about it. I’ve hidden food under napkins for this very reason. Arguing over dumb things like who gets the last French fry and who pays the bill could go on forever, and my deepest fear in life is being trapped in a conversation I cannot escape.

HI, I’M POOR.

For most of the time I’ve lived in LA, I haven’t had the money to be able to go out to eat. I was poor for all my twenties, spent all my money in my 30s barely scraping by and spending anything extra I had on furnishing my apartment, and then the pandemic happened and erased literally all my streams of income. Probably if it were more of a priority, I’d eat out more. But I’ll always choose buying a piece of art or a sconce for my new kitchen over going to a restaurant.

This isn’t to say I am not a fan of restaurant culture. I love food and consider it an incredible art form. But as far as my priorities go, paying my rent and mortgage and figuring out how to pay for home renovations outrank everything else. So a family style restaurant, where the inexpensive $18 plates start to feel a lot more expensive when everyone has to order ten of them PLUS six to ten $27 cocktails apiece, sends me into a tailspin of financial terror. Like you’re sitting there slowly starting to freak out about the bill as more and more tiny dollhouse-sized plates of food arrive with a tremendous amount of fanfare and way too much mansplaining by the female waitress. Long story short, I cannot afford this and what am I doing here?

AND NOW, A SHOCKING CONCLUSION!

I don’t like shared plates restaurants. If you’re starting a restaurant, give us elegance, give us glamour, give us beautifully-plated food. Feed us like human beings. Not like desperate birds at a depressing bird feeder, violently pecking each other’s faces to get the last bits of food. Feed us like dignified royalty, not like we’re at the buffet line at the wedding of someone we hate, desperately trying to get around Aunt Pam so we can grab that one last dried-out disgusting dinner roll.

All that being said, here’s something I do like. I like going to a regular (non-shared plates) restaurant and splitting two entrees with one other person. If that seems odd to you based on everything I just said, I’m going to need you to pay better attention. I don’t dislike sharing, I dislike the way food is served, styled, and plated when a bunch of people around a table get their grubby paws all over it. I love trying multiple things, but I’d rather they be plated in a cute way and intentionally composed flavor-wise. When individual humans are allowed to order a collection of small plates together, are they thinking about how the flavors of the different dishes will mesh or are they thinking about their OWN SELFISH DESIRES? I think it’s the latter, so family style restaurants lead to flavor combinations that, quite frankly, should never take place on American soil.

Anyway, that’s it. I rest my case. I won. No more shared plates/family style/tapas restaurants.*

*In the United States. They are still allowed everywhere else.