Small Plates

 There was a TV series a few years ago where various men of a certain age chuntered into the camera about the vexing iniquities of the modern age.

Grumpy Old Men was a very British sort of programme. A celebration of whining where the whingers were in on the joke. Futile raging against minor annoyances is, I would argue, one of the pillars of our National Sensibility, or stereotype, at any rate.

The point of me dragging up this quite minor TV show is that, at the time, I chortled along with the joke, while at the same time missing the essential tragedy. While they were nodding and winking along to their own grumpiness, and celebrating their own pettiness, it was nevertheless an incontrovertible fact that these were opinions that they held deeply, that the world was passing them by.

I've thought about this a lot recently, as I too descend into middle age (45 now, no getting away with "young" any more), I try to avoid my thinking ossifying, I try to question my own prejudices and opinions. But if there's one subject on which I could go onto Grumpy Old Men and mean every single word it is this:

Restaurants where food "comes out when it's ready" are the work of the devil.

Those poor souls amongst you who are subjected to my intemperate outings on social media will already be aware of my antipathy towards this modish method of eating, inevitably partnered with the small plates of the title. In theory I  am all in favour of small plates, I quite like having a variety of things to pick at. I'm a fairly sociable eater, and I'm happy to share. What I object to with this style of dining is the execution of it.

I've had two meals this year which have led to me finally deciding to get my irritation of my chest here. On both occasions my hackles were raised within seconds of sitting down, as wait-staff felt it necessary to explain this very simple concept to me as though it was some crazy new innovation too outlandish for my mortal brain to comprehend. And on each occasion when they explained it to me my heart sank.

For those of you as yet unaware, I am, by trade, a chef. I've worked in kitchens for a long time, I know what makes chefs tick, and I know how chefs like to have things arranged. And I'm here to tell you that while small plates is a pain in the arse, "when it's ready" is an absolute godsend.

A big part of the skill of cooking professionally is brining a disparate set of dishes up to the passe, ready, in their best condition, at the same time. It's the a la minute cookery where the skill lies, finishing the fish at the last second, finishing the sauce in the pan. The second the food's on the plate it's peaked, the longer it sits around for the worse it's going to get.

So from this point of view "when it's ready" is wonderful. Cook dish, send dish. But for the diner, this is to my mind, less of a good deal. Take our first meal like this this year, at Liverpool's much vaunted Mowgli (which is, apparently, "street food", which is a rant for another time, but suffice to say, if you're sat at a table, with a knife and fork, in a building, it's not bleeding street food, is it?). After having the concept explained to us as if it were the Nicean Creed we picked a variety of dishes,. Eating out as a family this should be great, a lovely homely vibe as we share plates and compare and contrast our various choices with a little good-natured bickering about who's ordered best.

In reality, Mrs Coastalblog's meal arrived almost entirely within five minutes. Nothing else for a further six, during which time, rather than looking forlornly at it, she had generously divided it amongst everybody else. Dishes arrived at irregular intervals. Eldest son got one two minutes after that my curry arrived. The rice, however, arrived several minutes later. The grim punchline to what was a deeply frustrating lunch was a side of roti bread arriving ten minutes after everything else had been finished and cleared away. Mmm. Dry bread.

So while I don't entirely dislike the idea of bits arriving fairly regularly, it doesn't seem beyond the wit of man to me that a diner might want their rice at a similar time to to their curry, or their bread while there was something to dip it in. Also, as a chef, I found myself wondering how on earth a complex curry, and some lamb chops presumably cooked from raw arrived long before some chips and some rice. This isn't sending dishes out when they're at their best, it's sending them out when you can be arsed.

Conversely, at the second meal, some chips arrived ten minutes before everything else. I have been a chef more years than I care to recall, and in that time I have seen chips ordered as a starter, but it's a bold call to assume that. 

My other issue is the "suggestion of three plates". I disagree with this for a number of reasons. Firstly, I object to being told how much I would like to eat, secondly, and more importantly, in the instance of the second meal, at Ormskirk's new Italian, Luca, the end result was to inflate the bill to ludicrous proportions. I am not a cheapskate, I am happy to spend money on eating out, but I don't approve of eleven quid for a very small bowl of distinctly also -ran gnocchi. "We suggest three plates" is fine when the cost of those three plates averages out at what you'd pay for a meal at a standard sort of place. But not when it's significantly north of that. If I wanted to spend fifty quid on a main I'd go to Northcote and do so happily.

I should add, for the sake of balance, that a week after Mrs Coastalblog and I lunched at the excellent Kaizen in Burscough, which is also a "when it's ready", but the crucial difference here is that ut felt like there was some thought behind it, appetisers arrived at the same time, and when they were cleared out other plates followed in succession, at no point were we twiddling our thumbs waiting for some thing else to turn up.

Okay, so maybe it's not the concept so much I object to, more the concept being used to mask mediocrity in the kitchen, that would be a fair minded conclusion to draw. Possibly I'm not quite ready to go on Grumpy Old Men just yet.