🟧 This is not a small plates restaurant

Menus are returning to individualism and indulgence.

Amarante in Paris (photo by me)

Kyle Chayka: When Jess and I went to Paris a few months ago, one of the restaurants we booked for dinner (via WhatsApp and Google Translate) was Amarante, a low-key and yet quite serious animal-forward place on a quiet side street. It maintains a very French spirit in that the diner is not always right, and is in fact usually wrong and misguided. As the host took our order he warned us of the brief menu: You Americans always order too many dishes. These are big. Just pick one starter and one main, if you want to try other things, come back! In other words, we are too used to the current mania for small plates and the constant instruction from waiters who recommend ordering “a few” per person. We took his instructions and he was, of course, correct — Amarante was a large plates restaurant. After sneakily sharing appetizers of a puck of braised leeks and a plate of Gascon pork charcuterie, I could barely get through a giant chunk of roast veal, as delicious as it was. The red wine that I ordered for the veal, after a glass of champagne? I didn’t need to know what the grape was beforehand, the waiter said, I would like it. I did. 

The Amarante animosity was one sign that small plates have hit saturation, a point of exhaustion. At this point every new restaurant is a NWBSSP: a natural wine bar serving small plates. Throw in a retail concept and branded merch and you’re all set for the TikTokers. “No one is safe from a wine bar with olives, crudo, and a sourdough from popping up in your neighborhood and ruining your life,” Chris Black said on a recent episode of the podcast How Long Gone. Matty Matheson, the post-Vice chef / influencer, noticed it too, complaining in a NYmag profile written by Adam Platt: “…everyone sees everything and everything has been boiled down to nothing. It’s very homogenized and every restaurant looks the same and everything tastes the same and everything has anchovies.” The NWBSSP is for dilettantes who simply must discern how one crudo is different from all the other crudos. (Finger limes? Green Sichuan peppercorn oil?) Amarante, by contrast, demands discipline and commitment. You cannot dabble; you must choose, or have the choice made for you. 

Gustatory commitment is also the concern of Hugh Corcoran, a chef who runs the London restaurant (and bookshop, duh, and office to Luncheon Magazine) The Yellow Bittern. A few weeks ago, Corcoran went on an elaborate Instagram rant about his clientele; his account is now locked but the post was here. “Little sharing plates has ruined dining,” he proclaimed. He’s mad that people are coming to his lunch-only, cash-only, telephone-only restaurant and only ordering a salad and some snacks: “When you come to a restaurant, it is expected that you are there to eat and drink with some sort of abandon. ‘A grand cru to drink and a Beaujolais Villages to rinse the mouth,’” he wrote. (Corcoran locked his Instagram so I’m going by what I can rescue; for more, see coverage in the FT and Interview.) “Restaurants are not public benches, you are there to spend some money.” The Ozempic-era anhedonia, teetotaling, and perhaps inflation stress of his customers means that Corcoran can’t run the restaurant he wants. He would definitely prefer that you get sloshed at lunch. 

comments on Hugh Corcoran’s insta

It’s a funny, very British rant that should be read partially as trolling: “In the case that a plate of radishes is enough for you and your three friends for lunch, then perhaps an allotment would be a better investment than a table at a restaurant.” (An allotment being a domestic garden.) The frustration is real, though. Has any kind of appetite, long before gluttony, become a sort of sin? Many of the commenters back him up: “Hear, hear. The horror of the ‘to share’ and the ‘I’m not drinking right now’ friends.” Not unrelated, Brits are the people most obsessed with the individualized starters-and-mains dining model in my experience; Americans think appetizers are T.G.I. Friday’s egg-roll platters and most continental Europeans know how how to share and also how to not binge drink. Still, diners want to be able to have fun, to indulge without anxiety or embarrassment, hence the anti-small plates rebellion. Finickiness is on its way out.

Hugh on lunch in Interview Magazine

We’re tired of the cliche, globalized NWBSSP and we’re moving past the martinis-and-burgers clubby phase of restaurants as well. (The combo is too saturated to properly culturally signal, and our bodies can’t handle years of that much gin.) Something different is required for our moment. Order an entire veal roast! In Brooklyn, the delightful Strange Delight offers a perfect seafood tower for one. Le Veau d’Or, a revived and hyped trad-French restaurant in Manhattan, does a prix-fixe menu of starters, mains and desserts. Our DC neighborhood favorite Reveler’s Hour recently incorporated a permanent set menu option, too. Instead of sophisticated cosmopolitans we are picky children, guarding our own plates.

This discourse might have something to do with how dining has become trophy-hunting for a particular restaurant table or minuscule dish. Whether it’s meant to be shared or not, the food functions more as a prize or decoration than as food: The fancy Korean fried-chicken lounge Coqodaq in NYC is not a place to enjoy a relaxed catch-up with friends. Rather than hyperfocusing on attainment, checking the right boxes, the anti-small plates, set-menu vibe seeks to return focus to the social experience of the meal itself, the chill conviviality of not having to choose too much and knowing everyone will be taken care of.

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