Bring back plates! Restaurants serving food on Shovels, Dustbin Lids even iPads is unstoppable trend
Believe it or not, there was a time when restaurants served food on plates. Not a wooden board or a slate, but on a simple piece of crockery.
The plate was usually white and round, and had the advantage of keeping food in one place while making it look nice.
Nowadays, anyone hoping for a relaxing meal out will be expected to wrestle their steak off a breadboard, fish their chips out of a bucket and their rotisserie chicken off a brick.
Across the country, gastropubs and restaurants — desperate to be on-trend — are serving their food in flower pots, dog bowls, roof tiles, high heeled shoes . . . What on earth is going on? And please can we make it stop?
If the trend for wacky tableware continues, the dinner plate will become a relic. It will join the soup tureen and cow creamer in the great crockery graveyard on top of the kitchen cupboard.
Jumble sales will be full of them, alongside the cruet sets and fish knives that we no longer use.
Thankfully, a backlash against this ludicrous craze is underway.
An enterprising chap called Ross McGinnes has founded a campaign group on Twitter called We Want Plates, sparking an internet sensation.
He has been inundated with pictures from disgruntled diners of their bizarre experiences.
At one restaurant on the Isle of Man, the breakfast fry-up is served on a shovel. Elsewhere, bread is being served not in a basket, but in a flat cap.
Cocktails are no longer poured into elegant, thin stem glasses or crystal tumblers. No, all drinks must be served in jam jars, retro milk bottles, fish bowls, toy treasure chests and even ski boots.
The trend began ten years ago when some bright spark had the idea of serving a steak on a slate.
Indeed, as McGinnes says: ‘Whoever thought that the sound of cutlery scraping on slate was a good idea? What’s wrong with a plate?’
Then came the dreaded sharing platter — lots of nibble-style food typically served on a wooden chopping board — where no one knows how much they should take of anything. We can blame chirpy chef Jamie Oliver for that particularly irritating idea.
But recently things have got completely out of hand. Sausages and mash are being squeezed into wine glasses; chicken salads are arriving in glass jars; ice-cream is coming out of toothpaste tubes; and fish and chips is being plonked in front of bewildered punters on dustbin lids.
Besides being pretentious and annoying, this fad for presenting food on anything other than a plate makes eating out rather stressful.
How are you supposed to eat a runny egg off a flat surface? Or scoop cheesecake out of a Kilner jar? And why would anyone think it is appetising — not to mention free of germs — to be served food shoved into a shoe?
Novelty dishes are horribly unhygienic. One of the joys of a white plate is that you can tell straightaway if it’s clean or dirty. With a woven basket, crag of rock or a trainer, you could have millions of bacteria lurking in those crevices. And how do they clean these items afterwards?
Shopping baskets or mini picnic tables (the current choice for serving expensive afternoon teas) are hardly designed for stacking in the dishwasher.
I pity the thousands of washing-up flunkeys, puzzling over how to scrape trifle leftovers out of a golden syrup tin and vacuuming the breadcrumbs off mini Astroturf lawns.
It was bad enough when plates stopped being round.
William Sitwell, the MasterChef judge and food writer, recently slated square plates as ‘an abomination’. He is no fan of the wooden board either, and says the rule is that food should not be served on anything with a right angle. That rules out Wellington boots and garden trowels then.
But perhaps the real culprit for this craze is social media, as it’s mandatory to take a picture of all food and post the photo online before you tuck in.
Eating out is no longer a gustatory experience. It’s an opportunity to whip out your smartphone, then boast to your friends what a delicious (and trendy) meal you’re having.
So many restaurants have resorted to making food look more interesting. Instead of concentrating on tasty ingredients, many chefs are striving for style over substance.
Sorry, but I’d rather eat my hat than eat my food out of a hat.
The plate was usually white and round, and had the advantage of keeping food in one place while making it look nice.
Nowadays, anyone hoping for a relaxing meal out will be expected to wrestle their steak off a breadboard, fish their chips out of a bucket and their rotisserie chicken off a brick.
Across the country, gastropubs and restaurants — desperate to be on-trend — are serving their food in flower pots, dog bowls, roof tiles, high heeled shoes . . . What on earth is going on? And please can we make it stop?
If the trend for wacky tableware continues, the dinner plate will become a relic. It will join the soup tureen and cow creamer in the great crockery graveyard on top of the kitchen cupboard.
Jumble sales will be full of them, alongside the cruet sets and fish knives that we no longer use.
Thankfully, a backlash against this ludicrous craze is underway.
An enterprising chap called Ross McGinnes has founded a campaign group on Twitter called We Want Plates, sparking an internet sensation.
He has been inundated with pictures from disgruntled diners of their bizarre experiences.
At one restaurant on the Isle of Man, the breakfast fry-up is served on a shovel. Elsewhere, bread is being served not in a basket, but in a flat cap.
Cocktails are no longer poured into elegant, thin stem glasses or crystal tumblers. No, all drinks must be served in jam jars, retro milk bottles, fish bowls, toy treasure chests and even ski boots.
The trend began ten years ago when some bright spark had the idea of serving a steak on a slate.
Indeed, as McGinnes says: ‘Whoever thought that the sound of cutlery scraping on slate was a good idea? What’s wrong with a plate?’
Then came the dreaded sharing platter — lots of nibble-style food typically served on a wooden chopping board — where no one knows how much they should take of anything. We can blame chirpy chef Jamie Oliver for that particularly irritating idea.
But recently things have got completely out of hand. Sausages and mash are being squeezed into wine glasses; chicken salads are arriving in glass jars; ice-cream is coming out of toothpaste tubes; and fish and chips is being plonked in front of bewildered punters on dustbin lids.
Besides being pretentious and annoying, this fad for presenting food on anything other than a plate makes eating out rather stressful.
How are you supposed to eat a runny egg off a flat surface? Or scoop cheesecake out of a Kilner jar? And why would anyone think it is appetising — not to mention free of germs — to be served food shoved into a shoe?
Novelty dishes are horribly unhygienic. One of the joys of a white plate is that you can tell straightaway if it’s clean or dirty. With a woven basket, crag of rock or a trainer, you could have millions of bacteria lurking in those crevices. And how do they clean these items afterwards?
Shopping baskets or mini picnic tables (the current choice for serving expensive afternoon teas) are hardly designed for stacking in the dishwasher.
I pity the thousands of washing-up flunkeys, puzzling over how to scrape trifle leftovers out of a golden syrup tin and vacuuming the breadcrumbs off mini Astroturf lawns.
It was bad enough when plates stopped being round.
William Sitwell, the MasterChef judge and food writer, recently slated square plates as ‘an abomination’. He is no fan of the wooden board either, and says the rule is that food should not be served on anything with a right angle. That rules out Wellington boots and garden trowels then.
But perhaps the real culprit for this craze is social media, as it’s mandatory to take a picture of all food and post the photo online before you tuck in.
Eating out is no longer a gustatory experience. It’s an opportunity to whip out your smartphone, then boast to your friends what a delicious (and trendy) meal you’re having.
So many restaurants have resorted to making food look more interesting. Instead of concentrating on tasty ingredients, many chefs are striving for style over substance.
Sorry, but I’d rather eat my hat than eat my food out of a hat.
Music : Quasi Motion by Kevin MacLeod
Source : DailyMail , Twitter
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