Restaurants give a new meaning to clean slate

A Different View by Dave O’Connell

There is a growing trend in fashionable bars and restaurants to serve you your meal on a slate while at the same time pouring your chips into a miniature aluminium bucket.

Now I’m as much for innovation as the next man, but when did it become normal to eat your dinner off a roof tile and your chips from something previously used to milk very small cows?

When did the commoner garden plate become the unfashionable equivalent of bellbottoms for the restaurant business?

Is it in some way tied into the Greek crisis and their traditional predilection for smashing said plates after eating their dinners? Did their meltdown mean they smashed more plates than normal, and we suddenly had a global shortage?

Who was the first chef or restaurant owner who decided to do away with traditional earthenware in favour of serving up on a cornerstone of the construction sector?

Couldn’t they have as easily decided to serve dinner on doormats or a reinforced plastic bag from Tesco?

And when was it decided to segregate the chips from the rest of the meal by putting them into a bucket or a miniature deep fat fryer?

The angry celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey has told the story of his violent father many times but perhaps the strangest tale he recounts is the fact that his father insisted that no one part of his dinner touched any other part.

In other words, the meat was on one part of the plate, the potatoes on another and the veg made up the final third – adjacent but not touching.

And if they did touch off each other, the plate was sent flying into the wall.

Now apart from the fact that this was a man in need of psychiatric care, it might also be the only time that there is a justification for keeping the various ingredients of your repast away from each other.

Thankfully most of us have a more relaxed attitude to our food – so there’s really no need to make the chips feel like second class citizens by storing them away from the plate.

Ditto for the veg – if we didn’t want vegetables with the meal, we’d have said. There is nothing to be gained from bringing them later in a separate bowl with a lid on it; it’s just clogging up a limited amount of space on a table.

Square plates, I get – you can fit more of them on a restaurant table.

And they’re still plates, just in a different shape. It’s what is or isn’t on them that can cause the stress that leads to unnecessary indigestion.

Take Asian food houses, in particular where they provide you with a plate for sure – but then everything else arrives in a different bowl or container until you have enough implements and utensils to open a small shop.

And what do you do then? You get each of the bowls and scoop them onto the clean plate that arrived from the kitchen.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.