The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Bring back our plates!
Bread in a slipper. Chips in a tiny shopping trolley. Butter on a shard of bathroom tile. Is it any wonder there’s a big online backlash,
HOW DO you like your steak? Well done? Medium rare? Blue? Served on the flat edge of a meat cleaver?
Wait, what? You read that correctly. It is how one restaurant serves them.
Steak American Psycho-style is just one example of a trend to serve food on almost anything as long as it isn’t a plate.
Everyone likes a nice fry-up to banish a Sunday morning hangover. But would you want your sausage, egg, beans and hash brown to be dished up on a short-handled shovel?
A bar and restaurant in Islington serves chicken on a brick — a combination of chicken liver mousse and chicken skin served on a caramel glazed house brick.
Once they’ve finished eating, customers are encouraged to lick the brick, quite possibly to surreptitious sniggers from the kitchen staff.
Another restaurant presents ribs on a board, with chips brought out in a miniature shopping trolley.
This culinary craziness has now sparked a backlash. Yorkshire-based journalist Ross McGinnes set up the Twitter account #wewantplates just over a month ago.
The site now has more than 31,000 followers from all over the world, nearly 1,000 of whom have posted pictures of food served in outlandish receptacles.
From tacos in a car to soup in a stiletto, mushrooms in a trowel and fish on a rock, there appears to be no end to the madness.
Another garden-themed presentation, from a restaurant in Glasgow, serves tartare sauce in a watering can and cocktails in plant pots.
There is bangers and mash served in a wine glass and a salad served beneath an upturned wine glass — anything but wine in a wine glass.
You can have bread served in a slipper and a flat cap, potatoes in a shoe and popcorn in a clog.
If you don’t like your chips in a shopping trolley, perhaps you would prefer them cut into the shape of clothes and hung on a washing line with tiny pegs?
A Wisconsin eatery, meanwhile, has done away with dishes altogether, tipping the food straight on to the table instead.
The madness does not end there. One of Taiwan’s most successful theme restaurants is Modern Toilet where the meals are — you guessed it — served in little toilets.
It is, of course, true that even the most exquisite meal is no more than a bowel movement waiting to happen but most restaurants prefer not to remind diners of this fact.
In further evidence the world has taken a wrong turn somewhere, London is set to open its first owl pop-up smoothie bar.
“But owls don’t drink smoothies”, I hear you exclaim. “They dine on shrews and voles and other small woodland creatures.”
You’re being silly. What it is, of course, is a café where you can drink blended fruit while you stroke an owl.
Is this all just nonsense? Or is part of the experience of eating out all about being surprised, entertained and amused? We all eat off plates when we cook for ourselves. When we go out, perhaps we should enjoy experiencing something different. Let’s ask an expert. Jamie Scott is the winner of last year’s MasterChef: The Professionals. Jamie, from Arbroath, works as head chef at Rocca in St Andrews. He is fully behind serving food on a plate. “Presentation comes last,” he says. “You have the original idea for the dish. You focus on the ingredients, the cooking, the flavours and the aroma.
“Only then do you look at how you’re going to serve it.
“I’m not a fan of ditching plates. And I think slates are the worst invention ever to put food on. They don’t look good and they add nothing whatsoever to the dish.
“The only circumstances where I would say it’s OK to do something a bit unusual is where it fits into an overall theme or idea.
“Noma in Denmark serves some dishes on natural rock but that fits in with what they’re all about.
“We don’t serve dishes on anything outlandish at Rocca. We use nice plates and crockery.
“You’ll certainly never catch me serving anything in a garden trowel.”