Keep your mitts off my fries
Not everyone welcomes friends’ forks
WASHINGTON Sue Williams has a thing about her fries. She wants them. All of them.
She’s not stingy — she’ll happily order you all the fries you want. Those will be your fries. These are hers.
“She has an expression: ‘ Touch my plate and feel my fork,’” said John Williams, her husband of 43 years, as they faced each other over orders of cheese fries. “It’s funny because she is a sharing person. But not when it comes to food.”
“And I used to do fencing,” said Sue, 63.
“I’m lucky to be alive,” said John, 64.
These are hard times for plate protectors. A generation that shares everything is Instagramming pictures of the meal, Yelping a review of it and is sharing more and more of the actual food.
At better restaurants, servers report co- ordinated ordering is nearly universal at tables of foodies who want to sample as much of the menu as possible.
The group margarita with four straws is becoming a thing.
“Sharing has been one of the biggest trends in restaurants in recent years, and as millennials get into their 40s, they’re not going to give up on it,” said Annika Stensson, director of research communications at the National Restaurant Association, which recently released a survey marking the continuing encroachment of “grazing and small- plate sharing ” over the traditional “Who- had- the- crab cake?” model.
More than 60 per cent of chefs surveyed by the group said plate-sharing remains a hot trend. The concept has made that list seven of the last nine years.
“It’s moved from being a hot trend to a perennial favourite,” Stensson said. “Even where they don’t serve small plates, people are making a meal of appetizers for the purpose of sharing.”
All of this is a little hard on people who, darn it, just want a bit of alone time with the food they actually ordered.
For years, reluctant sharers only had to fend off the occasional fry filcher, or the girlfriend who virtuously passes on dessert — and then plants her fork in her companion’s cake.
Now, whole menus are devoted to socialist portions.
Discussion boards, blogs and a bunch of tableside interviews at Washington- area restaurants reveal an underground of those clinging to the one- person, one- plate definition of dining.
“We don’t even go to family- style or tapas places,” said Ryan Phipps, a minister from Manhattan as he finished lunch with his wife and two young children at Washington’s Bistrot Du Coin. “If I order something, then I want to eat it.”