Hungry Harriet & The Small Plate Revolution #Guest Editor

Steph
23rd August 2018

Sounds like it should be a film spin-off from Harry Potter doesn’t it. It’s not it’s just a very good read that had us all nodding here in the office.

Last week, we featured Will from Pickles and Pork for Tasty Thursdays where he wrote about where to go over one wonderful weekend in Cheshire. This week, we thought we’d mix it up with Steph from Hungry Harriet. Her feature is all about the small plate trend and the reasons behind it.

Once upon a time, the measure of a good restaurant was how much foodstuffs they could cram onto a plate and how low they could keep the correlating price tag. These days, it seems to be all about how minuscule a restaurant can shrink their portions down to and how abstractly they can present it to distract from the fact it often costs double the amount. The best part? We all just keep lapping it up!

Let’s get one thing straight here before we continue – I’m very much what you might like to call a small plate advocate. I’m 100% behind the idea that miniature meals are no longer reserved for under 10’s who thrive on chicken nuggets, chips ‘n’ beans. I’m championing these new ways of chowing down that are bolstering their position within normality at this point and I’m most certainly not alone.

Small plates are sweeping the nation and I’ve got a couple of theories why…

Okay, so this isn’t an entirely new concept. Tapas-style dining, starters and canapes have been firmly stitched into our culinary tapestry for decades but ‘small plates’ are just something altogether more… modern. They’re the Millennial Pink of the gastronomic world and emblematic of a time where reaching for your phone and snapping a photograph of your food has become an innate part of the human digestive system.

Disco Cauli Maray, Liverpool

Enter, my first hypothesis: people can’t get enough of small plates because, well, they’re just really heckin’ pretty. I’m from Liverpool which is home to something called the ‘Disco Cauli’ – a small plate born from the brains behind Maray which is a whole cauliflower smothered in tahini and harissa then bejewelled with a glorious shower of pomegranate seeds and flaked almonds.

The Disco Cauliflower is a piece of Instagram-ready, edible art and has fast garnered quite the cult following in and around Liverpool. In fact, legend has it that every time somebody eats a #DiscoCauli without immortalising it on social media, another copy of Yellow Submarine on original vinyl spontaneously combusts into ashes. Haters will say they’re just rumours.

Basically, small plates just look cool on a flat lay don’t they? Nobody wants to see a whacking great Toby Carvery with anaemic meat and a flaccid Yorkshire pudding anymore. They want heritage carrots reclining over charred grapefruit segments; they want technicolor tables of food that display every culture on the spectrum, splattered over mismatched crockery like some sort of undiscovered Jackson Pollock.

Today, more than ever, we are eating with our eyes and as a food writer, I can truly appreciate the relevance of aesthetic. Keeping up the pretence that beans on toast are thing of the gnarly past isn’t the only reason small plates are such a glowing success though. I think the act of sharing food and feeding from each other’s plates provides the world with that little bit of extra… togetherness, that helps us all sleep at night. A social crutch, if you like.

No longer do we have to make decisions alone about what we’re going to eat. Instead, we can order ‘a few picky bits’ collectively and all get stuck in together like some sort of four-headed monster. Gone are the days of bearing the weight of commitment that came with selecting just one option from the menu too. Why deal with that kind of pressure when you can put indecision into action and make sure all bases are covered instead?

So, to conclude? Small plates are a breeze. A balmy whip of fresh air against a picturesque backdrop.

I might have written this piece with my tongue in my cheek the entire time and do realise that as a member of the millennia and as somebody who gets a rush of dopamine whenever I see small plates on the menu, I have just torn myself a new one. However, look beyond the pretentious imposters and past what the gammon-and-egg generation might deem ‘a bloody rip off’ and there lies something quite lovely. A warm, fuzzy celebration of different delicacies and a social style of dining that thaws the edges of a world which is otherwise pretty darn frosty.

Long live small plates, I say!

Picture of Disco Cauli from Maray in Liverpool

Thank you to Steph from Hungry Harriet for this fabulous piece; if you’re want to find more of Steph you can find her on her website, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. We can’t wait to hear more from Steph in the future!