You can hardly escape sharing plates when you eat out – but who gets the last bite? Time to embrace your inner glutton …
And so, it’s farewell once more to the asparagus season. Personally, I’m delighted to see the back of it. This isn’t to do with disliking asparagus. I love it: boiled, chargrilled, as part of an edible re-creation of Stonehenge. I’ll take it any which way. The problem is one of mathematics. It’s not unique to asparagus, but this season its popularity has highlighted the issue.
Simply put, the asparagus of 2017 was at the heart of what I call The Casual Dining Paradox. The paradox being that the more casual the dining concept, the more socially complicated the experience becomes. Because just how the hell do you split a sharing plate of seven asparagus spears between two? There are, to be fair, other reasons to hate the whole sharing-plate thing: the fact that there’s not a waiter alive who can say the words “we have a sharing-plate concept here” without sounding like an arse; the suspicion it’s a sneaky encouragement to order more than you otherwise would; the way the table clutters with dishes which have no business loitering in each other’s company. But key to it is the whole numbers game.
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