Please, No More Sharing Plates

Sharing is bad. There, I said it! Over the past decade, it’s almost become the industry standard for restaurants to suggest ordering “five to seven dishes” from a same-y line-up of starter-sized options. (Whipped cod’s roe! some kind of pulled meat croquettes! burrata drizzled with an unintelligible green oil!) Which is not to say that any of these offerings aren’t tasty, but to highlight the fact that they deliver just a tiny taste of greatness, while never really letting anyone go all-in and shamelessly scoff whatever sits in front of them. They deny us the pure and greedy pleasure of a big plate of food for one, a dish that you can behave appallingly to—by over-salting, pushing about messily with your fork, and eating at your own leisurely pace—and offending nobody, apart from maybe the chef, in the process. 

The rigatoni Jill and Joe ordered is apparently The Red Hen’s specialty. This isn’t just any sausage ragu, this is one that, under a recent Instagram post, a local branded the “best dish in D.C.” It looks it too, dusted with a heavy blanket of grated parmesan. If I heard something was the best dish in town, I’d be more than happy for my partner to order it as well—in fact, I’d encourage it. Consider the alternative: namely, facing the ignominy of ordering something not quite as divine and having to look at your date chowing down in raptures, as you push your own less-than-spectacular pasta around the plate, contemplating revenge by somehow spiking their tiramisu with a bottle of balsamic. The whole scenario is unthinkable. 

At 80 and 71 years of age respectively, Joe and Jill are old enough to know their own minds—and their own stomachs, for that matter. Not for them the totalitarianism of “picky bits,” where it’ll only take mere mouthfuls of food for those tiny plates to become empty ones, following a pass-agg, “no you have the last bit” exchange. Instead, this couple orders what they want—which just so happens to be the very same thing—and get to share in the satisfaction that neither one of them is enjoying something the other can’t, or gloating over the fact the other wasn’t wise enough to order it in the first place.