Columnist: Small plates

My local paper, the Reading Post, has invited me back for the second instalment of RG1 EAT, my column about food and eating out. My friends, by and large, are very happy for me - mainly because they think I'm going to get offered lots of free meals and they'll get to accompany me to restaurants for nothing. Wendy, for instance, read my column in delight on the funbus and said "You're going to be the Carrie Bradshaw of food!"

"No, I'm going to be more like Gil Chesterton." I said, because I know my limitations if nothing else.

Later on, one of my favourite local restaurants told me on Twitter that they were nervous when I went in for dinner shortly before my column was due in the paper. "It's like having Giles Coren in" they said, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that that felt like a compliment, although I keep telling myself that I'm not quite as much of a cock as he is.

Anyway, the piece below appeared in the Reading Post on Wednesday and is written by someone who is approximately 25% Carrie Bradshaw, 25% Giles Coren and 50% Gil Chesterton. I hope you like it.


The London Street Brasserie used to have something on its menu which I found really odd. Not a dish, a suggestion: at the top of the list of starters was this sentence, in italics - Two starters makes an ideal light lunch. I remember thinking it was the silliest thing I’d ever read, but it turns out that they were ahead of their time; small plates were the next big thing in London a couple of years ago, and now they are coming to a chain restaurant near you.

For most countries, this idea of eating lots of little dishes with friends or family is second nature. Tapas is the one we’re most used to (and good tapas, even if it’s something as straightforward as slabs of manchego and slivers of jamon, is a wonderful thing) but there are many others, from sushi to mezze. On location, it makes sense; watching the Turks eat out in Istanbul for instance - a good-natured hubbub of shouting, gesticulation and passing plates around - it’s difficult to imagine a better way of eating.

You don’t see anything remotely like that in restaurants here; it seems a British fetish to lock ourselves in the three-stage cage of starters, main courses and desserts. There are tasting menus, I suppose, but they’re high-end stuff and even then it’s one dish at a time, a conveyor belt of miniature delights like a culinary Generation Game.

Besides, I have a sneaking feeling that sharing food just isn’t in our nature. My meal is my meal, we seem to say, you can have a forkful if you must, but if you want any more you should have ordered it yourself (unless my meal is disappointing, in which case you can have as much as you like). The main exception is curry, but I reckon that’s because everyone always orders more than they can physically eat, so letting other people have some is no great loss.

I’d like to see small plates catch on. I liken them to my iPod (bear with me) - I have a playlist on there of songs I love which are less than three minutes long. I listen to that playlist when I’m in a rush and it’s perfect; every track is bite-sized and if I’m not in the mood for one it doesn’t matter, because I know another will be along in no time.

Will they catch on, though? I’m not sure. So far, they’ve mainly been picked up by the Italian chains; Zizzi, Strada and Carluccios are all experimenting with them on their menus, calling them Cicheti, Antipastini and Stuzzichini respectively. The thing is, it feels like lip service; they are at the beginning of the menu before the starters, and the suggestion is that you have them too, just a middle-class way of going large for people too posh to go to Burger King (only Zizzi, in fact, seems to have grasped the idea that you might want these instead of a pizza).

Meanwhile, if you want to try small plates as they should be I recommend you go to Kyrenia in Caversham. It’s their tenth birthday this year and their mezze is still as perfect as it was on day one, whether it’s smoky houmous or squeaky halloumi. Best of all, for me at least, is the octopus - marinated in red wine and oregano and simply grilled, it’s one of my favourite dishes in the whole of Reading. It proves my other theory about small plates right, too – when you really love a dish, the plate is always too small.

Holidays in bed

My wife is away with work this week, and whenever she does this I go on a little holiday of my own, by which I mean that I sleep on her side of the bed.

It’s strange how such a small alteration makes the world so different a place. It’s funny, too, how couples do this; we have our set sides of the bed, of the sofa, we divide our little lives into halves and segments. Both flats we have lived in I have slept on the right, closest to the window, furthest from the bathroom. On every sofa I have sat on the left. Maybe all married couples become their very own versions of Ant and Dec, just in case people have difficulty telling the difference.

Spending time in someone else’s segment, the shape of the bedroom feels altered in a subtle but perceptible way. I can leap to the bathroom without having to wander round the perimeter of the bed, usually a precarious voyage embarked upon in greyscale darkness in the middle of the night. The alarm clock, and the power of deciding by how long to postpone the inevitable, is within my reach. There is twice as much of everything – two piles of books to perch my glasses on, two coasters to gather empty glasses and cups. It’s as if my normal world has been reflected in a mirror, one of those odd composite images of someone where both sides of their face are completely symmetrical.

Like those pictures, it doesn’t ring true – too perfect, not real. Besides, I wouldn’t want to live in a space that only reflected me. Down my side of the bed are discarded newspapers, books I haven’t put back on the shelf, the occasional empty tray from a packet of chocolates, t-shirts discarded in the middle of the night when I’m hot and half asleep. Her side of the bed is almost clear, just a box of tissues and a tube of moisturiser, nothing to hurdle when I walk through the wide open space to the bathroom.

Holidaying on my wife’s side of the bed, I wonder how this room looks to her. No clear view of the window because it’s blocked by my slumbering frame every morning. Nobody to set and snooze the alarm and control when things happen. No excuse not to go to the bathroom, or to send someone else down the long hall in search of hot beverages. She is in a hotel room I will never see, a different shape again, all huge, all hers. And yet I hope that when she settles down for sleep that she notices a me-shaped hole. Perhaps she sleeps on my side of the bed, out there.

Holidays are like Goldilocks and the three bears - some are too short, some are too long, and some are just right. There comes a point in most holidays for me, ideally close to the end but sometimes far too far from that, when I want to return to my life and see familiar things, to have that same old walk to work through the posh shopping arcade and to see the faded grandeur of the old department store on the corner, to be asked in the café if I want “the usual” and to see faces I recognise on the bus. After the first night of this particular holiday the novelty has vanished, and I know that if I sent her a postcard it would just say: Having a lovely time. Wish you were here.

On my last night alone, I go through the flat tidying up and restoring the bed to her side and my side. I fill the dishwasher and put clothes in drawers. I put the washing machine on, and at just past midnight I hang my underpants on the clothes airer while Fred Astaire sings Puttin’ On The Ritz on my iPod. I love the irony of that, and I know she would too. By the time I’m done, you would almost think she had never been away. Just one more thing, and it will all be fixed.