People in New York City, in general, have very small kitchens. It’s a big reason why New Yorkers eat out so often. A city filled with small apartment kitchens means a city filled with restaurants. Eating out in New York can be a luxurious treat. It can also be a delicious window into another culture, a way to travel around the world for the price of a subway ride. It can also be annoying as hell.
“Have you dined with us before?” is one of those questions you hear sometimes at hip, noisy New York restaurants, and the best way to answer it is to say, “No, and I’m not going to,” and then to walk out. Because what’s about to unfold is sure to be one of the most irritating meals of your life.
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That question sends an unmistakable signal that you’re about to suffer through a cascade of additional red-flag queries, be hoodwinked into ordering way too much food, be forced to navigate a lot of tiny plates, and end up spending an enormous amount of money and then be left hungry.
“Can I explain how our menu works?” is the next thing you’ll hear. If you’re like me, you’ll be tempted to ask if this menu, like every single menu you’ve encountered in your lifetime, is composed of a list of dishes offered for sale accompanied by a price. Don’t give in to the temptation to get snarky — the restaurant team will quickly peg you as a troublemaker. So it’s wise to remember that these people spend a lot of time with your food before you eat it. But that’s not what they mean in any case.
In restaurants like this, the menu works this way: there is a small section at the very top identified in the most baffling way possible — usually something like “For the Table” or “First Bites” — and often portioned out in impossible fractions. If there are four of you dining at the table, the restaurant will offer deviled eggs in threes. If there are three of you, a plate will arrive with four of whatever it is so that there’s one lonely item sitting on the plate, with everyone too polite to snatch it up until the very last minute.
“The chef has designed the menu for sharing,” the waiter will tell you as you make confused stabs at the next two sections, unable to confidently identify anything truly shareable. How, for instance, does the restaurant expect you to divide a pork chop into four equal pieces? Or, for that matter, the whole roasted fish, which arrives with a spoon and a fork and will look like a scene of unbelievable fish carnage when you’re done trying to cut it into shareable wedges?
“We recommend one dish from each section per diner,” you will be told, which will result in the weird, inexplicable experience of each diner getting barely two-thirds of a bite from only three-quarters of the dishes on the table. “Did everyone get a bit of the pork chop?” someone will ask. Half of the table didn’t know there was a pork chop. By the time that plate got around to them, it was just the cabbage garnish and some sauce. They thought it was what was left of the salad.
And also: the plates will be a little bit smaller than whatever is on them, so be prepared to scoop a lot of your dinner off of the table.
What’s infuriating is that the meal, when you manage to cut it and share it and snag a bite from the plates rotating quickly around the table, is often really good. As a rule, New York restaurants serve delicious food, but in the most uncomfortably difficult way imaginable. It’s enough to drive New Yorkers back into their tiny kitchens. And many vow to do just that, until the waiter comes to take the plates away and it dawns on us that the point of eating out isn’t the food or the experience. It’s that somebody else has to clean up.
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Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer onCheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
