To want my dinner served on a plate

[LEMmingaround]

instead of a bit of slate/wood/chopping board

Had a lovely lunch today - the food was really good, just a sandwich but posh sarnie. It was marred somewhat by being served on an oblong serving board that wasn't really big enough. It was an open sarnie and was a knife and fork jobbie. So as a consequence, half of it ended up on the table and how do they get those things clean??

Yes, it looks really impressive but whatever is wrong with a nice, clean, smooth plate with a little lip on it so that the food stays on it when you push it around?

It wasn't even a particularly expensive restaurant, naice but not dead posh. This happens everywhere now - I am now considering ASKING for my food to be served on a plate and risking being thought of as an old fuddy duddy - my 77 year old mother was totally discombobulated by the board thing!

We had a family Christmas Day meal out about 12 years ago.

Our roast was served in frying pans

Do I win?

YANBU. I hate the feel of the knife going across the slate - gives me the heebie jeebies like fingers down a blackboard.

I don't think they're unhygenic - after all most food is prepared on this sort of thing. But yes it is weird when you're supposed to eat your food off it. But I secretly quite like it, as long as the food fits on it ok.

I hate the way food can't be served all together any more. Everything has to be in seperate little containers. So flavours are hard to mix and it all goes cold faster.

Can we start a movement to bring back the plate?

No simplethings you don't, because it will have at least stayed in the bloody thing when you cut it up - im surprised we are not denied knives and forks and expected to eat it with our hands.

Send it back.

Just marking place because I want to remember to use discombobulated in the morning. And I do hate a knife on slate it's very like nails down a blackboard.

I had lunch out today at a local pub (Sheffield Bottom) with superb food. I always find that main courses are too much for me so had two starters and no main course. Whitebait on one wooden board and mushrooms in a cream sauce on toast - both in the same bowl) also on a wooden board. Each wooden board was decorated with salad. While watching them being put on the table, I wondered how many whitebait had escaped on the way from the kitchen..........

Barf. Went to a local restaurant about a year ago and noticed the boards being used so I asked that my bruschetta was served on a plate. "Oh no, we always use the boards for bruschetta!". "Well in that case I'll just have a coffee". Out it came on a plate. My husband thought I was being awkward until he saw the lady at the next table getting stuck into her bloody steak on a board! I reminded him of a conversation we had with a waitress at another restaurant. Apparently because they're made of wood they can't go into the dishwasher but get wiped clean with a soapy cloth!

But you can't put wooden boards in a dishwasher can you? And they tend not to use wooden chopping boards in catering kitchens.

DS1 had a job washing up in local posh restaurant. It had an excellent hygiene score, which I always found quite disconcerting given my own observations of DS's very lackadaisical washing up skills.

Cross post Staywithme

Sometimes these things have clearly been through the dishwasher, but i am still very about the whole thing - they look bloody expensive too so are probably still paying a % for poncy foodware in the food bill. Just put it on a fucking plate!!

YANBU-I cannot stand those sizzling things that some places insist on using, just why? Do they not understand that it continues to cook just burns whatever is on there?!

i don't mind the sizzlers for fajitas, but otherwise i agree - put it on a fucking plate!

Tinkly,

Great minds think alike. Lol

Hmm - I think I can beat that. Many years ago a group of us went out for a meal. Most of them ordered "Chicken in a Cauldron" - and that was what it was served in. Happily for me, I had a baked potato. Unhappily for them they were all unwell the next day. This happened over 27 years ago - I have never been back to that restaurant - which has no doubt changed hands at least 15 times since then. They no longer serve "chicken in a Cauldron"!

Yeah that's fair enough

I too don't understand the whole presentation crap, just serve me delicious hot food on nice warm plates thank you.

But still.... Christmas dinner in a frying pan?!

I have seen, on fb not in rl, food served in a dogs bowl. Yes a dogs bowl.

What's next, a washing up bowl ?

I would SO sign up to a Bring Back Plates campaign. I was having a rant about boards in a (lovely) pub only this evening. The worst thing is when you get ice cream served on them - have you tried chasing ice cream around a board? You end up with a big melted puddle. What are you supposed to do - lick the board?
They're a nightmare for staff, too, as they're heavy and difficult to pick up from the table. The barman tonight said that slates are horrendous, as they effectively stick to the table, and of course there's no rim to grab hold of like there is with a plate.
And yes, food apartheid, with everything in its little separate container. What's all that about? The whole POINT of food is the magic that occurs when ingredients meet each other on the plate.
Basically we need chefs to stop thinking of themselves as tortured artistic geniuses and just get on with the job of providing something good to eat.
Re thedog bowls, many years ago as a student in Paris I was persuaded to go to a restaurant where the wine was served in babies' bottles.

I used to work in a restaurant that was trying to be waaaay posher than it actually was, they bought vey expensive olive wood boards (at £16 each!!) to serve almost everything on - they were a nightmare! Food was constantly falling off them, too small for most things, couldn't cut anything on them, customers were constantly sending them back and staff were constantly having to bring food back as it had fallen off them onto the floor on he he way to the table :(

I think the chefs hate them as much as the customers do, it's the management that buys the stupid things! We also had those tiny fry baskets for chips, fit about 4 chips in, very frustrating!

Cross contamination was a bitch too as they absorb everything, you have to oil them regularly to stop them cracking just creating more work for the kitchen staff, and you can't really put them through the dishwasher as it would ruin the very expensive wood, they just got a wipe over

Has anyone been to the Star Inn York, by the side of Lendal Bridge? (an offshoot of the Star Harome)Where you get your bread served in a flat cap? The meal was lovely but the flat cap made me feel a little bit sick

Well at my pub they went through the dishwasher! Maybe they weren't supposed to but everything did, we certainly wouldn't have faffed around wiping and oiling

Wooden serving boards must be half wood and half spit, drool and grub from previous diners.

Yum.

A flat cap? Harebell is the winner!!!! and that isn't envy!

Yep, 2-yes 2 pubs in my city do the dog bowls