4 hours ago
2
It’s lovely going out for dinner in London. It’s a gastro capital with cuisines from all around the world. One night, Indian, French the next, Peruvian, Ethiopian. You can travel the globe without leaving Hackney.
This time of year, I’m super busy planning the un-Royal Variety show – a punk pastiche of the royal version – and so I can’t be bothered with meal prep and washing up, and find myself eating out an awful lot. Most food trends I can get behind (with the exception of truffle – yuck!). But one pernicious dining trend that refuses to go away and which I detest is “small plates”.
My heart sinks and I become inwardly furious when I sit down and the waiter asks, “Have you been here before?”. “No, it’s our first time.” “Well, we do ‘small plates’ and we suggest you order between three and 20 per person.”
It’s even more annoying than QR code menus. The last thing you want to do when you sit down with an old friend for a catch-up is immediately get your phone out and start loading internet pages and inputting your bank details – it’s a leftover from Covid that should be abolished.
But back to small plates. People think I’m a hipster, being an east London drag queen, but I’ve got nothing on the purveyors of “caulifower bites”. Suddenly you’re hanging out a tenner here, a tenner there, for tiny saucers of pomegranate seeds, things sprinkled in petals and a random blow-torched lettuce leaf. Just give me a bloody dinner!
And then your friend inevitably says, “Let’s just get lots of things and share.” NOOO!!! Don’t make me share my dinner with you as if we’re a pack of wild cats. I will gladly share a lot of things with strangers in a Berlin dungeon, but I absolutely refuse to share a piece of pig’s cheek in Haggerston.
I’m 53. I grew up in Kent in the 1970s in a perfectly normal working-class, borderline lower-middle-class household, the kind so wonderfully explored in Mike Leigh movies. It was the kind of home where the food was dished from the pan on to the plate. And then the whole plate was plopped in front of you and you were told to eat it all up – or you couldn’t go and watch Grange Hill.
In small-plates hell, you end up trying to reconstruct a normal meal and paying twice the price for it. Death to small plates – that’s the hill I will die on. Unless you’re in Spain, of course; I love a spot of tapas, but that’s different. Andalucia – do your thing, honey. But Dalston: oh, grow up, and give me a pie.
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Jonny Woo is a performer, drag artist, writer, and co-owner of The Divine, he will be hosting his Un-Royal Variety at Soho Theatre Walthamstow 26-28 November 2026.
