A woman writing on the blackboard at Camille.

The specials board at Camille. Credit: Harriet Langford

The long read: The rise and stubborn decline of small plates

06 Aug 2025

Journalist

Joel Hart charts the rise of the small-plate format, from its impact on British dining culture, to the growing backlash against its cost, chaos and lack of clarity

When chef Hugh Corcoran of the controversial Yellow Bittern restaurant in London called out diners on a now-deleted Instagram post for not ordering enough food, the internet erupted in outrage and faux-critical think pieces. Few of them, however, pointed out that Corcoran’s ire was directed not at those four specific diners per se – and their assumption that it's okay to order one starter, two mains and a glass of tap water between them – but rather at what they represented. “Little sharing plates have ruined dining. Or rather, it has ruined diners,” is how he opened. Not much from a chef’s mouth has sounded so provocative – but had he focused his criticism more squarely on the tyranny of small plates, perhaps more people would’ve agreed with him.

Everyone has an opinion about small plates; today, it’s usually negative. In Corcoran’s case, it’s the confusion that small plates menus have generated about what he called “dining etiquette”. As for the diner, it’s the increasingly ludicrous portion sizes. A single scallop sliced like steak for the same price as a scallop starter that has five of them? Check. A broccoli dish once a £4 side, now dressed up with £8’s worth of nuts? Check.

But like all discourses, this one carries a degree of fantasy. At its best, the small plate signals a kind of cultural self-stylisation – urbane, leisurely and effortlessly cool. At its worst, it’s dismissed as fussy, hipsterish and performatively pretentious. “Give me proper food,” the anti-small-plates brigade will moan. Then there’s everything in between, where the small plate becomes so many things that it ends up meaning nothing at all.

So how did we get here – and where are we now? The best way to start telling this story is to try and identify where it began.

It is hard to pinpoint an exact moment when small plates culture arose in London (and spread later to other parts of the UK), but there were a few significant movements that transformed the restaurant landscape in the city.

The Ottolenghi effect?

My initial theory – like many roads in UK food culture today – led me back to Ottolenghi. I’ve written about the effect Ottolenghi has had on our food culture in terms of ingredients and style – but whilst colossal salad displays and the introduction of sumac and za’atar to the UK are not the engine of small plates culture, they are aspects of one key social effect: sharing food.

The introduction of the long table at Ottolenghi Islington, which opened in 2004, was a significant move in the architectural history of the London restaurant. You were suddenly no longer separated from other parties by discreet boundaries or stiff formality. You shared space – and, implicitly, a dining experience – with strangers. You could think of the small plate in similar terms. Its ethos of sharing ran counter to the more individualist, course-by-course model of eating that had long dominated British restaurants.

This mode of eating has roots in mezze: a Levantine tradition of non-sequential, collective dining, where large groups gather around tables heaving with kaleidoscopic spreads of hummus, baba ghanoush, fried kibbeh and sumac-laced salads. The goal is to taste as much as possible, together. The pleasure is communal, not private – a constellation of flavours and textures meant to be passed around, talked about and returned to.

Whether it was the manner of eating at that restaurant (and other modern Middle Eastern restaurants of a similar ilk) or whether such ideas of commensality were adopted in domestic settings and then filtered out, former boundaries were broken, and people now sought to share dishes with others. It encouraged spontaneity, generosity and ease – you were, quite literally, breaking bread together. Hence, another aspect that comes with this is informality. The two are tied together. However, the rapid rise of Levantine cuisine in London in the 2010s was not the only force at work. If Ottolenghi introduced some folk to the notions of informality and sharing, the natural wine bar expanded the culinary creativity in such settings.

Dining for discovery

When it comes to menu design, St John Bread & Wine, which opened in 2003, was key. Unlike the original Farringdon spot, which delineated between starters, mains and desserts, and was individually portioned, the menu was a long list of reasonably priced dishes, designed to be shared alongside a few glasses of wine.

“When James Lowe took over the kitchen there, it was a really exciting time,” recalls chef Jackson Boxer, “and was hugely influential on me in my early 20s, and somewhere which was a great galvanising force behind my desire to open in Brunswick House.” However, for Boxer, this move was clearly an “evolution of the gastropub,” as places like The Eagle and the Anchor & Hope also followed a more Parisian-style bistronomy philosophy, inspired by chefs like Iñaki Aizpitarte at Chateaubriand, James Henry at Bones, and the birth of Septime. This “creative insouciance,” he adds, allowed for more freedom and experimentalism. “It was dining for discovery, rather than reassurance.”

Boxer also remembers, at a similar time, hearing “a lot of the older chefs carping on about how much they hated 'small plates', the move away from the traditional three course, individual plates and no sharing model which they seemed deeply wedded to.” Clearly, it was already ruffling some feathers, even as its creative pulse was progressing things forward.

Terroirs opened in Covent Garden in 2008, 40 Maltby Street in 2011 and P Franco in Clapton in 2014. Between them, they crystallised the idea that much of London’s most creative cooking could be eaten in casual wine bars. The way these kitchens functioned made a sharing, small plates philosophy a necessity. Food was sent out in waves, with the same dish prepared and dispatched to all tables that had ordered it before the kitchen moved on to the next. The traditional structure of dining, with its neatly patterned courses, gave way to a new rhythm dictated by the kitchen’s flow. Service became collective rather than individual, with timing optimised for efficiency rather than formality. This approach redefined the meal as a shared, dynamic experience, shaped as much by the needs of the kitchen as by those of the diner.

"Young hospitality professionals were stripping away everything they saw as superfluous in a bid to create something as raw, authentic and immediate as possible”

Whilst diners – myself included – seemed to accept this in pursuit of creative bites, was it always a pleasant experience? Anna Tobias, who is now the chef at Café Deco, but did a six-month stint at P Franco in 2018, doesn’t think so. “I think some customers did care and it was a bit annoying,” she says. There was “that person who's… got a nice seat,” and the struggle to “put something in my mouth because someone's jostling me while I'm at the wine rack.” Still, she points out, “it was quite sexy and fun and a bit crowded.” It was “the hot place to be. And so I get that people kind of didn't care.”

For Boxer, the success of this model was rooted in the cost of the rental market and wage stagnation. “Creativity in London restaurants was largely driven by young people, who lived in small flats without adequate kitchens to entertain, but paid little enough for them that they could afford to eat out with frequency,” he says. “These diners drove the explosion of interest in natural wines, and the often whimsically creative food which went alongside it.”

Jimi Famuwera, who was the London Evening Standard chief critic from 2021-2025, suggests another precursor: “the emergence of Polpo and the restaurants that kind of responded to that and the proliferation of pop-up culture and that kind of DIY ethos.” There was a continuum between such spots and “the natural wine revolution,” he says, “and that more casual approach to dining where the cooking is serious and ambitious, but the atmosphere is casual.” At this time, it became “more punk… to almost riff on tapas culture, Venetian… small plates culture, those things were really becoming more influential.”

Variety is the spice of life

What did people really love about this new way of eating? “What was exciting for me personally, as well as just being able to eat a lot more,” Tobias says, was “the variety.” She draws an analogy to going out for Chinese food, where “the joy is to be able to order more.”

For Boxer, there was an honesty that appealed to many. “Small wooden stools, wonky tables, food coming out of a small kitchen as and when it was ready, obscure wine selections,” is how he describes it, remarking “all of these reflected the enthusiasms of young hospitality professionals stripping away everything they saw as superfluous in a bid to create something as raw, authentic, and immediate as possible.” The key to how it worked, however, would eventually instigate its downfall. “The more minimalistic you made the service, the more ambitious you could make the food.”

Back to comfort and value

The trajectory looked poised to continue in one inventive, imaginative direction. That was until a pandemic swept across the globe and stopped many such things in their tracks. Coming out of it, the first thing that the masses were after was not the unfamiliar. During the pandemic itself, “people just want[ed] comfort now, they just want[ed] nostalgia,” Famuwera says, pointing to the rise of rotisserie chicken offerings and businesses – also driven by financial motives. “I thought that was interesting at the time… the security blanket cuisine that everyone embraced and was a kind of survival tactic.”

But the effects of that would be felt way beyond, as the post-pandemic bistro boom attested to. Camille in Borough Market was one of them, which Elliot Hashtorudi, the restaurant’s chef, says was deliberately positioned against the pre-pandemic norm. “For me, it was never intended to be a small plates restaurant, and we’re not a small plates restaurant.”

Even if people may approach Camille as a place to share plates, the explicit rejection of the label points to a larger issue, which Tobias articulates with candidness. “I'm quite cynical about small plates and always have been because I ultimately think it benefits the restaurant owner or bar owner more than it does the customer.” Allowing restaurants to position their menu prices with the most expensive dish seeming quite reasonable can obscure the portion sizes, meaning “restaurants could slightly inflate their prices whilst not seeming to do so.” Customers have become savvier, which is why the current discourse is hardly celebratory of a small plates way of doing things.

For Tobias, there is another issue at play, and that is the perceived wisdom that small plates restaurants are places to be wowed by creativity and novelty. “There's a ubiquity in menus sometimes,” she says, making “the small plates restaurant… the epitome of homogeneity.” For her, the meteoric rise of crudo and beef tartare exemplifies this pattern. With many restaurants sourcing from the same suppliers, you could often hedge your bets if you noticed a particular variety of tomato or melon appearing across multiple menus at once.

The end of risk

But are value and homogeneity issues that have been noticed and rejected by discerning diners, or are diners reacting to hard facts constraining them in other ways? As Famuwera points out: ”We're still in this era of a kind of poly-crisis.” Post-pandemic instability has been joined by political instability, geopolitical uncertainty and a cost of living crisis. “And I think it feeds into this idea of nostalgia, but also of people eating out less and so wanting less risk, wanting more kind of guarantees.” Diners, now, are especially focused on getting more “bang for their buck,” and are less interested in something “roaming [and] experimental.”

This is certainly part of the reason chefs with Michelin-starred restaurants are opening pizza places, and just about everyone is opening a rotisserie chicken joint. We’ve also seen the rise of the prix-fixe and set menu, with Famuwera pointing to The Fat Badger’s £85 set menu as a key player in instigating this. “So I do think a lot of the kind of set menu and those kinds of guardrails that are being put in place are about just everyone just… knowing where they stand.”

Mixing and matching

More transparent menus may have resulted from this, but diners continue to eat in diverse ways. At Café Deco, the average age of customers is around 40-plus, Tobias tells me, and the “older generation much prefer to have their own plate.” Still, there remains “a split between how people decide to eat,” she says. Some customers will share four starters, a main and a couple of sides between three, whilst others will go for a starter, main and dessert. “I really think it ought to be up to people to decide how they want to eat.”

"Ultimately, small plates benefit the restaurant or bar owner more than the customer"

Does this desire for transparency mean the small plate is in terminal decline? Not exactly. For Boxer, “the big commercial hits of the last couple of years… Mountain, Manteca, Oma, Fallow, are all small-plates restaurants… My favourite restaurant in London, Planque, is this kind of restaurant.” By this, he means they are the kinds of restaurants that have crossover appeal amongst “industry award bodies, younger vibes-based, lifestyle-focused influencers, expense-accounted suits and older diners still getting their restaurant recommendations from the Times” – all of whom can choose how they want to approach the menu at such restaurants. Sharing in such settings, he suggests, is likely still dominant.

Famuwera agrees: “I don't know if I felt a backlash against small plates. I know that it's something that a lot of people talk about… [and] there's loads of wry comments about… fussy little small plates or whatever. But I just feel… that a sharing style is just people's… favourite way to eat.” Even at bistros like Camille, Josephine and Café Francois, “though the presentation is classic… diners will still be sharing dishes, sharing snacks, you know, mixing and matching a little bit.”

Small plates energy

So have things really changed? Boxer points out that “it's important to remember that 'small plates' was rarely exclusively small plates, outside of perhaps Spanish tapas joints which had a big moment post-Barrafina.” In the end, what was most important was not the size of the plate (there were likely a few larger ones in there), but “the implicit sharing.”

Perhaps the confusion is even greater today. There are snacks, small plates, medium plates, large plates and extra-large plates. Maybe what we really need is something altogether more simple – snacks (at snack prices), starters, mains and half-mains, which is the possibility of having large plates as smaller plates – something they do in Spain with a system of entrantes, media raciones and raciones. More freedom for the curious, and full-size raciones for those who insist on a main. But one thing is clear: the discourse isn’t going anywhere, and it has iterative effects that extend beyond traditional small plates settings. “Even if the trappings can be quite throwback and traditionalist,” Famuwera says, “there's small plates sensibility and energy in there.”

06 Aug 2025