Eddie’s dining annoyances: restaurants with those crappy, tiny tables and chairs

Adeline loves eating, a lot and often, both at home and out. Usually that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the series Eddie’s Dining Annoyances, she shares her bewilderment. This week, she has to get something off her chest about those crappy, tiny tables and chairs in restaurants.

Recently, I went out to eat in one of those narrow little places in Amsterdam and ended up practically sitting on my neighbor’s lap. Luckily, I wasn’t out to dinner with my boyfriend, but with a female friend. I didn’t do it myself, by the way; it was because of the distance between the shitty, teeny-tiny tables in the establishment.

Shared dining, how?

Of course I understand the thinking behind the small table, because the smaller your table, the more tables and guests you can fit. You don’t exactly need to call in a mathematician for that calculation. But what I don’t get is why you put out those teeny-tiny tables when your concept (more on that in an extensive rant later) is shared dining .

Then they advise you to order two dishes per course, but all those plates don’t fit on the table. How? You’re not only sitting at a small table, you also have to eat small, because otherwise you’ll knock all the dishes and glasses off the edge. (Small side note; this is also the only downside of the wonderful restaurant Beurre, where we recently squeezed in cheek by jowl).

Gigantic ass

Even worse are those crappy, tiny tables in a restaurant that are practically stacked on top of one another. Interior designers pretend that a long bench along the wall is super hip, but in reality the owner simply wants to cram as many people as possible cheek by jowl. I don’t have a gigantic aura, so that part works, but I do have a gigantic ass, and that doesn’t. Only people who are wafer-thin can get through that impossible thirty centimeters between the tables.

Meanwhile, I’m sweeping the bread basket onto the lap of the person on the bench with my ass, or knocking over the wine glass with my bag. To prevent this, you could turn yourself around, except then you’d be passing the table at crotch height, which is awkward too. Your neighbors then look from your crotch to your face and back to the table—and thus your crotch.

Grabbing hands

Sitting so close on top of your neighbor has another interesting side effect. I’ll leave it open for now whether that’s a bad thing, because sometimes it’s simply very interesting. But you hear all sorts of juicy details from the conversation next to you. This is extremely awkward when a lovey-dovey couple decides to go out for dinner and sit down, because then you spend the entire time staring at those grabby little hands on the table. But your ears perk up when the neighbors are arguing in hushed tones.

You don’t even have to lean left or right to hear better. Just keep talking to your own conversation partner, otherwise it’ll be noticeable. If you can forget those thirty centimeters between the tables and the limited square footage for your dishes, it could turn into a fascinating evening.

Also read:

• Eddie’s dining annoyances: when all the dishes arrive at the table at breakneck speed
• Eddie’s dining annoyances: those people who don’t like anything
• Eddie’s dining annoyances: when someone wants to help with cooking