Why I Have a Love-Hate Relationship with Shared Dining
I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with shared dining restaurants. Love, because I often suffer from choice stress when looking at menus, so I’d prefer to taste as many things as possible. It’s happened to me far too often that I hesitated between two dishes, chose one, and my dining companion chose the other… And then I regretted it.
An utterly irritating feeling. At the same time, of course, I can also show off my good choice when the other person has the wrong dish in front of them, but that happens far less often.
‘Are you familiar with our concept?’
You’re less likely to regret your choice when you’re in a shared dining restaurant. Increasingly, I also notice that these kinds of restaurants get on my nerves. For example, I recently visited a new-ish restaurant in Amsterdam for the first time. The menu featured Spanish tapas. I’m guessing that, even if you’ve never been to Spain, by now you know what that means, and yet someone from the waiting staff came over to our table, immediately crouched down so he was at eye level with us, and asked with a big smile: ‘Are you familiar with our concept?’
I really can’t stand hearing that word concept anymore: what do you mean, ‘your concept’? Tapas have existed in Spain since the 13th century, and even in the Netherlands you’re far from the only—or first—person to come up with the groundbreaking idea of serving Spanish tapas. So, to give you a short answer to your question: yes, I am familiar with the concept.
There’s more
Then, unfortunately, we move on to irritation number two: why am I seated with my dining companion at a table the size of my side table at home? That table is immediately full with our two glasses of wine and the accompanying bottle, plus two glasses of water and that accompanying bottle too. And there isn’t even a plate on the table yet.
Why do restaurants embrace the whole shared dining idea if they also plan to accommodate as many guests as possible at minuscule tables? As far as I’m concerned, those two things genuinely don’t go together. Nine times out of ten, these restaurants also say, cheerfully: ‘And we’ll just bring each dish as soon as it’s ready.’ Fine by me. But surely the waiting staff can see that there’s barely room for two plates? And then they arrive with two more plates and jokingly say: ‘This is going to be a bit of a squeeze.’ No. It simply doesn’t fit, because with your concept you’ve crammed twenty tables into a space that should have held about twelve.
But it can get even worse
Just before Covid, I had my worst experience of all. It was at a restaurant in The Hague, where I had gone for a weekend with twelve girlfriends. We had already looked at the menu and saw that it was nothing special: burgers, pasta, tomato soup, bitterballen, carpaccio, chicken satay… Nothing exciting, but perfectly fine. We had to leave early for another party, so our idea—or our ‘concept’, if you like—was simply to get a quick, solid base in our stomachs, with wine on the side. This venue seemed capable of arranging that for us.
But when we received the menu, the waitress asked ‘whether we were familiar with their concept’. A question that already caused irritation, but now also confusion. What did she mean, concept? You order a burger with fries, and after a while it appears in front of you and you eat it. But no, she too was now participating in the ‘shared dining concept’.
‘How does that work with dishes like soup, burgers, pasta and satay?’ I asked, confused. ‘All the dishes arrive as soon as they’re ready, and then they’re placed in the middle so you can share them.’ ‘…So we all get a spoon to scoop soup out of the bowl?’ ‘Yes, exactly!’
But how does that even work?!
Now that I’m thinking back on it, I’m confused all over again. Of course, we all simply ordered our own dishes, they were nevertheless placed in the middle, and everyone just took what they had ordered. And yes: we also got a lecture ‘that this wasn’t their concept and that they had explained that very clearly to us’.
Sometimes I wonder how that waitress is doing now and whether she has come up with any more new concepts.
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