Shared plates complicate dining and are often a chef’s conceit

A perfectly reasonable request from a hungry diner who just wants to eat his tea in peace.

‘Hey, you’ve already had 27 bean sprouts! This one’s mine.’

It always starts the same way. A bushranger with an armful of tattoos saunters over just as I’m about to deliver the punchline to a filthy story, looks around like a schoolteacher for silence and ­attention, then asks: “Have you eaten here before?”

My heart sinks. I am about to be informed, after several decades of getting food successfully into my face (some say too successfully), how this restaurant “works”.

“Chef’s dishes are designed to be shared,” Ned Kelly drawls through his luxuriant beard. But they’re not. Outside a Chinese restaurant, they hardly ever are. They are designed to make you sad, angry and mean-spirited.

A slow-cooked organic hen’s egg, drizzled with a rich jus, arrives. This is very tasty, but I am with five other people and the bushranger has advised us that two portions will be sufficient for the table.

The dish is made for sharing in the same way soup or chewing gum or an oyster is. I know few people well enough to share a runny egg with, and my dining companions aren’t among them. There are no serving utensils, so everyone just dives in. I don’t want to sound too Howard Hughes but after all their spoons have gone into the bowl a few times, I might as well be licking the inside of their mouths. That doesn’t usually happen until we hit the cog­nacs.

Hygiene aside, who has the mathematical skills, let alone the honesty, to apportion food in a world where “one each” is an alien concept? How do three diners divide two lamb cutlets? Or worse, four? How much food is wasted, everyone wanting, but not daring, to clean the plate? How many friendships are soured by that greedy bastard (hey, it’s not always me) helping himself to the last slice of wagyu sirloin or taking more than his 16 per cent of the squid?

In the 18th century British navy, survivors in a lifeboat would cut a fish or a seabird into as many portions as there were men, then one sailor would be asked, ”Who shall have this?” as each piece was held aloft behind his back. It was a crude way of ensuring fairness but my friends, strangers to the ways of the sea, have rejected my ­attempts to reintroduce it.

I hope the days of the shared plate are numbered. Yes, it means you talk about the food, but if you’re not being fed by Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adria, maybe you should find richer ­topics of conversation. And, yes, it avoids those “I didn’t have the lobster” arguments at bill time, but you really should have ­exorcised those people from your life.

Despite those minor pluses, I suspect in every group being taken on a shared culinary “journey”, half just want their own steak and to be allowed to slice it themselves. They don’t want to share their meal and they don’t care how the man behind the pans arrived at his rustic epiphany. So chefs, if you need to explain your “philosophy” on the menu, lift your game above boilerplate musings about passion and provenance.

The truth might work.

My food philosophy, born in the back alleys of Liverpool, is about sharing. Ever since I saw the price of beef going through the roof, I have tried to feed more with less. My other philosophy is about wages, and share plates let me employ staff who are incapable of getting six different dishes to your table at the same time, like in a proper restaurant. These philosophies underpin my main philosophy: it’s my place and you will be grateful to eat what I give you when I give it to you. Did I mention I have been a judge on a TV cooking show?

I know, I know: it’s a First World problem. It’s different in the Third World. Many years ago, I was ­invited to eat with a band of Sierra Leone militiamen who had prepared an enormous fish-head stew. Their leader caught my eye as I looked around for a bowl. “We are African,” he announced, ­offended, as his men plunged their arms into the steaming cauldron. “We chop with our hands.”

That was one of my earliest shared plates, and it tasted vile. But at least nobody wanted to deconstruct it, photograph it for their blog or charge me $85 for matching wines.