{"id":34121,"date":"2016-01-17T02:00:06","date_gmt":"2016-01-17T07:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34121"},"modified":"2016-01-16T09:22:40","modified_gmt":"2016-01-16T14:22:40","slug":"tabatha-southey-is-getting-nostalgic-for-plates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/01\/17\/tabatha-southey-is-getting-nostalgic-for-plates\/","title":{"rendered":"Tabatha Southey is getting nostalgic for plates"},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps I’ve been lucky to have (mostly) avoided this restaurant serving trend<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been away seven weeks now, travelling, working, researching a book, seeing friends, but it\u2019s time to come home; I miss plates.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been staying in London mostly, visited other cities from there, and then I was in Dublin for a while. In all these places I ate out a lot, and I can report that the restaurant industry is in the midst of a tableware crisis. There\u2019s barely a plate to be found any more, and the first time you\u2019re served a dry-aged rump of beef with celeriac gratin, chanterelles and red wine jus on a cutting board, it\u2019s possible to be charmed.<\/p>\n

After all, you<\/em> are not a tablecloth, but soon the tide of things being served on other things that were just not meant to be served on starts to wear on you.<\/p>\n

I have a high whimsy-tolerance. Doctors have often remarked upon it. Sometimes half an hour into a puppet show involving a talking reflex hammer and a musical stethoscope, a doctor will say, \u201cThis is very unusual,\u201d and make a note on my chart, but recently my whimsy-tolerance has been tested.<\/p>\n

I miss plates. Why, in one day on this trip, I was served breakfast on a chalk slate, lunch on a clip-board and dinner on a wooden cutting board shaped like a clover leaf. I\u2019ve been served frites in a beer stein, and the ones I could reach were delicious, and so my verdict was a resolved \u201cFun!\u201d \u2013 until my slow-baked quince, wild honey ewe\u2019s yoghurt, bee pollen and almonds arrived in a vintage teacup balanced on a strip of artfully weathered barn board, and then the next morning at breakfast, I was served a waffle on another waffle<\/em> with maple syrup in a stem vase.<\/p>\n

What was under that waffle I do not care to know, but everything I\u2019ve been served of late suggests that that non-plate waffle presenting item was handcrafted from a substance that Dwell<\/em> magazine would call \u201creclaimed ash flooring from a demolished church in Ohio,\u201d and the rest of us would call \u201cwood.\u201d<\/p>\n

I miss plates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps I’ve been lucky to have (mostly) avoided this restaurant serving trend: I\u2019ve been away seven weeks now, travelling, working, researching a book, seeing friends, but it\u2019s time to come home; I miss plates. I\u2019ve been staying in London mostly, visited other cities from there, and then I was in Dublin for a while. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,74,57],"tags":[52,350,202],"class_list":["post-34121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-food","category-humour","tag-absurd","tag-london","tag-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Sl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34122,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34121\/revisions\/34122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}