A decorated morsel” is how Nishi Shisodia, founder of Bengaluru-based travel company The Happy Holly, describes small plates. Shisodia’s large blended family, which includes four teenagers, eats out often, and she finds the “small plates trend” annoying and expensive. “We like to try out new restaurants and cuisines, but we have started skipping the small plates section because we have to order multiple portions for everyone to even get a taste,” says Shisodia. Since most upscale restaurants with interesting food tend to do small plates, does she feel it has become the default way to eat out? “If your goal is to lose weight, then yes,” says Shisodia, laughing. “It’s a bummer because the descriptions sound interesting, but from a value-for-money perspective, they are not for us,” she adds.
Over the past decade, small plates have taken over Indian fine-dine menus and become the focal point around which the entire meal is designed. It started when some of the most avant-garde restaurants in Indian dining, from Indian Accent in New Delhi to Monkey Bar in Bengaluru, turned the standard starters-mains-desserts distinction on its head and split menus into small and big plates. Over the next few years, diners got more used to the idea—the appearance of small plates often spelt “fancy”, signalling complex dishes with interesting combinations of flavours, textures and aromas, and were not necessarily a precursor to something bigger and better but often the highlight of the meal.
However, they can sometimes leave diners feeling that they are not getting their money’s worth. “The small plates can be so small that they are almost individual portions. I thought they were supposed to be shareable, but often they are not—definitely not in the way that starters are shareable,” says Debolina Ray, a product manager with Amazon in Bengaluru and a food blogger. “Let’s say four of us have gone out, and we get a small plate with three bite-sized portions of something we all want to try. So by default we have to order another plate, and at over ₹600 a pop, it all adds up very quickly without really being filling,” says Ray. This is something one hears diners say all the time—small plates may cost less individually, but are not filling in the way a similarly priced traditional starter/main course dish would be. They feel perfect for two people, but as soon as you have a larger group, the calculations go out of whack.
Have small plates simply become too complex for their own good? Chef Varun Totlani of Masque and Bar Paradox in Mumbai says that while small plates offer chefs a unique format to experiment with and showcase ingredients and technique, conveying value can be a challenge. “If customers don’t know the labour or the technique that’s gone behind creating a dish, they might not see value in the dish. The perception exists because sometimes dishes can look simple but take a lot of time and effort to make,” says Totlani, using the example of the Bucatini (priced at ₹1,100) at Paradox, for which fresh pasta is made by hand, using Italian 00 flour and only egg yolks. Restaurants often balance this out, says the chef, by adding small plates that are cheaper to make and cost less as well—Bar Paradox’s Corn Curd Fries, for instance, which cost ₹650.
Chefs love small plates, and one of the obvious reasons is they encourage people to sample more. “This is easily accomplished when you can share four-five plates between two people. The more you try, the more you’re able to decide what you want and explore all the various flavours that we’re trying to put out there,” say chefs Pallavi Menon and Kanishka Sharma of Nāvu in Bengaluru. But the decision is not only about variety. It’s also about how certain flavours and ingredients are best experienced. “Some things are best enjoyed in smaller quantities because they are intense and can really consume all your senses,” says Menon. She compares eating a big bowl of pasta with tasting caviar. “Nobody’s going to give you 150g of caviar—it’s one spoon—because that’s enough to experience what the ingredient has to offer.”
An example of a dish from Nāvu that is best enjoyed as a small plate is the restaurant’s interpretation of fish and chips. “We start with a small potato pavé, on top of which we pipe a taramasalata (a Greek meze or spread made of salted and cured fish roe and garlic) along with a little bit of tobiko (Japanese flying fish roe). Now, that’s an intense flavour combination—so we do two bite-size pieces as a small plate. You can’t have too much of it,” explains Sharma. And when you think of the work that goes into constructing the dish, starting with making the pavé—paper-thin potato slices baked, compressed overnight, and then cut into rectangles and pan-fried until crispy on the outside and soft inside—it’s not easy to complain about the price ( ₹750).
Diners also want complexity and storytelling on their plates, and the gourmefication of restaurant menus and the way we eat out today has gone hand in hand, says chef Hussain Shahzad of The Bombay Canteen, which calls its small and big plates “chhotas” and “badas”. “Eating out earlier was largely with family. We knew what we wanted to order even before we got to the restaurant. It was culturally very different from the way we are dining out today. Now people are coming in either as solo diners or in sets of two, three, four, and they demand something new and exciting,” he says. Restaurants can’t turn out time-tested recipes and call it a day, he adds—dishes take months to conceptualise before they can be added to the menu. Small plates at the Bombay Canteen cost between ₹600-1,000.
In a small-plates menu, each dish is about surprising and delighting the diner, says Prashanth Puttaswamy, whose modern Asian restaurant FOMO (Flavours of Modern Orient) in Bengaluru uses them to showcase northern Thai and lesser-known Vietnamese dishes. “People want both novelty and comfort in a meal, and small and big plates deliver that balance,” says Puttaswamy. What’s harder to balance are the economics, especially when you are importing ingredients like Belgian pork belly at over ₹1,500 a kg or lump crab meat at ₹8,000 a kg.
Most chefs agree that whether you see value in small plates or not depends a lot on what you’re looking to get out of a meal—satiety, variety, newness, or a bang for your buck. Most diners look for something that ticks all the boxes, but ultimately, it may not be possible for restaurants to deliver all that given the cost of ingredients and a large number of hidden factors from LPG prices to real estate costs. “It’s usually not a problem for chef-driven restaurants. People are able to see the effort and thought that has gone into each dish. The mismatch occurs mostly with restaurants that are more business-driven and adopt the small plates structure without really understanding what should go into it,” says Sahil Makhija, an independent food-reviewer with his own Youtube and Instagram channel Headbanger Eats.
The small plates economy is here to stay, and whether you think of them as decorated morsels or a way to experience blow-your-mind tastes and textures depends entirely on where you’re choosing to eat.
Shrabonti Bagchi is a Bengaluru-based writer and editor.