Kristina Soljo
They’re seductive, snacks. A little sneaky too, the way they’ve begun colonising an ever-increasing amount of real estate at the top of restaurant menus.
Alluringly dressing what might be considered a semi-shameful culinary kink in fine-dining drag: a potato gem, topped with crème fraîche and caviar, a morsel of fried chicken turned edgy with house-fermented chilli, a tiny crumpet piled with raw tuna or crab meat. You’d be a stronger person than me to resist those salty, sweet, fatty, tangy siren songs.
That snacks are increasingly offered per piece adds to the allure. This is a marked improvement on the small plate conundrum that takes place when starters arrive as a trio on a table of two or four, requiring extra negotiations with your server or your dining companions. It also allows you to pretend you’re exercising restraint by ordering just one blinged potato gem, even if said gem might set you back somewhere north of 10 bucks for a single mouthful and will inevitably tempt you into ordering a second. Or a third.
Which brings us to the false economy of it all. At a time when prices further down the list have entrées hovering around the $30 mark and mains often breaking the $60 barrier, those morsels and their sub-20-dollar price tags start looking like a prudent financial choice.
But if you’re truly hungry – as you often are, especially when you’re doing the late night, post-show thing – those tiny price tags quickly mount up. And because they’re snacks, designed to do what snacks do, you can blow through a fair number of them and still not feel entirely satiated, despite the size of the bill.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to snack-shame. I’m a big fan of punchy one- or two-bite morsels, particularly in the classic mode of tapas, cicchetti, the izakaya or street food in Bangkok, Istanbul, Addis Ababa or Mexico City. These all represent a style of food deliberately calibrated to satisfy an immediate on-the-go craving or to act as ballast to a couple of pre-dinner cocktails in a bar. They were never designed to usurp the “real” business of dining.
But as the line between restaurant and bar has become more porous, snacks seem to be increasingly breaking out of their traditional role, muscling in on the more substantial territory of a so-called complete meal. Sometimes a substantial portion of a menu is taken up by snacks masquerading as traditional entrées.
Sliced-to-order salami, house-made pickles, a couple of grilled asparagus spears served with a dab of fresh ricotta, pickled mussels, tongue skewers and single-bite slivers of cured raw fish are undoubtedly lovely things, but definitely more about flavour than bulk. This is not some kind of underhanded, price-gouging restaurant trick. Given the amount of labour and the price of ingredients, the current snack price tags are mostly fair.
The reason snacks have become increasingly common is simply that restaurants and bars are giving the people what they want: flexibility. Ever since the phrase “our menu has been designed to share” became ubiquitous and the notion of having your own plate of food came to be viewed as unfashionable, antisocial and selfish, the scaffolding of a meal changed from the entrée-main-dessert tripod to an elaborate series of small or large sharing plates.
This is great for those punters more on the flavour-not-bulk end of the spectrum but perhaps less so for those who like to feel full, and consequently have to duck in for a quick hamburger on the way home.
The fashion for flexibility has also meant that it is customers, rather than chefs, who are handed the work of balancing their own meal. With the mudslide of chaos that’s been engulfing us recently, pining for a simpler life is understandable (and a boon for our mental health). Fewer decisions is a good place to start, particularly when we go out to eat.
Being a professional eater, I’m seasoned at keeping an eye on meal balance. But for others looking for sustenance and solace after a hard day, it surely would be nothing but a force for good, if there was a little less flexibility in our dining culture, less need to make algebraic calculations to formulate a meal from an array of differently sized dishes.
A good place to start would be by taking snacks off the table and corralling them back to the bar or the street, where they truly and most successfully belong.
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