When Family Style Dining Does Not Work

The morning-after symptoms of a large meal are usually a still-too-full belly and a throbbing headache. This was not the case when I awoke on Sunday with aching arms. The root cause of my curious ailment? The recommended family-style, communal dining at Top Chef judge, Tom Colicchio’s Craft in Manhattan. I’m a huge advocate of let’s-just-all-dig-in feasting, in fact that’s my preferred mode of eating. But, there’s one caveat, the menu has to lend itself to it.

If a big bowl of chicken curry and a mound of steaming rice is on offer, or a platter of bite-sized Spanish tapas, or a deep tray of lasagna and a large salad, or a decadent Sunday roast rib of beef with all the trimmings – you get my point – then communal dining is not only ideal but it really makes for an altogether more enjoyable and sociable experience. You serve yourself, you serve your dining partners on either side; then you all get busy. If you don’t know everyone at the table, then this all-inclusive style of eating breaks the ice. Nothing to talk about? Rave about the how delicious the Szechwan chicken is or that the Thai green curry needs to be cranked up a notch on the heat-o-meter. Hopefully, for a really spicy evening, you’ll disagree about whether the type of chile used in the chile was in fact the best choice.

It wasn’t that my meal at Craft was not enjoyable. In fact I don’t recall whether I actually enjoyed it or not, precisely because I don’t recall actually “tasting” any of it. What I do recall, however, is spending 95 minutes passing a plethora of heavy cast iron serving dishes around the table and 15 minutes in between this mealtime weight lifting shoveling forkfuls of gratin potatoes, roast sirloin, braised short ribs, a medley of mushrooms, creamed corn, roast Dourade, pan fried soft shell crab, sugar snap peas, foie gras on toast, escargot and poached eggs, crispy bacon and frisee and pancetta salad into my mouth before someone at the table impatiently eyed up the dish at my elbow.

In explanation of this farcical dinnertime pantomime, let me take you to the beginning of the meal. Our waitress explained that all the food would be served towards the centre of the table and was intended to be shared, but that we were still advised to order a starter, a main and a side or two each. With six eager and willing diners, you can imagine that all this amounted to a sizable landscape of serving dishes on an inadequately sized table. In my book, trying to navigate 18 different dishes at any one time does not constitute an enjoyable meal, but instead an arduous regime of lifting and passing, lifting and passing that is reminiscent of an evening in the gym.

It’s not that I don’t like Colicchio’s concept of constructing the different elements of your meal, where you choose a protein to which you add your preferred vegetable and carbohydrate. It’s really quite ingenious; you are an active participant in the creation of your own dining experience as opposed to being entirely subjected to someone else’s culinary vision. But why not stop here? Why not just present me with my personalized meal? Why do I then have to share my creation with everyone else at the table? And an even more perplexing, why having spent all this effort creating a unity of protein, vegetable and carbohydrate, do they arrive in individual dishes and at different times throughout the meal?

As I nurse my morning-after bicep burn, I can’t help but to wonder whether Colicchio should spend a little less time criticizing other chefs for their culinary misjudgments and address his own. I’d love to hear if any one else had a similar experience at Craft or in any other restaurant where the suggested style of dining simply did not jive with the food on offer.