SMALL PLATES

And as night follows day, the bus home again follows the bus there. Though the bus there took two hours and fifteen minutes in the end, so I’m kind of hoping for something a little quicker. Imagine having to do this every day! I’m pretty made up that the train is and always was my best option.

We all went out for lunch today in a swanky Oxford ‘small plates’ wine bar. It’s the kind of place that paints the walls dark violet and has bronze frames for pictures of chickens. ‘Small plates’ by the way, is code for ‘fancy tapas’.

Fancy tapas. It’s a swizz! I’ll tell you what they’ve invented there - starters at main course prices. Out come the ‘small’ plates with roasted peppers and tiny sausage rolls. There’s fish (hake) that could have revived itself in a fish tank, and little pots of truffle butter and oil for flatbreads and chunks of wholewheat loaf, and some swirl of salmon teriyaki with a kind of undefinable mousse and all manner of stringy garnish - tiny bean sprouts and seeds and black blobs of oily sauces.

“Best thing is,” had said the waiter, “To order two or three plates per person and then you’ve got a good range.” Yeah, I’ll bet. Not great for allergies though.

But my main problem is of course that the dining experience needs a main course. It really does. What small plates gives you is a bewildering array of the first course - and you can hardly believe that any of this will actually fill you up - followed by dessert. In effect it’s a restaurant where you have to have a prawn cocktail and then a knickerbocker glory - though obviously not from the 1970s. It’s gazpacho and cheesecake, pate and sticky toffee pudding, bruschetta and a tiramisu! Where’s my lovely mains?

I had to get the waiter to put a pen mark by everything I could eat. He was kind enough to do that. Then I persuaded him to leave the menu with me so that I didn’t poison myself.

I’m sure actual tapas isn’t this complicated. I think the idea must be to craft a flavoursome meal from a variety of components, brought out to you one by one. That’s fine in Spain, and if that’s the idea then great. But when they brought the fries out after I’d already polished off some scallops that would have gone perfectly well with them, I did start to wonder about the format of it all.

It’s dark out there. I can’t see a thing. It feels a bit like being on an aeroplane - though, ever so slightly less exciting. And all the way home I feel as though I’m missing out on the far better way to travel, the train that links me between two buses either side like a lovely filling in a well-made sandwich. Or, indeed, the main event in a three course dinner.

Small plates indeed. Tsk.