Food presentation in restaurants / pubs

I feel the same. I dont want it served in a shoe, or a pan, and a cup doesn't hold enough "twice fried fries" for me!

Quite recently we ordered steak, chips and the usual trimmings in a gastro pub. It was served on a wooden chopping board. It was impossible to keep the food actually on the board because, in its many turns in a dishwasher, it had buckled and split in several places. The result was that peas and mushrooms rolled off the edges and the juices and grease dripped through the cracks, onto the table and into my lap. We sent our meals back to be served onto plates. I'm also perplexed by the current fashion to serve long drinks, like white wine spritzer, in a jam jar with a handle. What's that all about?

YES oh YES please. What is this with long thin slates that the food falls off. It's come to the point now where when we go out to eat I say right at the start that we want our food on plates please

Yes and somewhere at Euston serves coffee in bowls without handles which were so hot I nearly burnt myself.
I agree. No planks slates or boards. After Brexit they will be banned.

Yes, please. I want a plate and, if it's hot food, I want a warmed plate.

I have the occasional snack lunch in my local Waitrose and everything is served in a huge soup bowl- I hate it and they refuse to do anything about it. Cutlery is also hit and miss- they rarely have all that one needs. I frequently take an extra fork or knife to stir my coffee.

I don't mind a board for cold things but not hot too difficult to handle. I now use enlarged soup plates at home for stir fries and curries etc but a proper dinner goes on a proper plate and the vegetables in a vegetable dish with serving spoons in my house. What I do dislike is them plating up the food as a pile meaning you only get one or two vegetables unless you buy extras which is a complete con.

A 'stack' of fries usually means 5, arranged in an artistic wigwam effect.

I like mine served without someone's thumb in the gravy, I watch the waiting staff carry it from the kitchen to the table and many of them have no idea about hygeine at all.

As for the shoes, spades, buckets etc I wouldn't bother with any place that served food that way, pretentious nonsense!!

My particular dislike is slates. While I favour in principle diversification in the slate industry, it should not be at the expense of waiters struggling to pick the wretched things up at the end of a meal, scrabbling to get a fingernail underneath them or dragging them to the edge of the table.

And serving steak on a slate so it cooks at the table, what is that all about, I pay for someone to cook the steak for me. As I like my steak rare it is chargrilled by time I have cut off one slice plus the smoke from the hot slate thing gets in your eyes.

Slates, wooden boards ( I thought that trenchers had gone out of fashion round about 1700) and any other odd things instead of plates are a no-no, food tastes and looks better on a plate.

I am the same it puts me right off eating out, have you heard of the website called we want plates, they also have social media pages on twitter/face book and people post photos meals of that they've had served in/on strange things, it's hilarious, so I go and have a look if I need a good laugh,they make some of the food look revolting. I'd have to send it back or refuse to pay. I want my dinner on a plate & my desserts in a dish not on a shovel , a chunk of rock or a dirty bit of wood. It can't be hygienic surely ?

At least that daft fashion for cooking your own food at the table on hot stones didn't last long. We did it a few years back, on a cheap Groupon, and I couldn't help wondering how it had slipped past the H & S person, and which of us sitting there faffing about with raw prawns and strips of raw chicken would be up in the night regretting it....

Oh dear, a chorus of vindictiveness. I love the theatre and artistry, okay some things do not work, that is true of art. Some dining establishments have some super and unexpected ways of serving. By the sounds of it many grumpy grans are just waiting to pounce, for instance if going to a training college criticising the unpolished performance of the waiting staff. Ouch

I hardly think its vindictive! Its just a fun look at life today.

I like mine on a plate too. When the vegies are in a separate bowl and the meat's on a board I don't know whether to move the veg onto the board or vice versa. A while back it was fashionable to serve the bread in a clay flowerpot!

I always look around and if other people are being given boards or slates I actually ask for a plate. I'm probably wrong but boards and slates never seem hygienic to me. Also proper plates are much easier for the waiters to pick up and carry

Since when have comments on hygiene and practicality been vindictive?

At home I serve dinner in pasta bowls. They are flat like plates but with a little rim that keeps food from falling of. Great for children and adults alike. I've had no complaints so far.

Uggh! I've just read about food served on wooden boards that have been through a dishwasher and have many cracks. Even with dishwashing they must harbour germs in those crevices; the most attractive way to serve food (for me) is on white plate - it makes everything look fresh and colourful, and having had a meal served in a piece of terracotta guttering (Portugal) I think the whole idea is farcical and off putting. Not to mention dangerous in some cases - tea cups without handles???

I don't mind chicken-in-a-basket but soup is taking it too far!

In Dubai we had breakfast served in the small frying pans it was cooked in. Novel, but DH burned his hand on it! My mother would only take the GC to the Wimpy, never McDonalds, because they had "plates and knives and forks".

I like the idea of going back to trenchers, as long as the table is clean. It is then a choice of whether you wish to eat it or not.