I'm a Food Capitalist. My Husband is a Food Communist.
Or, why "family style" restaurants are causing drama in my marriage.
My husband and I used to love this Thai fusion restaurant in San Francisco, where we would often bring friends or visiting family members. It was a nice restaurant, although not Michelin star nice—the kind of place where you’d dress up a little (just kidding. It was San Francisco, so everyone was wearing Madewell olive green utility jackets and Patagonia vests. Except me!)
Anyway, after faithfully patronizing this restaurant for years, one day they informed us they tweaked their menu. “It’s family style now,” they said, “So we brought down those portion sizes a bit, and now we recommend eight dishes per person.” The prices had not come down proportionately.
It felt like a gross and deliberate misunderstanding of what “family style” means. Allow me to illustrate, quite literally:
Maybe this is because I grew up in a very heavily Italian part of the tristate area and “family style” was always something I encountered at Italian restaurants that would bring out a gigantic trough of baked ziti and a colossal bowl of salad complete with a big serving spoon and fork, but this made no sense to me. This was not family style. This was “making six people dissect and share two spicy lettuce wraps.” And unfortunately, this distinction (and my difficulty adhering to the etiquette of modern-day family style) has created drama in my marriage.
Over time, it seemed that every restaurant was adopting this new family style model. We’d sit down, and our waiter would ask us if we have been there before, and then let us know they needed to “explain” the menu to us, which meant that the portion size of every dish was bound to be minuscule and we were supposed to buy fifteen of them.
My husband’s family loves to eat this way. He was raised to share food, including tiny portions of food. He was even raised to share drinks. When we order cocktails with his parents, there’s this communion-style ritual where everyone takes a sip from the same glass—something which used to be completely alien to me, although over time I’ve gotten used to it. Whenever we go out to eat with his parents, the menu is something that everyone tackles together, as we all strategize what looks the best to the largest number of people, how many dishes we need for everyone to be full (it’s never obvious).
I was not raised this way. I was raised to believe that my food is mine and mine alone. My parents would occasionally take me out to various taverns and the aforementioned Italian restaurants, and it never once occurred to me to share food with them or to ask them what they wanted to make sure I only ordered stuff everyone would enjoy. I went through a phase where I ordered a gigantic plate of penne al la vodka every time we went out, and nobody had a problem with it. My brother, a severe picky eater, would often just get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, continuing to order off the kids’ menu well into high school. I don’t recall my parents ever once asking me if I wanted to try anything they ordered. If they had, it would have felt gross and weird, like asking if I wanted to borrow their underwear. We didn’t even share apps.
I grew up as a food capitalist, my husband grew up as a food communist. Because of proximity, we hang out with his family much more than mine, so I’ve had to adapt to food communism. I’ve come to tolerate this strategy of ordering and eating with the whole table in mind, and even enjoy it sometimes. There are upsides! It’s nice to try lots of different things. Sometimes, I’ll enjoy a food that I wouldn’t have thought to order. But I struggle with the ethos of your food not really being up to you, or belonging to you. As it relates to food, he wants to live in the anarchist commune with the co-op garden. I want to live in the gated community in a McMansion with a big ass chandelier.
My in-laws probably know I feel this way, and every time we go out they let me know I have their blessing to just order whatever I want. A few times I’ve done this, where everyone is sharing small plates and I just get a mondo serving of tagliatele. But it feels a little rude, and I can tell it pisses my husband off. Early in our courtship, he warned me of his one major dealbreaker: I had to share my food with him. He told me about this the way someone might share that they have children from a previous marriage. A few times when I’ve grumbled about it, he has reminded me that this was what I signed up for. On one of our first dates, he got angry at me because we both ordered burritos and I ate my entire burrito without offering him any (I maintain this was insane because we ordered the exact same thing.) We’ve been married so long that sometimes I forget how important sharing food is to him, but it hasn’t gotten any less important over time.
So naturally, at restaurants, he wants to try as many things as possible, and if I opt out (especially with full-size entree he doesn’t like) that’s three small plates he can no longer try. In our earlier years of dating, even if I was open to giving him a few bites of my food, he would get annoyed with me for ordering things without asking him if it looked good to him too, because his assumption was that we were ordering to share everything evenly. Sometimes, when we get to a restaurant, my first instinct will be to tell him what looks good on the menu and then docilely ask him if I have his permission to order it, which I’m sure has either puzzled our servers or awakened a new kink for them.
My in-laws will usually tell him to cut it out. “Let her order what the wants,” my mother-in-law will say between sighs. But for whatever reason, this type of eating is how my husband experiences affection. Ordering a grilled cheese sandwich, knowing he hates it and won’t eat it, feels like I’m not considering his needs. He believes that ordering at a restaurant should be done with everyone in mind.
Ordering can be stressful for this reason because there are so many extenuating factors. My mother-in-law is lactose intolerant. I don’t eat pork or octopus for ethical reasons, although if the food has already been purchased without my consent, I’d rather eat these things than have them be thrown away. When we order as a family, we have to decide what to do if we all want to order something that one person doesn’t eat. Usually what this means is that the person who can’t eat the dish gets a larger portion of a different dish, but then that dish has to be something A.) good and B.) that nobody else wants that badly. You can see how complicated this can get. Ordering can take forever. I often just completely surrender to this charade and mentally check out, submitting to the fact that I will eat whatever is given to me.
Once we’ve mentally calculated the food concessions that the dietary restriction havers get for not partaking in everything, we have to deal with the second wave of mental calculations—serving. This is the part where I get extremely anxious. I have a huge appetite. I know a lot of people (seemingly the majority of people) claim to never be hungry. I’m not sure why. Every time I make cake, people either say they don’t want any or ask me to give them a slice thinner than the latest iPhone because “I’m not hungry.” I’m assuming everyone is just on a diet and doesn’t want to admit it, but I prefer it when people are honest about this because it makes me feel like less of a circus freak. That said, my in-laws genuinely have smaller appetites than me or my husband do. So this is taken into account when we pass plates around.
The problem though, is that if there are four of us eating (or up to six, if other family members or friends are there) it’s not always possible to know who has already served themselves a portion of the singular cup of caremalized brussels sprouts. When we’re sharing something like empanadas, this becomes a bit easier because we can plainly see how many empanadas are there and hand one to each person (or more realistically, cut them in half.) But sometimes the dish is more of a scooping dish, and this, dear reader, is where all hell breaks loose. I regret to inform you that my husband has forced all four of us to share an appetizer-sized cup of gazpacho.
The bowl of quinoa salad is handed to me. I have no idea who already had some or who has yet to have some. As I take what I think is fair, my husband materializes over my shoulder and tells me that I’m taking too much and his parents haven’t eaten any yet, which makes me feel like Jabba the Hut with worse table manners. How am I supposed to keep track of who has eaten what percentage of seven different small plates to ensure I’m eating enough to be full while not bogarting the burrata? Evidently, my husband is able to keep track, but somehow this skill escapes me.
When you marry someone and enter into their family, you learn to live with their different ways of doing things. We do food communism now the vast majority of the time. My husband is Food Stalin, as it were. That’s fine. There are worse things to be than Food Stalin. But here’s my humble proposal for a more enjoyable experience: if we’re sharing small plates, six people are at the table, and one dish contains four sardines in lemon and yuzu oil with a tarragon garnish, we should order two plates of it so everyone gets at least one full sardine.
Calling small plates "family style" is very disingenuous. Family style should always infer big sharable portions.
A few things.
The most revealing part of the story was this line “the prices has not come down proportionately”. You just described succinctly why we might be headed for actual fascism. Seriously. Because my suspicion is your annoyance at this Thai restaurant was like 50% they went “family style” and 50% they raised prices. And what you discovered is why people hate hate hate even moderate price increases. You feel cheated. Even if you weren’t cheated. The restaurant may have seen their rent go up or had their suppliers raise prices and felt like they had no choice but to increase prices (doesn’t help they tried to obfuscate their price increase with this change to “family style”). And yet it still sucks to see that you have to pay more for the exact same thing you had like 6 months prior. So yeah, you inadvertently wrote the perfect “why Trump won” post.
Second and getting into the more “meat” of your article. I am part Indian. I bring this up to note that I absolutely was brought up in a communal eating culture where food is shared. So when I say this, I feel like I have some ground to stand on. Your husband’s insistence that you think about whether he wants some of the food you are ordering just for yourself is nuts. All of your posts seem to indicate your husband is a lovely man, a good partner and a good father. But I think this post is a good reminder no one is perfect. Because this food eating habit of your husband is not about communal eating, this seems to be some weird quirk with your husband. Again if this your husband’s worst flaw I’d say you lucked out. But in my book this is definitely a flaw.