And so, it’s farewell once more to the asparagus season. Personally, I’m delighted to see the back of it. This isn’t to do with disliking asparagus. I love it: boiled, chargrilled, as part of an edible re-creation of Stonehenge. I’ll take it any which way. The problem is one of mathematics. It’s not unique to asparagus, but this season its popularity has highlighted the issue.
Simply put, the asparagus of 2017 was at the heart of what I call The Casual Dining Paradox. The paradox being that the more casual the dining concept, the more socially complicated the experience becomes. Because just how the hell do you split a sharing plate of seven asparagus spears between two? There are, to be fair, other reasons to hate the whole sharing-plate thing: the fact that there’s not a waiter alive who can say the words “we have a sharing-plate concept here” without sounding like an arse; the suspicion it’s a sneaky encouragement to order more than you otherwise would; the way the table clutters with dishes which have no business loitering in each other’s company. But key to it is the whole numbers game.
Obviously, we’ve all confronted this in Chinese restaurants for decades. Two of you go out for dim sum; every plate of dumplings comes in threes. Why? Because the Chinese word for four sounds like the word for death and is therefore considered unlucky; the word for three, however, sounds like that for birth. We might wish to dismiss this as superstitious cobblers, but we are alive to the cultural sensitivities.
Accordingly, for years we have struggled to navigate the social crisis which is The Last Dumpling. The thing is it’s no longer the last dumpling. Now it’s the last lamb chop problem, the last grilled shrimp problem, the last damn asparagus problem. The idea behind sharing plates is to bring into the restaurant the informality of the family table. Accidentally, they’ve also imported the entire dynamic of mealtime sibling rivalry; the neurosis and anxiety that comes with attempting to get your share.
How to behave? You can say nothing, in the hope that an instinct to good manners guarantees everything will work out for the best. But you really do risk being treated unfairly. (If your response to this is “but I don’t care either way”, you are reading the wrong column.) Alternatively, you can be the one to point out the sole remaining item to your companion. The problem is that the mere act of pointing out the last asparagus spear states bluntly that you want it. Allow even the edge of anxiety into your voice and you swiftly become the youngest child in a family of seven convinced that your parents and siblings are conspiring to exclude you. It’s needy.
You can go for the “I cut, you choose” model, but that presents two problems. Firstly, not every item lends itself to division. Who wants the prawn head or the woody stem of the asparagus? And second, it comes across as anally retentive, as if you’re one of those tight-fisted nightmares who insists upon identifying exactly what everybody had when splitting the bill, instead of just dividing equally.
My solution? Invoke Darwin’s theory of evolution by shouting “survival of the fittest” and then just take the last item. Look, if your companion hasn’t gone for it then clearly they’re not greedy enough. They don’t deserve it. It would be wasted on them. At the very least, if you are unfortunate enough to go out for dinner with me, you now know what to expect. You have been warned.
