We Want Plates , a Twitter campaign against the restaurant trend for serving food on breadboards and miniature shopping trolleys, launched six months ago. Now some chefs are scrapping their slates. We serve up some of the worst offenders

Why would you serve chips inside a miniature shopping trolley? To disguise a portion that would fit inside a cigarette packet? Because nothing says “tasty” like a tiny recreation of a freshers’ week piss-up? Or is it because no one’s been kind enough to say: “Dude! You work in a greasy spoon!”?

These are the questions that, since March, Ross McGinnes has been asking via his We Want Plates Twitter account. To rail against pretentious restaurants’ “gastropub style-over-content nonsense”, he tweets photographs – largely submitted by his followers – of their more baffling presentation choices. Think casseroles served in jars, desserts that have been squished into plant pots, and fry-ups dolloped atop garden shovels. All of these are actual examples.

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“Restaurants are trying to stand out,” sighs McGinnes, “but they’re just making their customers look like infantilised idiots while eating.” His online lampooning has helped him to nigh-on 95,000 social media followers, and since We Want Plates became a bit of an “internet thing”, he’s done TV appearances and – such is the way of the web – had his content repurposed by all the top clickbait purveyors. He can now even get a meal served to his liking in Hebden Bridge – his home town – on the basis of his face alone. “I ordered a burger in a local pub a few weeks ago and the barman went: ‘I suppose you want that on a plate, yeah?’” he chuckles. “When I looked confused, he said: ‘I follow you on Twitter.’”

So passionate are the We Want Plates devotees that even McGinnes has felt their rage. “I get complaints,” he says. “You can’t win. If I tweet a picture and don’t name the restaurant it’s, ‘NAME AND SHAME!’ If I do, it’s ‘STOP GIVING THEM FREE ADVERTISING, YOU SELL-OUT!’ Every day I get people unfollowing – they still love the account – the pics just annoy them too much.”

We Want Plates (@WeWantPlates) Fake fryer and chopping board sent back to the kitchen in exchange for a nice, white plate. Good work, @gemmasomerset pic.twitter.com/fPFuHpPOyM

In recent weeks, things have really taken off. In July, McGinnes took a spot of culinary direct-action and began requesting a plate whenever he was served a meal whose dish seemed to hail from a garden centre. The resultant tweets proved so popular that his Twitter devotees followed suit and We Want Plates now features “before” and “after” photos of members of the public transferring their meals to china. Suddenly, it’s gone from being jokey internet satire to real-life protest.

“I hope we’ll make a difference,” says David Martyn, a We Want Plates follower who was featured on the site after asking a Clifton pub to provide him with a normal serving vessel for his portion of fish and chips – rather than the proffered roof tile. “How are you supposed to eat fish and chips off a slate? It’s presentation over practicality. And surely it’s old hat by now?”

The residents of Glasgow think so. “My prediction is that plates are going to be the hip new thing for 2016,” jokes Ross Swanson: duty manager of the Griffin – a pub so inspired by McGinnes’s tweets that it advertises its meals via a sandwich-board promising “actual plates”. In Windsor, one restaurant even went so far as to restyle a dish after We Want Plates’ photos showed their slate-based serving of ice-cream, leading to a tablecloth swimming in melted dairy. “We were delighted that someone pointed it out to us,” smiles Conrad Byrne, general manager of the Fox and Hounds. “We put the dessert on a plate that very afternoon and it’s changed how we look at our dishes. Now we don’t just think purely about the visuals, we’re asking: ‘How will the customer see this?’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘My prediction is that plates are ­going to be the hip new thing for 2016’ … says Ross Swanson of the Griffin pub in Glasgow. Photograph: @rugs77

Not all restaurateurs are as grateful for the attention, though. “Absolutely couldn’t give a fuck about We Want Plates,” tweeted Great British Menu contestant Michael O’Hare in response to a follower’s suggestion that serving langoustine tartare inside a giant plastic egg may have left him off McGinnes’s Christmas-card list. Michelin-starred chef Andrew Pern complained about “the sad We Want Plates muppets who need to get a life (or a slate)” – perhaps not surprising, given their comments on his policy of serving bread rolls inside a flat cap. And when we contacted Seth Levine, the executive chef of Hotel Chantelle who likes to dangle mini slivers of jamon from a washing line, he was unfazed by the fact that he’d recently been mocked by Evening Standard food critic Grace Dent – while heavily name-checking We Want Plates. “I’d never in a million years even contemplate changing my style because there’s a small group of people who want to eat off a white china plate,” he says. “It’s fun to upgrade dishes a bit. I ate in a restaurant the other night where something was served to me on burning wood and I thought it was incredible.”

On occasion there’s something to be said for a restaurant adding a fun bit of flair to a dish’s presentation (to quote McGinnes: “There’s no need to round up a group of local villagers and head for the gastropub with burning pitchforks”). But salads served on ping-pong bats? Bread rolls stuffed into zebra-skin handbags? Not clever – just irritating. Plus, you know what’s going to happen in the coming months? Celebrity chef Tom Aikens is planning to open a Dubai-based restaurant called Pots, Pans & Boards. Its concept? Every dish will be served in a pot. Or a pan. Or something else – you can probably guess what.

Please? Get the pitchforks.

The worst offenders

Thought mini shopping trolleys were bad? You haven’t seen the half of it …



1. The upside-down umbrella. “The end of the world is nigh,” says McGinnes of this attempt to use an upended rain shield as a canapé dish. Presumably listed on the menu as, “Singin’ in the Rain Mishap”.

Andy Hayler (@wyahaw) One for you @WeWantPlates pic.twitter.com/Ro2zhHf4pc

2. The goldfish in a glass. How to really set off a prawn cocktail? Balance it atop a glass containing a live goldfish. It’s a bit like a barbaric fairground game, except that nobody wins.

Ali Millard (@millyandpip) One for @WeWantPlates Here's a friends prawn cocktail in Croatia served on top of a LIVE goldfish! pic.twitter.com/pRwniJdwMf

3. The beef wellington on barbed wire. What is this? An attempt to serve a meal as though it’s been caught halfway through breaking into a scrapyard? “COMES WITH FREE TETANUS SHOT,” comments McGinnes. Almost as safe as this rusty old saw.

Astrid Schreuders (@AstridsTaste) Ha ha n stel Britten in shock door mijn tweet met prikkeldraad-amuse @RestaurantZarzo. Niks gewend daar zeker?! 😊 pic.twitter.com/EQpF9qvYy3

4. The fake shoe. A mini tower of bread rolls balanced on a fake metal kitten heel. Because … because … nope, no idea. Trainers and boots also feature a lot.

5. The dog bowl. Sausages, beans and chips all jumbled up inside a canine serving dish for the enjoyment of customers that are either: a) dogs or b) rapidly demanding their money back.

6. The flatbread in a sink. Guys, the phrase is: “Everything but the kitchen sink.”

7. The prosecco-filled welly. As if using footwear to chill a beverage wasn’t bad enough: is that a black globule on the outside of the boot? Has someone – shudder – been wearing these?

8. The rat-trap and the toaster. Not just a highly conceptual way to present macaroni cheese, but serving it on a device intended to break rodents’ spines also gives a strong message to customers. Unfortunately, that message is: “We have a rat problem.”

9. The burger scales. Have customers been complaining that their quarter-pounders are only fifth-pounders? Do they think people want to know how much they’re eating to the exact gram? McGinnes’s comment? “*Blank face*”

10. Pork in a toilet. Perhaps this restaurant was unaware that they are essentially serving pork medallions inside a urinal. But if so, we’d hate to think about what they usually get up to in a public loo.

