We Want Plates campaign mocks restaurants that serve food on ‘bits of wood and roof tiles’

Ross McGinnes is fed up with trendy restaurants serving food on slabs of slate and wooden boards, and tucking treats inside those tiny little shopping carts.

Drinks in jars? In baby bottles? Stop it!

Chefs call it creative plating.

McGinnes calls it weird.

So he started a social media campaign called “We Want Plates,” a crusade against “food being served on bits of wood and roof tiles.”

In 2008 a Barcelona restaurant served him a piece of cake on a table tennis paddle - and he jokingly lost sleep over it.

“Restaurants are trying to stand out but they’re just making their customers look like infantilized idiots while eating,” McGinnes told London’s The Guardian.

The 40-year-old online content editor in West Yorkshire, England, isn’t alone in his crankiness about plating gone wild.

His Twitter account @WeWantPlates has scooped up more than 100,000 followers in the last year. The photos posted there are a head-scratching feast for the eyes.

McGinnes set up the Twitter and Facebook pages - and a website, WeWantPlates.com - after a friend posted a picture of an “average-sized steak on Facebook, which had been served to him on a large chopping board. It was captioned, unironically, ‘That is a big meal!’” he recently told Munchies, the food blog of the Vice website.

“It wasn’t a big meal. He’d fallen for all this style-over-content nonsense. I searched Twitter for an account which would allow me to vent my spleen with like-minded people, but found nothing. We Want Plates was born.”

Some of the most ridiculous stand-ins for plates that he’s seen include dog bowls, hats, Chuck Taylor sneakers and high-heel shoes. He makes special mention of one restaurant that spreads servings of spaghetti directly onto the table.

“It’s style over content. Too much time is spent (fussing) around balancing six chips in a mini wheelbarrow, the flavor becomes secondary,” he told the food blog. “Ask people what their extravagantly-presented meal tasted like: ‘It was OK.’”

Munchies food blogger Phoebe Hurst agreed with him.

“Builders’ yards must be crawling with gastro pub owners searching for the perfect shard of MDF on which to place their special ‘rustic’ burger,” she wrote.

“It’s not that our dinnerware choices should be controlled by some sort of plate police. Who are we to begrudge a chef their chance to smear — sorry, delicately drizzle — raspberry coulis over a chopping board?

“The problem is that consciously quirky presentation methods so often mask bad cooking. If you’re taking the time to arrange breadsticks in a miniature shopping trolley, chances are, they’re not going to taste great.”

McGinnes beefs up the food photos people send him with peppery protests of his own.

No more skillets.

No more deconstructed food that has to be rebuilt tableside.

No more shopping carts on the table.

No more toast in tubs.

And no more of whatever this is.

Or this.

Last year McGinnes put his online protests into action by requesting a plate whenever a restaurant served him food in a manner he deemed peculiar. Soon his Twitter followers started doing it, too, posting before-and-after photos of their meals.

Not surprisingly, McGinnes has ticked off more than a few chefs. One tweeted a vulgarity about We Want Plates when a follower mocked his pasta served inside a giant plastic egg.

Another Michelin-star-decorated chef - tweaked for serving bread inside a flat cap -

called McGinnes’ followers “muppets who need to get a life (or a slate).”

Executive chef Seth Levine of Hotel Chantelle in New York and London, known to serve elegant slivers of hand-sliced iberico jamon dangling from a wire, didn’t care what the group had to say about him.

“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,” Levine told The Guardian.

“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.”

Burning wood just might send McGinnes over the culinary edge. But he’s hoping this trend, too, shall pass.

“It’s all cyclical,” he told Munchies. “In ten years, there’ll be a We Want Boards group on whatever Twitter’s been replaced by, posting pictures of white china plates.”

This story was originally published April 14, 2016 at 1:44 PM with the headline "We Want Plates campaign mocks restaurants that serve food on ‘bits of wood and roof tiles’."