I’ve always been uncomfortable with leftovers when it comes to dining out. It is such a strange exchange. You review the menu and narrow down your choices by mentally eliminating the items you know for certain you don’t want to eat. The server arrives, but you still can’t decide between the striploin or the blackened salmon, so you order one for your entree and satisfy the other with an offering from the appetizer menu. Appetizers feel like a requirement, don’t they? Even though the entree, we know, will be portioned well beyond comfortable digestion.
The server gathers the menus, and someone comes by with glasses of water and a basket of warm bread with whipped and spreadable butter. Conversation flows, wine pours, and you pick away at the bread with your party. Before you know it, someone is offering you the last knob of bread, and you aren’t nearly as hungry for your meal as you felt when you ordered.
The appetizers arrive, and you shuffle glasses and side plates around to make room in the centre of the table for the platters of calamari and whipped feta so everyone can share because everyone is feeling the same. Someone eats the last spring roll, and you take a pass on the last wedge of flatbread, sending it back to the kitchen. Some are pacing themselves, and others are already too full for dinner.
Entrees arrive on warm plates that the servers present using napkins to protect their hands and your plate from fingerprints as they twist the dish before you for perfect presentation. Once everyone has their entree in front of them, you spend a moment admiring and complimenting one another about your selections and bolstering each other’s appetites to press on through the main course of food. There are always some who finish every morsel on their plate. They sit uncomfortably through coffee and pass on dessert. Others, like me, usually end up with more than they can comfortably enjoy. How do you handle the leftovers?
There are definite instances where you leave your leftovers with the restaurant. A fine dining restaurant is not a place for schlepping home leftovers. Fortunately, the portions are usually properly sized. You can enjoy a 4-course meal without being uncomfortable or full. You would never ask for the leftovers of a banquet, conference meal, or formal business luncheon. And you wouldn’t take home amounts that equate to scrappings. And you don't take home your friend's leftovers. Some countries are horrified with the North American practice of doggy bagging. But then, these countries generally refrain from the excessive and monstrous portioning we’re programmed to expect in the West. It's so nice to travel.
But on a Friday night in a casual-ish restaurant, servers are always prepared to cheerfully offer you a container to take the rest of your meal home. In these instances, you inevitably agree. You always say yes, even if you don’t mean it. Refusing seems like a waste of food and unappreciative of the cooks who have prepared the food.
Pre-pandemic, a server would wisk your plate off to the kitchen and pack the leftovers into a takeout container that they would discreetly tuck onto your table while you were paying the bill.
Here’s what I used to do with those doggie bag containers. I would pick them up, carry them through the restaurant, out through the lobby, cart them home on my lap, pop the container in the fridge, look at it for two or three days, and smile at the memory of fine company and a lovely meal. On day four, I would toss the container into the bin. Something about eating food that has left my sight has never sat right with me.
The routine for dining leftovers has changed thanks to the pandemic. The kitchen is now a one-way corridor. What goes out never crosses back over the door unless it’s going to the bin or the dish-pit. Servers don’t want to deal with your leftovers, and diners don’t want another set of hands on the food they want to eat later. Diners became accusingly suspicious of what might happen when they couldn’t see their food. Did someone sneeze on in? Did the server transfer the fries with their hands? That suspiciousness was good for the leftover scene.
Now, a server will bring you an empty container to pack yourself. Great idea! For the first time ever - I’m comfortable curling up on the sofa in my loungy pants, snacking on what I couldn’t finish the evening before. I can dine without gluttony or guilt about generating food waste.
It’s brilliant but so incredibly awkward in the moment, don’t you agree - the DIY doggie bag? A burger or sandwich is easy. You can neatly pick up the handheld, tuck it into the box, and slide in the fries, and no one hardly notices. But other meals are not so neatly transferred from your plate to container. There is no elegant way to slide mashed potatoes, charred beets, and 3 oz. of uneaten steak into a box without looking like you're scrapping slop into a trough. What do you do with the little bit of leftover au jus? Do you pour it into a plastic portion cup (if they give you one)? Do you pour it onto the food? Do you leave it behind? Do you pack up the little sauce pot like a thief and hope karma doesn’t topple it on your way to the door? Do you pass on the doggy bag altogether?
I try the ‘avert your gaze’ approach, where I convince myself that I am swift and deft. And know that if I pretend not to see people watching me, they won’t notice me tilting my plate, scraping the food into the container and trying to avoid the resulting drips of cream sauce or gravy. If I’m lucky, I’ll have the whole thing wrapped up before the server returns with the check, and I can avoid the captive audience waiting patiently to clear my plate since she’s already there.
The other thing about doggy bags that I dislike is that they make it incredibly difficult to sneak spoonfuls of your husband’s dessert if you haven’t finished your meal. The little cardboard box perched blatantly on the table before you like a beacon shouting, “I thought you weren’t hungry.”
Comments