I’ve never had any sort of problems with family-style dining – you order what you want, and if something else looks tempting, you get to grab that as well.
About the only concession our family does with family-style dining is to diversity the dishes; if there’s already a chicken dish, a fish dish, and a veggie dish, there’s little incentive to order another chicken dish, for instance. Sometimes this requires a little negotiating (“Okay, you order the soy sauce chicken, I’ll change my choice to fried tofu instead”), but since when is talking with your friends/family a bad thing?
We go out for lots of lunches at work and it’s only at places that have “lunch specials” - risotto, bread and wine, one curry and rice, that we don’t eat family style. That includes Greek, Singapore, Malaya, Thai , Chinese, Lebanese and Italian (gourmet pizzas really).
Now I’ve learned something.
I’ve eaten several times at chinese/thai restaurants in the past but never ever the other people said something about “family-style” and neither have I ever heard of this on my own before reading this thread.
Come to think about it, except once for some pizzas, I’ve never ate “family-style” in my life. (well okay I’m only 22 but still)
(And well, I’ve just asked my dad (60, ate a hell lot at those kind of places and never ate like that either, didn’t know too it existed)
I’m seriously baffled since reading this thread it seems to be one of those “but everybody knows that!” thing.
I find family style eating at Chinese restaraunts to be the most fun way of eating as you get to try a lot more variety than would be possible ordering on your own. I accept that this idea breaks down when you go to dinner with fussy eaters or a mix of carnivores and vegetarians which is a bit of a shame but if you will eat pretty much anything (my family will try anything) then it is real fun. I think one possible way to get round the fussy eater thing would be to find some dishes acceptable to everyone and order the bulk out of those choices then order a few ‘wildcard’ choices in for everyone to try and if some people don’t like these then no biggy, there is plenty of the acceptable stuff left to fill them up. This way would be applicable to a mix of meat eaters and veggies as you could order the bulk out of the vegetarian options and then order a few meat dishes to appease the carnivores.
There’s a lot of stuff that I simply cannot eat without dire consequences. There’s a lot more food that will have minor consequences. Thus, I really can’t eat family style unless the people I’m eating with are willing to refrain from eating black pepper, raw onions/garlic/scallions/shallots, high sodium items, and a whole long list of other restrictions. I have to check the menu carefully, and sometimes ask the waiter to check with the cook about the ingredients, to see if there’s ANYTHING on the menu that I will like and can eat. I have had to walk out of restaurants after I’ve been seated because I could not find anything on the menu that I could eat. Since the whole point of eating family style is to try different dishes, and I’m generally constrained to only a few dishes, it’s not fair to me or my tablemates for me to order family style.
I have eaten and enjoyed dim sum, but I was lucky in that my companions knew what was what, and always consulted everyone before choosing a dish. There were only the three of us, and I was perfectly happy to allow the other two to eat all the shellfish (I can’t stand shellfish) while I had another serving of a strange vegetable dish I’d never seen before.
I didn’t know that people regularly went out in a group and didn’t eat family style. I thought that was the point of going for Chinese.
(Say, do you have the big round group tables with lazy Susans in the middle, so you can put the food on that and turn it until what you want comes to you?)
When eating chinese, Szechuan, Thai, indian, lebanese, etc, I have always eaten with a group of people sampling everything. Since my wife is pescetarian who’s allergic to cilantro, and I can’t stand chicken, it just means we talk with our dining companions about what we’re eating (but we made it work even with someone on Atkins).
When I am with my family, we each order one of our favorites and negotiate – mimosa shrimp for you, Mongolian beef, and maybe some sesame chicken. Then a few appetizers. Depending on the portions and people’s tastes that day, it’s either free-for-all or you eat mostly your own dish but sample everyone else’s.
If I’m in a big group of people, we usually order our own meals, if for no other reason than I know a LOT of cheapskates who would order chicken fried rice, pick lightly at that but take it all home as their leftovers, eat everyone else’s doubly-expensive food, and only chunk in the exact amount for their rice plus maybe a few cents for tax. :mad:
So, I’m guessing you individual platter people have never had Peking Duck? I can’t imagine one person ordering it, because it’s usually about twice the amount of any other meal. I usually save up my negotiating ‘credit’(i.e. let the other people get their favorites for a three times or so) Then put all my stored up credit into an order of Peking duck, the fourth time. People shutter at the price, but once they taste it they heap much praise upon me and my suggestions.
As for the dealing with cheapskates thing, I just decided to not eat with iditos anymore. There are so many cool people to go out to dinner with in the world, I just blow off the bad meal partners, even if they are family. Saves a lot of stress.
A typical order for 6-7 people eating among people I know
Appetizer(usually a cauldron of soup or pu-pu platter)
One beef dish
One poultry dish
one pork dish
one seafood dish
One veggie dish
Fried rice.
And within that frame work
At least one really spicy
At least one sweet.
One Mandarin Pancake dish (If It’s not Peking Duck, then I suggest mu-shu, I love Hoisin :))
One lightly fried(may also be either the spicy or sweet or neither)
One deep fried and crispy(same as above)
One steamed.
With all of the combinations possible, half the fun is finding the correct solution to the complete system of requirements.
That’s at least half the fun. I’ll wait half an hour for one of those tables just so the “please pass the *****” hassle is avoided. As a child I learned all about the ways that glasses of water are affected by centripital force.
I’d still have to say that I prefer Mongolian BBQ to family style chinese though.
Nope. Nor am I likely to try it. Not just because the restaurants around here want at least 24 hours notice (not that I blame them, I’ve read descriptions of how that dish is made) but because I really don’t like duck. I’ve had it at least five different ways, and I doubt that I’ll like ANY duck dish. Same thing with shrimp…I know that other people love it, but I’ve had it fried, boiled, stuffed, this way, that way…I just plain don’t like it.
I’d enjoy eating family style IF the majority of dishes were things that I can and should eat, and which I like. But as I said, since I’m likely to only find one or two items on a menu that I can and will eat, it’s not fair to me or the other people at my table for me to eat family style.
All you picky eaters have nothing to complain about, really. I grew up vegetarian before most people had heard of it (at least in Arkansas). I’m hardly strict about it now, in fact, I’ll eat meat with relish (or with gusto, if we’re out of relish), but when I was strict, I was very strict.
It never stopped me from eating with a group family-style. I’d explain my requiremnets, and the worst case senario was that everyone would say, “OK, you order yours, and the rest of us will share.” Far more common (especialy once vegetarianism became more widely practiced) was for at least one person to say “I don’t mind not having meat, why don’t we both order vegetables, abd we’ll share together.” I’ve been in plenty of situations where someone else has said “I only really like X,” and that’s been worked around, too. Only extremely rarely would I actually end up without enough food, and frankly, it’s happened at least as often since I began eating meat, just because not enough was ordered (but I wasn’t quite hungry enough to say, “let’s order something else”).
Frankly, I wouldn’t want to eat with any group of people who couldn’t handle something as basic as ordering food together.
So is it fair to other people to have them order from the limited number of items that I can eat? Or is it fair to me to pay for a full meal, yet I can only eat a fraction of it? I don’t think that either way is fair. So if everyone else is ordering family style, that’s fine with me…just let me order what I CAN eat, and keep your hands to yourself, unless I offer a taste (which I frequently do).
I’m not picky just because I don’t like stuff. There’s a very large range of foods that I simply can’t eat, unless I want to spend the next 72 hours in a bathroom, spewing from both ends.
I always thought “family style” at a Chinese restaurant was ordering those godawful food platters for 2, 4 or more people. The ones that come with soup, eggroll and the whole “WASP ain’t got a clue what to eat here” menu.
But whenever we go for Chinese (which is often), we always “share” platters that we have ordered. I rarely can finish whatever I order so I don’t care if everybody else orders things I don’t like, they can still have some of mine.
Oddly though, I don’t think we do that with other foods in other restaurants. Well, other than the occasional, “try this” bite, and sometimes even that is only to confirm the shrimp is off and not just your imagination.
Other than Chinese food, I do consider it rude for people to just suddenly stick their fork into something off your plate without asking…and I used to see that mostly in NYC.
I have never heard it called “family style” before, but yes, that is the normal way to eat in Asian restaurants.
For those with special requirements, they just let it be known that a certain dish is the only one they can eat, so others leave it alone, but it still goes in the middle of the table.
When I was in Hong Kong visiting my family we would go to this Chinese buffet place on Lamma Island. It had the lazy susan dealy in the middle of the table and everyone shared. I always walked away hungry. Some idjit would always order something like ‘broccoli’ as their dish. There was always tons of broccoli left over and not a speck of fried rice left. “Yo! Broccoli isn’t food, it’s what food eats, ya moron! And if you don’t keep your cotton-pickin’ hands off of my sweet and sour pork I’m going to demonstrate that broccoli feels about as good going down the front as it does going up the back!” Broccoli :rolleyes:
I prefer ordering a main dish of my own and then some common dishes that everyone shares such as rice, or soup.
Do you mean those sets of items that are usually titled “Emporers dinner”,“Golden Family dinner” or “Shining cluster Fuk” dinner or something similar that adds one more dish for each additional person? Those are generally crap in my opinion. It is usually the cheapest stuff they don’t put much effort into.
Usually the places with the big lazy susans are kind of over priced tourists traps, at least here in Colorado(I’m looking in your direction, Aspen and Vail). The good places are the dark, dingy places with mismatched tables and the conspicuous lack of health certificates :). The tables are so small and cramped there isn’t room for my fat gut hanging over onto it, let alone a table that can hold a lazy susan.
P.S. And re-reading my OP that is crappy typing and spelling even for my low-ass standards.
I had actually never used family style to refer to it before this thread(hence the quotes in the thread title). I had always refered to it as ‘eating chinese dinner’ until my parents experience with their neighbors, and I realized some people did it differently. But Buca di Beppo advertises as family style so I guess that’s a good enough term for what I’m used to at Chinese places…
In the Chinese restaurants I go to , the dark, dingy ones with lazy susans ,filled with Chinese customers, the food is served family style , but there is no sticking your fork into someones else’s plate. Everyone has therir own plate and bowl to eat from, and the food is placed in the middle of the table in a serving dish.
