About

Small Plates Society is a small research and writing group interested in one narrow subject: the formats people invent for eating together in pieces. Not recipes, and not reviews. We look at how a way of eating is put together - the ordering, the pacing, the pricing, the seating, the reason it came to exist at all - and at what happens to it when it moves somewhere else.

The name comes from txiki, the Basque word for small, which is also where the domain comes from. It was chosen partly because our editor is Basque and partly because the Basque counter is a good illustration of the thing we keep finding: the food is usually the visible part of a system, and the system is usually the more interesting part.

We work from published sources, from regional food writing, from heritage documentation, and from a great deal of time spent sitting in rooms watching how they run. Where we are describing something we have not seen at first hand, we say so. We are wary of the tone that treats other people's ordinary habits as mystical, and equally wary of the tone that flattens them into content. Traditions are usually solving practical problems, and the practical explanation is nearly always the better story.

A few things we deliberately do not do. We do not name restaurants, bars or cooks, because the moment a piece becomes a recommendation it stops being a description. We do not rank anything. We do not accept anything in exchange for coverage. And we try to be honest about dilution without being sniffy about it: formats change when they travel, that is what formats do, and the useful question is which mechanism got left behind rather than who is allowed to cook what.

Editing is by Aitor Zelaia. The writing is collective, argued over before it is published, and revised when we turn out to have got something wrong.