I went to Mon Lapin in Montréal for my birthday last month. Mon Lapin is venerated by people for whom food is an experience. I am one of these people, but only because I was once a 10-year-old whose greatest dream was that the whole world could be made of Buffalo chicken tenders, and I guess I haven’t changed much.
Mon Lapin is a small-plates restaurant, the darling of a genre that appeared sometime during the second Obama administration and has mysteriously persisted, despite the fact that nobody asked for it. At these establishments, a small plate isn’t just a plate. It is a tiny altar, a demand: Behold these four little roasted carrots on their shiny little pond of complicated sauce! For each ofne is so special that it could be the keynote speaker at every carrot conference. “Have you dined with us before?” your server will ask, as if you’re about to experience something so format-busting, so unprecedented in the history of sitting down to eat, that you need a trip-sitter to accompany you.
If only! The small-plates experience has become exhaustingly predictable. There will be a smug little menu with a lot of white space. Even if this menu does not include blistered shishito peppers, you will feel their essence everywhere; I believe it is highly likely that the concept of small plates was invented by a shishito.
You will order some number of dishes that are smaller than a standard entrée, though they cost roughly the same amount, and are “meant to be shared.” A series of plates will arrive, each one an event that must be met with a certain amount of enthusiasm. But not all dishes will shine equally, leaving you to feel vaguely embarrassed — for whom, you’re not sure.
You and your companions will take turns eyeing the final cube of dukkah-sprinkled halloumi, or harissa chicken wing, or some other lonely and indivisible morsel. Some of you may convene a tribunal to decide its fate, while others will simply let it languish out of politeness. Then you will receive the bill, and it will be a fucking miracle if you managed to spend under $50 per person and nobody is still hungry.
It is true that I have loved some things I’ve eaten at small-plates restaurants around Burlington. The littleneck clams in briny, herby broth at Frankie’s downtown are sublime, as is the whipped feta at Fancy’s in the Old North End. And I have no objection to restaurants pricing their dishes to ensure fair pay for their vendors and staff. I just don’t think that’s the animating principle of the small-platification of upscale dining.
There’s a formulaic preciousness to all small-plates menus that feels infantilizing, even hostile. I will publish my unabridged manifesto on the Great Shishito Reset if Burlington gets one more restaurant that serves $17 charred broccolini, $20 furikake-dusted somethings on toast or anything with Parmesan foam.
Small plates are the cuisine of a society that has given up on wanting more.
The fact that these things can be delicious is beside the point. The point is that small plates are the cuisine of a society that has given up on wanting more. Small plates are aestheticized scarcity. Small plates are part of an end-stage capitalist world in which nobody can seem to finish a whole book, airfare no longer reliably includes the cost of a plane seat and it is cheaper to be rich than poor. The restaurant business is brutal. Life is brutal. Small plates will be no one’s salvation.
Still, I hoped Mon Lapin, ranked second on the list of 50 Best Restaurants in North America, would be different. We had a reservation, but the staff greeted us in a slightly manic way, as if they’d had just about all they could take for the night and we were maybe going to send them over the edge.
They brought us to a table in the middle of the restaurant, an exposed two-top amid cozier nooks. There was an empty table at a banquette behind us. My dining companion asked if we could sit there instead. Our server turned this moment into a feedback opportunity that I suspect none of us enjoyed.
“Can you tell us why you don’t like this table?” she asked.
Well, imagine being a meerkat with no hole to hide in. I didn’t say that. Instead, I apologized for asking to move. Then a second staff member came over and escorted us to the other table as if we were parolees who could not be trusted to move ourselves and our jackets three feet away. For some reason, we apologized to him, too. I wondered if we should apologize to more people, just in case. Then I noticed the foam finger not so subtly tucked above the bar (“#1”!) and decided that wouldn’t be necessary.
The menu was a single typed page of about 10 dishes, most of which were inscrutable as complete ideas: clam with sungold tomato purée and pickled coriander seed; a scallop mousse sandwich; a pork shoulder with a green I had never heard of, a green that had undoubtedly been foraged and then undergone some kind of conversion therapy to remove all its recalcitrant qualities. There was a fermented potato chip.
The server insisted on going over each menu item in exhaustive detail, explaining the provenance of each ingredient and the methods by which it was tortured in the name of Art. After we asked a few clarifying questions, the server told us, with an almost gleeful contempt, to please hold our queries until she had finished her monologue, which is when we had the unsettling realization that we were no longer the protagonists of our own evening.
We ordered a handful of things, and then our server informed us that we had not ordered enough things. Vaguely fearing that she might strike us across our faces with a piece of stemware, we ordered more things. From a purely caloric perspective, this was decent advice. We had four punitively small clams, each adorned, to zero discernible effect, with a droplet of sungold tomato mush and a single microscopic pickled coriander seed. The pork shoulder arrived as several tender pink medallions, cooked to clinical perfection and bland as milk.
But the real revelation was the fermented potato chip, which turned out to be several normal-looking and -tasting potato chips. They were arranged around a small tin of leeks drowned in olive oil, which tasted exactly like the sum of its parts. I felt sorry for the potato chip, for what it had needlessly endured so that it could be called “fermented” at the second-best restaurant in North America, and for the person who had overseen its failed transformation. I imagined this person’s enthusiasm, their diligence, their sincere desire to help this chip self-actualize.
I wanted to tell them all that it was OK. Not every chip can become an astronaut. ➆
Hater’s Guide is an occasional column that offers deeply biased reporting on things that rarely make the headlines but are nonetheless part of life in Vermont. This column does not represent the views of Seven Days but is one writer’s opinion — and maybe yours, too.
This article appears in The Food Issue • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!