Would you like some meat with your fries?

By Ed Goldman

Some restaurateurs are upset that some younger diners are ordering multiple side dishes instead of costlier entrées, according to The Wall Street Journal. Diners are eschewing rather than chewing big honking meals in favor of little honking meals— the most popular combo being a Caesar salad and French fries.

This proves illuminating for my OSSO (oh-so-significant-other) and me since that meal is precisely what we order—and, as a bit of foreshadowing, what we share—about three times a month. We do so at one of the two locations of our favorite local bistro, Café Bernardo. The place is one of the satellites in the eatery empire owned by chef Kurt Spataro and the late Randy Paragary.

As a personal-vanity aside, it tickles us pink to know we’re doing something younger diners do, at least when they’re in public. It isn’t hastening us to cut holes in our jeans, throw objects at rock-concert performers or skateboard down a tot-lot slide but we definitely feel youthfully refreshed. 

What the article doesn’t mention is the health and fiscal benefits of meal-sharing, which I’m duty-bound to warn you is the topic of today’s sermon (remember, I foreshadowed it in the prior paragraph). 

Even though the salad and spuds are “sides” they still offer us enough calories to sustain us as we return to our physically demanding jobs of sitting at desks, typing and phoning. (Do I hear someone reciting “O’ Pioneers” in the hazy loam of the morning frontier?)

Meal-sharing was new to me when we started doing it but I swiftly grew to love it as the suits in my closet began to re-grow. They had inexplicably been shrinking over a period of years, a phenomenon I attributed to humidity—until I was reminded, possibly by my admirably slender OSSO, that Sacramento, where we live, has a remarkably dry climate. 

At that point I began to blame excessive aridity for the problem and considered shipping my wardrobe to Houston every summer and Florida year-’round for re-moistening.

I also came close to enjoying, for the first time, receiving the check at the end of the meal, which suddenly no longer required me to issue calls for a co-signer.

As you know, smokers, drinkers and atheists who undergo lifestyle conversions tend to view their former cohorts as deaf, dumb and blind. I don’t feel that about people who don’t share their meals but I have to say that when I see an entrée delivered to a table and it not only fills the plate but forms a mashed-potato mountain—if there’s also gravy, it resembles the kind of meniscus you’ll find at the border of an infinity pool (though it’s a mirage) or if you suffer from water-on-the-knee (which is real)—I semi-gag. I can’t believe I ever ate that much food in a single sitting.

Ah, but I did. What was a coffee shop breakfast if it didn’t include eggs, some form of meat, hash browns, toast, butter and jam, the last being the only thing restaurants provide in tiny little packets as though a teaspoonful of (usually) grape jelly is as precious as painite, the planet’s rarest gem and rarest mineral.