50 Times Restaurant Clients Got So Annoyed By How Their Food And Drinks Were Served, They Just Had To Document It (New Pics)

We Want Plates is a website, subreddit, Facebook page, Instagram account, Twitter account, and even a book! Just like wooden boards and baskets have taken the restaurant world by storm, We Want Plates has secured its place on the internet, demanding that people just use normal dishware. The subreddit, which has amassed an impressive 932k members since its creation in 2015, describes its mission as “crusades against serving food on bits of wood and roof tiles, chips in mugs and drinks in jam jars.” And the community certainly does an excellent job of mocking all of the ridiculous items restaurants find a way of incorporating into their kitchens for questionable reasons.

We Want Plates was started by Ross McGinnes, and lucky for us, my colleague Jonas was previously able to get in touch with him to hear more about how this community advocating for plates began in the first place. “I started the campaign in 2015 after a friend posted a picture of an average-sized steak on Facebook, which had been served to him on a large chopping board. It was captioned, unironically, ‘That is a big meal!’ It wasn't a big meal — he'd fallen for all this style-over-content hipster gastropub nonsense,” McGinnes previously told Bored Panda. “I searched Twitter for an account which would allow me to vent my spleen with like-minded people, but found nothing. We Want Plates was born.”

The creator of We Want Plates presumes that restaurants go to these extreme measures when plating their food to ensure that they stand out from the crowd, and perhaps go viral. “My local pub used to do a great Sunday roast: twelve quid, piled high, tasted great and yes, it came on a plate,” he shared. “One weekend they added a quirky offering to the menu: little sandwiches, pies, dainty cakes and mini milkshakes served on a miniature picnic bench. The benches, painted bright pink and yellow, sat on top of tables seating actual grown adults. And what was the first thing these infantilized diners did? It wasn’t try the food — it was whip out their phones and take a picture.”

“Over the following months, the picnic benches became increasingly popular, coinciding with the specials board becoming progressively smaller, before it eventually disappeared altogether,” McGinnes continued, much to his dismay. “I sat there one Sunday, watching bench after garish bench emerge from the kitchen like a technicolor carnival of idiocy, before my usual roast arrived. The meat was cold, and the potatoes were burnt. It was once their main Sunday trade, but the traditional roast had died an unpalatable death. But that’s okay because they were doing a roaring trade with the benches, right? Sure, until the pub down the road started doing them too. Then the one around the corner. Before you know it, everyone’s doing the same ‘quirky’ thing, except it’s not ‘quirky’ any more because you can’t move for mini picnic benches and now all their roast dinners are rubbish to boot.”