Karen Stabiner

A mountain of food at the restaurant? No thanks.

Boston Globe

The big platter of food in the photograph looks so good: a mountain of seafood, roasted vegetables, and rice.

Oh well. Guess I’ll go somewhere else for dinner.

My decision has nothing to do with allergies or the decibel level mentioned in all the online reviews. I can’t go to that restaurant because tonight I am a family of one, which would mean coming home with four nights of leftovers, easy.

I stand at the crossroads of restaurant survival and population demographics, a hungry place to be. Family-style dining — large platters for the table instead of individual meals — makes economic sense for businesses looking for new ways to eke out a profit. It makes no sense for the 10,000 Americans who turn 65 every day, along with the 62 million who have already celebrated that birthday — almost 30 percent of whom live alone.

Hang on; this is not the story of a lonely oldster looking for sympathy but a dilemma in search of a creative solution. Yes, many singletons have family members and close friends in adjacent ZIP codes. That’s beside the point. There will still be days when we get to 6 o’clock and don’t want to cook, don’t want to sit on the couch with takeout and the TV news, and haven’t made plans with someone.

Dining out is a valuable tradition, particularly for diners who grew up when restaurants were a meeting place, not an influencers’ Instagram photo studio. I had lunch recently with a younger friend who flinched every time his watch vibrated with a work email, and for a moment I yearned for the days when restaurants banned cellphones in the dining room and smartwatches were somebody’s fevered tech dream. Digital tourists like me appreciate being in the middle of a bustling scene even when we’re by ourselves. We know how to have a conversation with a stranger if they welcome it, or how to read a book if they don’t.

Either way, we like to be part of the mix. Lots of older solos have survived a life change by now, whether we are widowed or among the increasing number of long-marrieds who get divorced. I speak from experience, having left a 30-year marriage to live on my own: We’re motivated to participate.

Restaurants are motivated, too — to survive, always a challenge but even harder these days. They reel from the one-two punch of the pandemic and inflation, emerging from the shutdown to face higher costs on everything from the raw ingredients to labor to rent. And the well-intentioned among them have embraced the added challenge of building a better (and better-paid) culture than the brawling, substance-enhanced, male-dominated model that made the hospitality industry a target of #metoo, alongside Hollywood.

Some recent restaurant casualties were an inevitable correction in a glutted market built on unsustainable dreams of celebrity and vast wealth, but restaurants have always been a dicey proposition. As many as 5 out of 6 restaurants closed in their first year before the COVID pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association — and statistics have been in such a shambles ever since that the association won’t even make a firm estimate about current closure rates. Everyone’s on the lookout for ways to stay afloat. Over the past few years, restaurateurs have gotten creative: They carve out part of their square footage for a wine shop, a little market, an expanded take-out counter; they feature guest chefs to turn a slow Tuesday into a bustling event, and shrink portions or raise prices — or both — as they monitor customers’ tolerance. The smart restaurateur embraces change.

Popular chain restaurants have long relied on family-style menus, but independent fine-dining operations are starting to see the wisdom behind the approach as well. They might prefer the euphemism “large format,” if their customer base skews more toward date night than toward parents and kids, but it’s still platter food.

Sending out a big plate has a happy ripple effect on restaurant economics, according to Brian Bornemann, a chef/owner of two small restaurants in Santa Monica, Calif., because it requires fewer cooks and front-of-house employees, as well as fewer plates to wash. And it reduces stress in the kitchen, where individual cooks no longer have to synchronize their efforts to ensure that four separate entrees hit the table simultaneously.

Sounds like a good idea — but I’m still stuck if I’m alone, or even if I’m half a couple, unless I want to tote a half-gallon food-storage container with me to take home the spoils.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of shared plates as long as they’re smaller than a football. My informal observation, over the years, is that the world divides into people who like to share food and people who don’t, and I’m an enthusiastic member of the first group. I’m concerned instead about volume, about finding a way to belong in the room no matter how many of us there are.

Daily life offers older people plenty of opportunities to feel left out, including but not limited to too many younger people’s mistaken assumptions about our fragility, physical and/or mental. It’s an odd attitude, given that they won’t want anyone to dismiss them when they grow old, but I’d rather look for hacks than try to reason with them.

In that spirit, I offer what I call the Goldilocks stratagem. Papa Bear portions can be a deal-breaker for me, so why not offer a Mama Bear or even a Baby Bear option? Platters come in all sizes, none of which require the high-maintenance, tweezered placement of edible flower petals on top of an individual entrée. More sizes could mean more business — more two-tops, more singletons dining at the bar or the counter — which would make up for the increase in costs. I love leftovers. I just want less of them.

Or we can wait for the trend to fizzle out, as trends do, though patience can be difficult if you’re old enough to care about this. There may be a fly in the family-style soup, according to Bret Thorn, senior food and beverage editor at Nation’s Restaurant News. “If customers think that one platter will feed all six of them, why would they order more?” he said. “Restaurants have to figure out the math” or risk smaller per-customer revenues — and if decreased spending negates the back-of-house savings, we might see a shift away from platters and back toward individual dinners, or at least to smaller shared plates.

In the meantime, I offer my own guerrilla tactic: Sidle up to the bar, put on your best defiant smile, and order enough appetizers to approximate a dinner for one. Leave a nice tip, chat with the bartender a bit, smile at your seatmates. The neighborhood landscape would be dreary without our neighborhood places (think “Cheers”), and older diners risk becoming dreary if we spend too much time outside the fray. We have to find a way to work — and dine — together.