What’s one major difference between eating at home and eating at a fancy European style restaurant?

Easy: At home we share everything. At upmarket restaurants we have to eat fancy food carefully arranged by chefs on pretty plates designed for the single diner. Nothing is meant to be shared.

That, I sometimes think, is also the basic difference between how Indians (perhaps all Asians) and Europeans eat at restaurants.

We share. They keep it to themselves.

It is, I think, the most important factor in deciding which restaurants succeed in India. Think about it. Why do we like going to restaurants that serve butter chicken and biryani? Why do we like places that heap on the hakka noodles so that we can have them with steaming bowls of Chicken Manchurian? Why do we like large pizzas that everyone can share? Platters of Korean fried chicken? Prawn red curry for the whole table?

Indians like sharing. Even when we order dishes that are meant for one person — a hamburger, for instance — we will always share the French fries. All desserts are meant to be eaten communally. Have you ever known anyone to order a single jalebi as an individual dessert?

The West was not very different from us once upon a time even when it came to royal courts and top restaurants. In France, everything used to be served together at the same time for everyone to share and eat.

Service a la Russe or the practice of serving food in courses only started in France in 1810 and did not really catch on till 1860. Even then, food did not necessarily come out from the kitchen in individual plates.

The great dishes of French cooking (say coq au vin or a roast chicken) were meant to be shared. This changed in the 1960s when the nouvelle cuisine movement took over and chefs demanded the right to control exactly what went on the plates. They began all this nonsense about fancy presentation, and just when it seemed like the tide was turning, around a decade ago, Instagram came along and appearance began to count for more than flavour.

The idea of everyone ordering individual dishes did not change at restaurants but it did transmogrify early in........

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