iStarvin.com

So 2009 wheezes out the decade. As I write this, snow is falling outside, unsettlingly. This is a fearful time for restaurants: they're hyping their Christmas menus with all the urgent gloom of a closing down sale. Those glorious, spending tables will stand desolate in January, the glasses unfilled, the rooms idle and voiceless.

I've eaten out quite a bit this year. And I've noticed one trend, one trope, one pattern above all others. "Sharing" plates. Kiddie portions of miniaturised food, sometimes ethnic, sometimes not, the shtick being that everyone orders a few dishes and you pass them round the table. "Tapas-style", the reviews always say, honey-I've-shrunk-the-squid.

What happened, I wonder, to heartiness, generosity and old fashioned unabashed Robbie Coltrane portions? This year, everywhere from Soho Italians to Fulham gastropubs to modern European basements in the West End have promulgated the absurd idea that mean, piddling little plates somehow promote conviviality, pleasure and fun.

Well, they don't. For one thing, they're dimly based on tapas, and we – like the Yanks – get tapas spectacularly wrong. In Madrid, the locals might stand at the bar nibbling a bit of bread and tomato. When dinner's at three in the morning, as it is for the average Spaniard, then you need something to plug the gap and plug the belly after your lunch and snooze. They don't – and this is the point – treat it as a meal.

They realise that dinner isn't about dissecting a lamb chop into eight teency morsels, it's not about shunting plates round the table in some artless supply chain, or about soup as swine flu vector, or about dropping things, or about interrupting conversations with have-you-tried-the-duck, or splitting crostini like peasants in a famine. Iberian pubs flog tapas because they're salty and make the punters stay more and pay more.

But here, it's become a lifestyle choice. People insist that it's sociable and cheap. They rave with evangelical passion that it unites tables and everyone mucks in, and they hand round bits of dead animal with the naughty glee of an old man in a dirty mac holding out a packet of sweets.

Small plates aren't sociable in any meaningful sense: friendships don't spring from shared germs and spilled salad. Just because you and I once split a sausage doesn't mean we've bonded on a deeper level: in fact, I probably fancied that luganega for myself.

Most of all, it isn't cheaper. Some of us, in a few limited respects, might occasionally enjoy the company of the people we have dinner with. But we're also aware of the Amazonian feeding frenzy that will ensue when food of this sort arrives: the jabbing elbows, the frantic gobbling, the forks stabbing thighs. So people typically over-order these shrunken plates as a kind of bitter insurance, spending more than they would if they'd done the sensible thing and had three simple courses to themselves.

It all suits restaurants, not customers. Tables turn faster; kitchens can get away with the odd missed ingredient or overcooked bit of fish because the vibe seems more informal; there's no pressure about when to serve stuff or in what order; and the owner can overcharge on more things.

Of all the restaurant trends we've seen this year, the most antithetical to our own pleasure has been the insidious and pervasive dwindling of our portions. In 2010, I want them to expand again, in tandem with the economy and my waistline.