A Bone To Pick: Down with the Rule of Three

Quick maths

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Three’s a crowd. Bad luck comes in threes. Three strikes and you’re out.

Throughout the hundreds of years in which these idioms have developed, one thing has remained: three is not a good number. Unless you are De La Soul.

If you’ve ever encountered the words: ‘we do things a bit differently here, the menu is designed for sharing. We recommend 3-4 plates per person’, then you most likely will have experienced the painful moment of quiet resignation when a plate of three prawns is set down on your table of four.

All conversation ends. Now, one person must volunteer as tribute to divide three, finickety crustaceans between four hungry mouths. You cannot cut a prawn in half so that someone gets the head and someone gets the tail — that is quite literally a bum deal — and what if both people want to suck the brains out? If the heads are left on, you can’t cut in half lengthways. Lord knows a prawn is not the easiest thing to cut with the head off, let alone on, and you can’t manhandle it lest you be deemed rude for having touched the food. Either way there ends up with someone cheesed off, someone being too polite, someone having got the best bit and several pieces still left on the plate.

Three prawns served at my inaugural visit to Condesa. Good luck cutting those up

So what do you do? Order two plates? For a plate of prawns these days you’re looking at about £12-14, maybe more. You can’t be spending near £30 on prawns before any other dish. That’s lunacy.

What’s worse is bread. I have sat at tables of four when three pieces of bread have been brought over. I look up, bewildered. This is not complex maths. There are four people at this table. Most of the time, the slices are halved before serving, which means the misers in the kitchen now have half a piece of bread knocking around, meanwhile out here we have been thoroughly short changed. Do you presume that we are so well acquainted at this table that we are happy to spend the next five minutes dividing each piece of bread into four to end up with a more suitable number of crumbs, or simply just pass it around for everyone to take a bite?

Three pieces of bread served to four people at Castle Farm, Midford

The absurdity only worsens with chicken wings, ribs, cobs of corn, lamb chops; all of which are indivisible. Couples ending up volunteering to share a shrapnel of chicken, it’s fine as their mouths have already touched — putting their relationship in peril for the sake of avoiding faux-pas at the table.

Three ribs served to two people at Woky Ko back in the day

Then there’s always one greedy you-know-what that pretends they cannot see this problem and helps themselves straight off the bat to a prized specimen, leaving even fewer to be divided between the remaining crew.

I’ll tell you what the solution is: restaurants should sell things individually, or in multiples of two, and nothing else. I am more than happy to pay the difference between what it costs to serve a plate of four prawns rather than three, to save me from this faffing. If I have to cut another three arancini into four only to then have a lonely quarter left at the end, I am going to scream.

Triple whammy. In the foreground, three pieces of two types of bread, multiplying the problem. In the background, three fish goujons. A table of four, admittedly in Dorset

After all, how often have you been at a table with two others? It’s rare, is it not, to go out as a three. I’m all for a third wheel and have been one myself many a times, but most of the time it’s me and my partner, or the two of us with two more. Hell, sometimes we’re even a five! What do you do with three prawns then?

Three chicken wings served to two people at Queen’s Arms, Chew Magna

I ask the restaurants — if tables of three are so proliferous, why are all your tables always laid up for two or four people? Where are all the round tables of three? If everyone is going round in groups of three as you’d have me is believe, why aren’t M&S doing a ‘dine in’ meal for three? Where’s the three seats next to each other on the bus? Why don’t you say your sharing steak is ideal for three?

Pricing by item allows for way more flexibility, and in lieu of that, two, four, or multiples thereof are nice, divisible numbers. And it means that the conversation around the table can continue, without the rude interruption of maths and tweezering. Three may be a magic number elsewhere, but it’s not welcome on my table.

Three corn cobs served to four people - though this particular crime was witnessed in Manchester

All words and photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour

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