“I Didn’t Expect This”: 67 Crazy And Unholy Ways Restaurants Served Food That Made Everyone Miss Normal Dishes

Food can and should be aesthetic. However, you should never sacrifice nutrition, taste, texture, and smell for the sake of superficiality. To put it bluntly, if your food looks Instagram-worthy but tastes like drek, you’ll end up pushing your customers away and burning your reputation.

Some restaurant owners are so desperate to stand out from the crowd and to appear unique that they sacrifice good taste for randomness. Not all of their experiments with design and ‘artistic’ plating work, though. Some are so bizarre that they can (and arguably should!) be called out by customers everywhere.

The ‘We Want Plates’ online group is one of the most well-known projects on social media and Reddit. Created in mid-July of 2015, over the past decade, the community has grown to become home for a million folks who are fighting “against serving food on bits of wood and roof tiles, chips in mugs and drinks in jam jars.”

The goal of the group is to “showcase cringe-worthy examples of plating.” However, you have to go above and beyond things like burgers on boards, sushi on sushi boats, or traditional types of plating from other cultures.

You have to remember that even though these restaurants are being gently mocked and literally named and shamed, it’s all done for the sake of humor. You have to be civil. There’s absolutely no room for insults or threats on the subreddit.

Posting original content is encouraged. In which case, be sure to share the details of what the establishment is called and where it’s located. Meanwhile, if you’re sharing photos of dishes that you didn’t personally try when eating out, remember to credit the person or organization who originally shared it online.

During a previous interview, Bored Panda had gotten in touch with the founder of the massive ‘We Want Plates’ project, Ross McGinnes. He was happy to share a bit about the history behind it.

“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,” he said.

“It [the picture] 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. 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,” McGiness shared with us earlier.

From McGiness’ perspective, restaurants place food on random things because they’re trying to seem unique, to stand out from the crowd of competitors.

“My local pub used to do a great Sunday roast: twelve quid, piled high, tasted great, and yes, it came on a plate. One weekend, they added a quirky offering to the menu: little sandwiches, pies, dainty cakes, and mini milkshakes served on a miniature picnic bench,” he said.

“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,” he shared with Bored Panda.

“Over the following months, the picnic benches became increasingly popular, coinciding with the specials board becoming progressively smaller, before it eventually disappeared altogether.”

“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 OK 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,” the creator of ‘We Want Plates’ revealed how the trend quickly went viral.

“Before you know it, everyone’s doing the same ‘quirky’ thing, except it’s not ‘quirky’ anymore because you can’t move for mini picnic benches and now all their roast dinners are rubbish to boot.”

According to McGiness, the very worst thing that he’s personally encountered was a piece of cake served on a table tennis bat in Barcelona, around 2008. “It still gives me sleepless nights,” he quipped.

We’d love to hear from you, Pandas! Which of these plating disasters made you laugh or cringe the hardest?

Why do you think restaurants try to pull nonsense like this?

What is the weirdest thing that your food has been placed on when dining out?

Have you ever had any food placed on random and weird items that actually kind of worked aesthetically?

Scroll down to the very bottom of this list to share your thoughts in the comments.