Restaurants often will leave the spoon out of standard place settings.
Diners have started noticing something missing from their place settings: spoons. As TerrenceS74908 recently posted on our discussion boards, "Unless I ordered coffee, or later, a dessert that required one, spoons seem to be missing from place settings."
So where did all the spoons go? In our quest to find out, the Buzz got in touch with one restaurateur who goes the spoonless route: Marc Murphy (NYC's Landmarc, Ditch Plains).
"It just seems to clutter up the table," he told us, "and not everybody needs a spoon. When we send the soup out, a spoon comes out on the liner under the dish. And, honestly, when I go to one of those fancy restaurants with all that silverware, I just push it aside – I need my room. I don’t know, I just like it to be a bit cleaner and neater."
A distaste for clutter seems a reasonable enough reason to drop a utensil, but we wondered if there was something more to the spoonless trend. And it turns out there is, according to Dr. Brian Wansink, the director of Cornell's Food and Brand Lab who's currently on leave to run the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, in Washington, DC.
Wansink said that his team at Cornell learned that "while place settings don't seem to have much of an effect on the way people order it definitely changes how people perceive a restaurant." They conducted a study of business diners "who don't blink at spending $30 on an entree," in which they asked participants to look at dozens of different settings and rate them by features like how expensive that restaurant would be.
"Settings without spoons were seen as more 'European' and were rated as slightly more elegant than most settings that had spoons," Wansink said.
However, the spoonless settings did not take top honors in the study. That distinction went to the very traditional setting of two forks and two knives on either side of the plate with a soup spoon across the top.
Do you have a dining question you'd like answered? Drop us a line at buzz@zagat.com!