Mezze, and the argument for many small dishes
The English dinner puts a plate in front of each person and asks them to look forward. The mezze table puts thirty small dishes in the middle and asks everybody to reach across one another for the next hour.
The second arrangement makes for better company, and it is the one the small Fayoum bowls were made to serve.
What mezze is, and is not
It is not a starter, and it is not a sharing plate in the restaurant sense. Mezze is the meal itself — an accumulation of small cold and warm dishes brought out together and eaten slowly, with bread, across a long stretch of the afternoon or evening. In Cairo, Beirut, Athens and Istanbul the particulars differ and the principle does not: many things, in small quantities, in the middle of the table.
The effect on the host is considerable and underrated. Nothing has to be ready at the same moment. Nothing goes cold in a way that matters. Guests serve themselves continuously rather than in one anxious pass, and the cook sits down at the same time as everybody else — which is, in the end, the only real test of a way of feeding people.
How many dishes
More than feels sensible. Six is a light lunch; ten to twelve is a proper table for six people; there is no upper limit that anyone has ever complained about.
The quantities are small — two or three tablespoons in a fifteen-centimetre bowl looks right and is enough — so the arithmetic is kinder than it sounds. Half of it comes from a shop and requires no cooking whatever: good olives, a jar of pickled turnips, labneh with oil poured over, salted almonds, radishes with butter, a wedge of feta, a bowl of tomatoes with nothing done to them at all.
The cooked half can be three things. Something with chickpeas, something charred, something with egg. That is the entire structure, and it has held for several thousand years.
Why the bowls should not match
A mezze table laid with a matching set of white ramekins is a buffet. The same food in eight different hand-painted bowls is a table.
The difference is that mismatched vessels read as accumulation — as a household that has gathered things gradually — and accumulation is precisely the register the meal is aiming at. Vary the sizes as freely as the patterns: a couple of the deeper eighteen-centimetre bowls for anything wet, the shallow mezze dishes for olives and pickles, one twenty-one centimetre bowl doing duty as the salad, a plate stacked with flatbread.
Blue dot beside green leaf beside blue-and-green swirl beside a striped bowl. Nothing on the table should look as though it was bought for the occasion.
Arranging it, which mostly means not arranging it
Do not build a grid. Push the dishes in loosely from every side, let them overlap and touch, and leave no clear middle — a bare centre is the thing that makes a table look staged rather than laid.
Bread goes flat on the wood without a board. Oil in a small bowl rather than standing in its bottle. Lemons cut and left in a dish, not arranged on a saucer at the side.
And put too much on the table rather than too little. The visual argument of mezze is abundance, and it collapses entirely if the table looks measured.
Afterwards
The washing-up looks alarming and is not. Small bowls stack, the glaze releases oil under warm water, and none of it is precious enough to require careful handling.
What remains is the reason to do it again: a table that took four hours to get up from, and a stack of small painted bowls beside the sink that will be back out on Thursday.
