Almost Every Food Would Be Better Served in a Bowl

Many hot takes are just for provocation, but when I tell you that almost all plates should be replaced with bowls, I really do mean it. Nearly every situation involving a plate would be improved if the plate were a bowl instead. Bowls are the superior choice on not just a practical level, but an aesthetic, personal, social, and moral one, too. 

The “plates are bowls now” trend isn’t new at all. In fact, the trend of replacing plates with bowls has been around for so long that it seems silly to talk about it. But that’s exactly why I am. I believe that bowls — dinner bowls, pasta bowls, plate-bowls, whatever you want to call them — deserve to be more than a trend, and should be permanently canonized as the default dinner vessel, for everything from the most casual meals right up to the most formal dinners. If you can only own one dish, it should be a bowl, and if you can afford to own a thousand of the finest dishes, bowls should have pride of place in your vast collection. 

To simply state a preference for bowls is very old news. By early last year, style round-ups were listing “bowl plates” (or the repulsive portmanteau “blates,” which I will not be using again) as one of the signature trends of 2023. Earlier this year, an article by Anna Hezel at Eater (“It’s the Pasta Bowl’s World, and We’re Just Eating In It”) quoted a viral TikTok from 2022 that states, “In the end, we’re all just women who want to find bowls that sort of look like plates that are sort of like bowls.” 

This Tik Tok launched thousands of re-posts across social media. It was so popular that I first came across it in a screenshot of a tweet posted to Instagram — three levels removed from the primary source document. 

The trend goes back even further: In 2018, Architectural Digest published a story (“You Only Need Dinner Bowls”) that promised readers they could substitute bowls (that sort of look like plates that are sort of like bowls) for the entirety of a previous generation’s set of dinnerware. Hezel’s Eater story traces the trend back even further, to the dawn of the Instagram era in 2012, and Jono Pandolfi’s line of dinnerware for the opening of New York’s NoMad Hotel. Pandolfi’s ceramics, with their elevated-yet-cozy look representing the more austere and aspirational side of the jocular, nostalgic twee that visually defined the early 2000s and 2010s, became wildly popular.

It was followed quickly in 2014 by now-ubiquitous (at least to the sort of millennial who subscribes to a lot of new-media newsletters and daydreams about buying a farmhouse upstate) East Fork Pottery and their Everyday Bowl, which is in the same aesthetic vein. This specific type of bowl — handmade yet pristine, available in a rainbow of muted earth-tones suggesting a charmingly-mismatched and showily thrown-together dinner table, the plateware equivalent of a carefully rumpled linen sack dress —  remains a visual signifier of a particular era, or at least one very particular niche within it. 

Maybe my outsize feelings on bowls have to do with some nostalgia for that era, a time I’ve only recently begun to accept as part of the past rather than part of the present. I remember around 2015 or 2016, telling a friend fervently that all plates should be bowls, and feeling giddy when she agreed. We’d text each other “BOWLS” in all caps as though we’d solved some obscure mathematical equation about aesthetics, and ease, and how elegance and practicality might dwell side by side. 

Bowls themselves were nothing new, obviously, but the idea of a bowl as the default dish-ware item, felt, then, like it might be. A bowl was casual, utilitarian, not meant for presentation; using it for the opposite purpose — formal, decorative, a vessel not just to serve a meal but to showcase it, therefore felt almost innovative. Doing the wrong thing on purpose and making it work has always been one definition of what it means to be stylish, and for an incredibly brief moment in a very small corner of the culture, bowls really did feel stylish. 

That moment’s long over; it was over before the TikTok about bowls that are plates that are bowls went viral. The moment in which such a TikTok could go viral is over now, too. Two years is roughly a millennia in contemporary internet time; “girls want plates that are bowls that are plates” feels firmly of the past. Bowls that are plates that are bowls are likely to fall out of fashion soon, if they haven’t begun to already.

Conservatism and the traditional formality that goes with it are on the rise. It's evident in everything from the sharp turn against enthusiasm and sincerity (or against corniness and cringe) in the media and influencer zeitgeist to the stark minimalism (clean lines, monochrome neutral shades, and a disdain for embellishments) that dominates current fashion trends. The “quiet luxury” trend has become so quiet, and so pervasive, that few people call it that, or consider it a trend, anymore. And the broader political shift that’s been sweeping in for some time has already begun to trickle down, in a specifically Reagan-era cadence, all the way to things like dishware and table settings. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a bowl-plate hybrid in a higher-end restaurant. I suspect the tide is already turning toward the straight-backed and punishing Calvinism of flat plates and perhaps even fine china.

Maybe that turn, in and of itself, is enough argument for bowls as the superior default vessel. Every trend is a form of contrarianism, which means bowls should come back around soon enough after they’ve fully lost popularity. But I believe there’s a better argument for bowls, one unrelated to any trend for or against them. 

Bowls are, broadly speaking, easier than plates, and more versatile, but it’s more than that. If niceness and kindness aren’t synonyms but in fact closer to antonyms, plates are nice, and bowls are kind. Plates are the dining room; bowls are the kitchen. Plates are scarcity; bowls are abundance. Plates are capitalism; bowls are socialism. Plates are a backward longing for an imaginary twentieth century; bowls are the dream of a better world. Plates are small talk; bowls are the part of a party where everybody sits on the floor.

I’ve always been very clumsy. I’m tall and gangly and accident-prone. Like many tall people, I never reliably know where my own limbs end. I live in constant terror of being in the way, and I’m almost always in the way. I can usually get through a meal without spilling anything or knocking anything over, but I’ll spend a lot of that meal holding my breath. In general, this is fine. Making that effort is a way of enacting care for the people around me, each of whom are making their own unseen efforts toward a shared social experience. Nevertheless, when I see a bowl in place of a plate at a restaurant or at a dinner party, a full-body shock of relief washes over me. 

Some of that relief is simple practicality: It’s a lot harder to spill anything or stain a tablecloth when eating from a bowl, even a very shallow one. More importantly, though, it’s the message a bowl sends. A bowl in its very shape acknowledges that clumsiness is normal and expected. A bowl wants you to succeed. Perhaps this sounds infantilizing, but it isn’t; it’s about pitching in, and setting one another at ease. Plates can often feel like a dare, waiting to see if you’ll screw up. Bowls want to help; bowls say that we’re in this together, and that none of this, even the most formal dinner, is really such a big deal. 

I’m not actually saying we should abolish plates; it’s more that I think bowls should be the default vessel in the way plates have always been. Plates should be for very specific occasions: to make a particular aesthetic gesture, or to serve a dish whose physical reality doesn’t align with even a shallow flat-bottomed bowl. I acknowledge that there are circumstances where only a plate will do. But these are, realistically, exceptions. Bowls welcome everyone. 

Of course it’s easier to eat from a bowl when heating up leftovers at home on one’s own, while at work, while watching TV, and in any other informal, private setting. It’s easy to see why bowls are the answer here. But I would argue that bowls are also the right choice for the most elevated and traditional home entertaining. It’s true that making a formal meal served mainly in bowls look elegant is more difficult than doing the same using plates. And yet, at the heart of the oldest traditions of hosting, what the whole concept means as far back as its history goes, is a devotion to making a guest feel welcome. Everything else proceeds from that goal. 

The joy of throwing a party is, essentially, offering a gift to one’s guests, and part of that gift is ease. If, in a formal setting, bowls require a greater effort on the part of the person laying the table, but remove some effort on the part of the guest sitting down to that meal, then bowls are a better tool for the old-fashioned tradition of throwing a dinner or serving a luncheon. Bowls are about practicality, but bowls are also about good manners. Bowls might be great for eating at home on one’s own, but bowls also stand in for a whole crowded table, in all its welcome and abundance, in everything larger that any of us might hope it could mean.