The Four-Bite Feast

By Terry McCarthy/Los Angeles

The signature dish of the Los Angeles restaurant A.O.C. is a small plate of English peas cooked with their own tendrils and a touch of green garlic. Cost: $8. Suzanne Goin, chef of the 8-month-old eatery, also offers bite-size portions of chicken with sorrel, black rice with squid and curried cauliflower. The dishes are all highly flavored and served up quickly. There are no entree-size portions. "I was afraid people wouldn't think of this as a place to have dinner," says Goin of her diminutive-dining concept. "But they went for it very quickly. I was surprised." Within weeks A.O.C. became one of the hottest restaurants in the city, as diners caught on to the newest trend in food: small plates.

Starting from a base in California, the graze craze is spreading across the country. Inspired by tapas, Middle Eastern mezes and East Asian small dishes, chefs are offering diners a greater variety of flavors on a multitude of mini-dishes, usually for less money than traditional-size portions and without a load of calories. Several cookbooks have recently been published that focus on the trend, including Meze: Small Plates to Savor and Share from the Mediterranean Kitchen (Morrow) by Diane Kochilas. The extravagant multi-tiered creations of the NASDAQ-fueled '90s have faded. Now the emphasis is on taste, according to Adam Busby, a Culinary Institute of America instructor at Greystone restaurant in the Napa Valley, Calif. "The philosophy is, Less is more," says Busby, who is teaching his students to use a range of pungent flavors from the "sun-spice belt" of Latin America, North Africa, southern India and Southeast Asia.

The godfather of small-plate dining in the U.S. is Thomas Keller, who in 1994 opened the renowned French Laundry restaurant in the Napa Valley, which offers tasting menus of up to 15 courses, each with tiny portions. "I want to leave the impression with guests that 'I wish I had another bite of that.' Then you know you've hit them at the peak," says Keller. His "four bites and you're out" philosophy was once regarded as eccentric but more recently has won over an increasing number of top-line chefs. This year the Zagat restaurant guide for San Francisco declared, "The graze craze is here to stay."

In Los Angeles, the newly opened Bastide restaurant of chef Alain Giraud has only tasting menus at dinner. In New York City, chef Gerry Hayden divides the menu at his chic Amuse into $5, $10, $15 and $20 columns so diners can customize their meals to suit their tastes--and wallets. In Chicago, there's newcomer Piattini ("small plates," in Italian). Mantis in Washington, which features pan-Asian tapas, recently opened its doors, and on the Strip in Las Vegas, the restaurant Prana has been offering Southeast Asian small plates to hungry gamblers since May. In Atlanta, there's a twist: trendy restaurants like Bluepointe are retrofitting bar food so guests can make an affordable meal out of several such appetizers.

But the epicenter of small-plate dining is the Bay Area, where out-of-work dotcommers are seeking to reconcile their gourmet habits with shrinking budgets. Diners can sample rabbit-sausage flatbread for $12 at A Cote in Oakland, or they can snack on stuffed dates with chorizo and blue cheese for $8 at the Spanish-Moroccan Baraka in San Francisco. The Russian Hill restaurant Pesce last year shifted away from traditional full-service Italian food to small plates in the Venetian cicchetti style, like swordfish rolls or octopus-and-potato salad.

"To eat small plates is fun," says Harveen Khera, owner of the recently opened Tallula restaurant in San Francisco. "Most people get bored after three or four bites of anything. It's a way of keeping your palate fresh." Tallula bills itself as French-Indian and has dishes like spiced pommes frites with mango ketchup and tandoori squab with cashews and spinach, each costing from $5 to $16. Says Khera: "You have so many flavor profiles going on, you're kind of on a roller-coaster ride in your mouth." And if one wild ride isn't enough, you can always order seconds.

--With reporting by Amy Bonesteele/Atlanta, Elizabeth Coady/Chicago, David Hare/Las Vegas, Laura Locke/San Francisco and Lisa McLaughlin/New York

With reporting by Amy Bonesteele/Atlanta, Elizabeth Coady/Chicago, David Hare/Las Vegas, Laura Locke/San Francisco and Lisa McLaughlin/New York