Wow. So The New York Times has announced that restaurants serving "small plates" are the Next (Little) Thing. This love affair with the miniature blossomed out of the ashes of the West Coast internet economy: Programmers and content providers at Gimme.com used to be way too busy to sit down to a full three-course meal; now they're way too broke to pay for one. Just like in the '60s, the revolution that took off in 'Frisco's Haight-Ashbury has started to spread its pernicious tentacles as far as Poughkeepsie, Middletown, and Lake Worth-only this time its not free sex and love-beads, it's miniscule plates of broccoli rabe and teeny tiny racks of lamb, child-sized filets mignon, thimblefuls of wine. America has fallen in love with petite. And judging from our obesity statistics, it's about damn time.

It's hard to say which of the Seven Deadly Sins might most accurately be described as our sin of choice, but surely Gluttony would be right up there with Avarice and Envy. As a nation, we're so fat the only thing attracted to us is gravity (which may account for our fleshy embrace of SUVs and Megamansions-the "one size fits all" equivalents for home and auto). My take on America's fat is that we're overcompensating-the rest of the World Family doesn't love us enough-in fact, they don't love us at all. We eat to mask our pain.

But here's hoping that the small-plate phenomenon will eventually toll the death knell for the Whopper and the Big Mac-do we want to "Downsize That?" You bet! And don't be surprised if your average restaurant experience starts to resemble a doll's tea party. Of course, the irony of all this "small plate" stuff is that you can still choke down a kilo of food at one sitting. You just order... MORE plates!

The Greeks were several thousand years ahead of the curve on this one-they've been doing mezŽ for centuries. When you sit down to dinner at your average taverna, you can expect to be lavished with many different mini-dishes-a steady stream of them sometimes lasting late into the night-to soak up all that ouzo and retsina. And nobody is holding up the Greeks as examples of gastronomic restraint; they're just about as fat as we are. Guess who invented the belly-dance as the signifier of the ultimate erotic?

I had as much fun as I've ever had the other night at Taverna Opa, a Greek place on the water in Hollywood. It's hard to pinpoint the exact source of that fun, because so much was going on. Seated as we were at a long table on the dock, with a perfect view of 1) the Intracoastal and 2) the parking lot and 3) the mayhem inside the restaurant, we were right in the thick of it. So it may have been the extremely comely maidens who were in fact standing on the tables and shaking booty, belly, and everything else that jiggles. It might have been the white-linen-suited Eurotrash chuffing up to the docks in their million-dollar fishing yachts, or gamely disembarking from their Ferraris and Rollses and Beemers and tossing their keys to the valets. There were lots of pretty girls around; that could have been it. And there were incidents aplenty, including the lady at the next table who got up to go to the can and tipped her chair, along with her "favorite jacket" into the bilge-colored wavelets of the Intracoastal: We watched chair and jacket swept placidly along on some invisible undercurrent until one heroic waiter fished it out with a boating hook (to raucous applause).