At communal tables diners will socialize over steaming bowls of Veracruz-style chilpachole soup as well as mi-fen, the Taiwanese vermicelli.
Meals typically are served on a communal platter, and diners use bread, rather than utensils, to serve themselves portions of such dishes as zigni (a stew made of fish, vegetables, and meat), ful (baked beans), dorho (roasted chicken), ga'at (porridge), and shiro (lentils).
At Inakaya the chefs stand in the middle of a giant U-shaped communal table and diners continue ordering until they're full.
Diners sit at communal tables, cheerfully shuffling glasses and plates to make room as new dishes or new neighbors arrive.
It can go toward a meal at the homegrown celebrity chef Wilo Benet's Pikayo, which recently relocated to the hotel and has been luring diners to its communal table for lobster empanadas and bay scallop ceviche.
Now he's developed an occasional tasting menu, served to five lucky diners at a communal kitchen table, that reinforces Yamasaki's status out as one of the capital's most exciting young chefs.
Noon 12. Local Lunch Occupying a 19th-century building that once housed the gardener who tended the Royal Terrace Gardens (below Calton Hill), the Gardener's Cottage (1 Royal Terrace Gardens, enter from London Road; thegardenerscottage.co) serves seasonal dishes to diners at three communal tables.
Diners are seated at communal tables for six.
Diners sit at long communal tables while meals are cooked in a Tuscan oven.
Very few members of the majority African-American population, though, were among the diners participating in the communal catharsis that unfolded in local restaurants in the years after the storm.
