I have a rather smart baseball cap that says on the front “Old Git”. It was the name of a wine brand sold in supermarkets at the beginning of the 21st century by the Cheshire-based importer Paul Boutinot, as part of an attempt to take some of the seriousness out of wine drinking. But being an Old Git is actually a very serious business: it requires one to nurture a permanent sense of outrage at the inanities of others.

Fortunately there’s a great deal of inanity about. The current inanity stoking my personal Old Git is the expression “sharing platter”. There is a well-known bar group that currently has on its website the following allegedly genuine quote from an allegedly genuine customer:

“After a few post-work Friday drinks, hunger set in so we went for a sharing platter. The platters were so good that now we have them every week!”

Did any normal, real, breathing human being ever say: “We went for a sharing platter”? I don’t think so.

Part of my objection to the phrase “sharing platter” is the fact that, as a fully subscribed Old Git, I hate sharing my food with other people: if there’s a “platter” in front of me covered with goodies, it’s mine, and everybody else can be off and away with themselves and get their own. Keeping everything to myself also eliminates the awkwardness of the last chicken wing or tiger prawn on the plate: “You have it!” “No, you!” Stuff that. I want a “platter” with my name on it, and nobody else’s, and I want the freedom to be able to pick up an item, take a bite out of it, decide I don’t actually like it and put it back down again on the plate. Try doing that in Nando’s with a “sharing platter” for six.

You have to be careful with what linguists call “the recency illusion” on these things: complaining about a usage that has actually been around for decades, but which you’ve never noticed before and so you believe to be an unwanted recent innovation. It would be silly, for example, to suddenly start complaining about inappropriate usage of “innit”, as in “I was late for work this morning, innit”, when Harry Enfield was mocking this via his kebab shop-owning Stavros the Greek character in the 1980s. But “sharing platter”, or at least its widespread use, really does seem to be a recent introduction. The earliest use I have found is from the American food magazine Bon Appetit in 1986, but even American references are rare for the next two decades, and the earliest use in a British context is in 2007, when Time Out magazine, talking about the City of London wine bar/nightclub Amber, said: “Amber is for a younger, partying crowd, more at ease tucking into a sharing platter of tapas (£10) than approaching a well-composed lunch.”

Amber still does sharing platters, and rather more surprisingly, they are still £9.95 for two. But it took another four years, until 2011, before references to “sharing platters” exploded, and suddenly they were everywhere. Some, like me, failed to welcome this new development on the British culinary table. The food critic Jay Rayner, who I’m sure also has an “Old Git” baseball cap in his wardrobe, wrote of one experience in 2012 in his book My Dining Hell: Twenty Ways to Have a Lousy Night Out: “A starter sharing platter brought rings of deep-fried calamari with all the texture and flavour of surgical support hose. A bolus of breaded chicken breast was desperate and dry, skewers of prawns simply odd. Spareribs were the colour of an old lady’s velour sofa and edible, in the sense that I ate them. This cost the best part of £15, the best part being £14.95.”

Mind, Rayner was talking about a meal in an Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse, which, with the greatest respect to the chain’s doubtless excellent current management, has to be a self-inflicted wound.

The roots of the “sharing platter”, I’m guessing, lie in Spanish tapas, which were originally free snacks handed out with every drink, rather like the plates of cheese that pubs would leave on the bar on Sunday lunchtimes 40 or 50 years ago. But tapas weren’t for sharing: each customer got his/her own tapa, one at a time. There are plenty of cuisines where sharing the dishes is natural, and expected: South Asian, for example, or Chinese, or Arabian, where in a traditional Bedouin feast a plate holding a vast mound of rice studded with meat, almonds and spices is placed on the floor in front of a group of diners, and every man uses his right hand to scoop out his food. THAT is a sharing platter. (There is a very funny anecdote in Arabian Sands, the marvellous memoir by the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger of one banquet in Arabia where Thesiger, tunnelling into the rice in search of a piece of cooked camel, found himself touching the fingers of the Bedu opposite, who was tunnelling the other way.)

This is Britain, however, and as far as I’m concerned it’s the land of the well-composed lunch rather than the dive in quick, grab what you can before it goes £14.95 free-for-all. You share if you want to: I’m keeping my platter to myself.

I am on holiday this week, staying in a National Trust cottage at the entrance to Stourhead in Wiltshire – a garden designed by an associate of William Kent and briefed by Henry Hoare 2nd, son of the founder of Hoare’s bank. I have been running every morning around 7am when no one else is around. It’s been truly magical and given me time to reflect on some quite different experiences over the last few weeks.

Firstly the National Trust itself. The houses and gardens we have visited have been, on the whole, magnificent particularly Barrington Court, the first house bought by the National Trust in 1907. Yet the food operation has been generally really poor. Yes, the cakes are nice but the sandwiches have varied from okay to dire with absolutely no consistency between operations (and no consistency in packaging, merchandising or customer communications either). And sandwiches seem to be the only offer – no salads, no snacks, no wraps, no fruit. What is going on?

It’s as though the National Trust is in a time warp of its own with its food offering – and no less so with its drink range. There are learnings it could gain from Pret, Eat and Pod who are masterful in attracting and delighting similar audiences to the ones I have seen around this week, not all of whom want a tired ‘sandwich only’ offering.

I love the National Trust – they are a fantastic organisation. There are so many opportunities for them to exploit, though, in terms of food and drink where they could really improve their customer’s journey, experience and satisfaction – I really hope they go for them.

They could probably use an injection of the energy, initiative and enthusiasm shown by Nick Miller at Meantime when I spent some time with him a couple of weeks ago. Much like David Bruce, I thought. He took me on a whirlwind tour of his brewery, hop garden, pub and distribution centre and was brimming with fantastic ideas for the future. He has taken a good brand in Meantime and made it incredibly strong and attractive. What I loved most about my time there was seeing Nick’s relationship with his team who all seemed to love what they do. All in all, a really inspirational visit.

His story isn’t too dissimilar to that of Andrew Quinlan who I met up with for lunch at Caravan (still as good as ever). He has built Orchard Pig out of absolutely nothing. He started making cider from the apples in his own orchard (which wasn’t that large) not that long ago and again has created a dynamic and successful brand on the back of that. The entrepreneurship shown by him (and Nick) is really inspirational.

As I was running and mulling over what the National Trust should do with its cafes, I thought about lunch I had recently with Mark Derry at Brasserie Blanc in its hugely successful Covent Garden site (I couldn’t quite believe how much this place turns over). I suppose I just hadn’t realised that this is a restaurant chain that makes all its food from scratch – and I mean all its food. I have never seen so much produced from such a tiny kitchen at such high quality. I was really amazed. And my lunch was simply divine. The National Trust could do worse than talk to Mark about delivering wonderful fresh food from small spaces.

They could also do worse than visiting San Sebastian where I have just spent five days eating everything in sight. The town is something of a Mecca for foodies and seemingly has more Michelin-starred restaurants than any other town in the world. It’s the pintxo bars here which are brilliant and you can feast on all manner of outstanding tapas including tortilla, jamón serrano, spider crab tarts, filo parcels of salt cod and miniature ice-cream cornets filled with cheese and anchovy amongst others. I thought the whole place was just fabulous and not a curled sandwich to be seen. National Trust take note.

We have consistently argued that like-for-likes should not be seen as THE major benchmark of retailing success; they are too easily manipulated consciously or subconsciously – and that one has to take a longer-term view of performance given that there is very little direct overlap across the direct reporting periods of the major groups in the sector. Also, that too greater focus on short term trading trends masks the overall performance of companies across the year. For example, always better to have your worst like-for-likes performance in January, which is the quietest month of the year for trading. Based on the Greene King Leisure Spending Tracker, spending on eating and drinking out is around 15% lower in January that the average for the rest of the year, and 30% lower for drinking, 20% lower for eating spend compared to December. 

Over the longer run, Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) is the only managed pub group to report a decade of continual like-for-likes growth. Its aggregate ten-year track record is comparable to Restaurant Group and Greene King – though the like-for-likes sample sizes will have varied significantly for all groups over this period. On the same day that M&Bs’ Quarter Three IMS highlighted around -1% for like-for-likes for the past nine weeks, Fuller, Smith & Turner (a predominantly London-based estate) reported +7.3% like-for-likes for its managed pubs for the last 16 weeks, which we estimate equates to +6.4% for the last seven weeks, having reported +8.0% for the first nine weeks of its new financial year back in early July. 

The Fuller’s comments broadly match those of Greene King recently, which reported that its London-based Metropolitan estate was +7.6% for the eight-week period from 5 May, although that was within the context of overall retail like-for-likes for the same period being +1.1%. This highlights the disparity of performance inside and outside of the capital, where Greene King and Spirit are the most exposed of the managed pub majors. A dissection of the Marston’s performance – the estate that probably has one of the greatest overlaps with M&B – might suggest that M&B’s performance has actually been more in line with the ex-London experience of the sector. We still believe that M&B’s London performance is up there with its peers. It doesn’t matter though that recent trading has been slow – everyone should have expected that, given the tough comp – or that it looks like the bottom end of Marston’s managed pubs have outperformed the top end Destination and Premium estate; what is more important is that like-for-likes are +4.1% for Marston’s at the 41 week stage – money in the bank – whereas M&B’s performance at the 42 week stage is just +0.7%.

This brings us back to M&B’s underperformance over the past 12-18 months. What is evident and what everyone knows is that M&B has been progressively slipping down the like-for-likes league table, so the questions that need answering are based around what is the relationship between price and volume, what is happening to the bottom quartile estate that has caused so much of this underperformance, and what is happening to margins? M&B management has attempted to describe the performance of its top three quartiles as broadly in line with the market. Based on M&B’s comments, we estimate that last year its bottom quartile like-for-likes were down in the high teens.

Comparisons of Half One 2013 and Half One 2014 would suggest that this performance is beginning to turn around. What frustrates investors though is that the pace of change is slower than the market would like. We see part of this as down to M&B being something of a supertanker, part to the pace of recovery of the economy and part to the major cultural reengineering programme currently underway within the business. It is also part of what we have described as management not overtly seeking to lead the sector again, rather just perform in line with it. Quite possibly, it is the supertanker issue that is the problem, so when it turns – as it seems to be doing – that is when the performance will kick on to more than the present rather prosaic rates of growth.