Girl dinner is still, somehow, trending. At the time of this writing, videos tagged “girl dinner” have a collective 410 million views on TikTok, and the number climbs by leaps and bounds with every click of the refresh icon. There has even been a brassy, booming song written in its honor. The phenomenon exploded after it was featured in the New York Times earlier this month, and has since been written up in numerous articles from legacy media outlets (such as right here, in this one). You can now order girl dinner at Popeye’s, and even the luminous Nigella Lawson has weighed in, referring to the meal as “picky bits.”
For those who have somehow managed to avoid this thing/non-thing, girl dinner is a snack plate, made up of whatever you have lying around. It’s a meal you prepare just for yourself that involves zero cooking or cleanup, but usually features some aesthetic flair (writing for the Times, Jessica Roy described the meal as “an aesthetically pleasing Lunchable”). Girl dinner can be a bag of popcorn and some pickles, a considered charcuterie board, or a plate of leftovers with some candy on the side. It is anything your heart desires, so long as you already have it in your kitchen and it does not require the aid of an oven, stove, or knife block. Girl dinner is perfect for the heat of summer, or any time that you don’t want to do the dishes, really.
Girl dinner was invented by Olivia Maher, a showrunner’s assistant currently out of work due to the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. On May 11th, she shared a video of an assemblage of baguette, butter, cheese, cornichons, and grapes, saying the spread was inspired by medieval peasants with their hunks of bread and cheese and dubbing it “girl dinner.” Other users began posting their own girl dinners: hummus and carrots with salami on the side; nuts and jars of olives; apples and sardines; piles of Babybel cheeses. In theory, girl dinner should be sort of random but also filling, an assemblage of sides that add up to a full meal. Of course, eating disorder TikTok got there too, with creators extolling the virtues of a nearly empty plate, along with sleep for dinner and pills for dinner. That part is depressing.
But girl dinner, in general, doesn’t have to be. I think it should be pure indulgence, sans all deprivation; pleasure, not a punishment. Let’s bring a little sense of occasion and some Dionysian sensuality to girl dinner. Think of a table overflowing with figs, cured meat, craggy blocks of cheese, honey, and good bread, like a candlelit Flemish still life. Lying back in the tub while lowering a bunch of grapes into your mouth is a delicious form of girl dinner, especially if someone else is holding them over your face as though you’re a Greek god. Or just stand in your kitchen and feast on something good. You are a lusty 16th-century kitchen maid or a nymph picking at ripe fruit or a girl who could afford to get her birthday catered by Alimentari Flaneur (RIP). Put your Proustian Madeleine on a pretty plate. Mine is definitely a Babybel.
“Girl dinner,” writes poetic Twitter user @killdads, “is the creaturely practice of hunting what’s gathered.”
I generally enjoy the female experience, besides the obvious downsides. And yet there is something about the invocation of “girl” in the naming of online trends that is irksome, cringe, and disrespectful to the early work of Megan Thee Stallion. You have heard of the hot girls eating tinned fish, drinking whole milk, going on hot girl walks (Maher invented girl dinner on such a walk), and suffering from IBS, which is unsurprising considering all the canned seafood and dairy swirling inside them; there is “that girl,” the clean girl, and the more recent invention of a “tomato girl,” a.k.a. a girl who loves in-season tomatoes, a.k.a. everyone.
The endless girl-ing of it all is passé—hot girl summers began a whole four years ago, and what about crones?—as well as earnest in a way that denotes contempt for its participants. (It is also depressing to go from the empowering fun of hot girl summer to the darkest recesses of girl dinner posts, in which preparing and finishing a meal is simply too much for the girls to bear.)
In an essay for Dirt on the coquette trend, Claire Marie Healy writes that there “exists a great pleasure in sending it [gender] up now and again: to perform the performance, by muddying those little white ankle socks in the ways we know how.” Coquettes are playful, but Girls have commands (the makeup of a hot girl walk is shockingly specific). It is annoying to be told what you are.
But falling into a self-loathing joyless trap about girl dinner is annoying, too. The trend has made some people really mad, which I bet is even worse for your blood pressure than eating cured meats and cheese for dinner. The girls should feast, and not have to clean up afterwards.
A couple of weeks ago, I visited a friend who has four children at her country house. I have zero kids, and did not realize how many times having children forces you to clean the kitchen, especially when said kids are too little to reach the sink. If girl dinner is a giant bowl of popcorn and wine eaten in front of the television, mom dinner is the remaining chicken nuggets eaten over the trash. It is unfair. And so when I got home, saying prayers of thanks to my intrauterine device, I made my own girl dinner or whatever I should call it. There was a rind of pecorino, a nectarine, some Marcona almonds, and a leftover mini sausage roll from an Australian coffee shop filled with patrons in felt hats. I ate it in bed and immediately fell asleep for 11 hours. Everyone deserves a girl dinner now and then.
