Tim Roxborogh's travel bugs: Men who order dinner for the whole table

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A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about your holiday.

"I'll order for the table", is a joke I like to make at group dinners in New Zealand. The laugh ratio may be against me, but it's worth it for the flicker of panic in people's eyes when they think for an instant I'm serious. On the odd occasion I get a chuckle, it's usually from someone who's also been hosted to a meal in Asia and had that awkward "free meal vs ordering-what-you-want" cultural conundrum.

In short, it's very much the custom in much of Asia (and undoubtedly much of the world) that if you get invited to dinner at a restaurant, the male half of the inviting couple will not only pay for everyone's meals, he'll take it upon himself to order everyone's meals too.

As someone whose love of free stuff has generally outweighed their love of selecting just what that stuff may be, it isn't always as straightforward with food. You could very well argue, if the chap who organised the dinner has the burden of generations of tradition forcing him to pay for it all, he might as well embrace the more empowering/fun tradition of controlling just what his guests will eat too.

To the outsider this can seem quite odd. You're in Beijing or Manila or Jakarta or Hanoi and whether you're Lazy Susan-ing up a storm or not, you're often drowning in plates of food you don't really want to eat.

"Do you not like chicken feet?" becomes a mid-meal question your host asks, as opposed to before he's ordered two kilograms of it from the menu. "No, no, it's just that I'm loving the sea cucumber so much."

Westerners who don't share their meals

Which brings me to a closely related Travel Bug that represents the other side of the coin in the above discussion. Just as the Eastern tradition of a bloke ordering and paying for the table can have its fishhooks, there's much fun to be made of the uptight Western notion of non-shared dinners.

The idea of ordering a meal just for you and only you makes sense in New Zealand if it's not an Asian restaurant, but if you're eating Thai or Indian or Malaysian, it doesn't matter whether you're in Bangkok or Blenheim: share the food. By all means, pay for a dish you want and even insist on eating most of what you've chosen. But the "mine all mine" attitude deprives you of sampling other dishes.

More than that, if it's a truly authentic Asian establishment, one dish is usually designed to be too much food for just one person. Four dishes might suffice for five or six people. In which case, perhaps it's easier if just one person does the ordering! Just so long as it's not me doing all the paying.

Tim Roxborogh hosts Newstalk ZB's Weekend Collective and blogs at RoxboroghReport.com.