What's a girl's dinner?

TikTok women show off their suppers - plates of snacks prepared by one person, for one person's consumption and enjoyment.

It's 90 degrees outside, and you're too hot and exhausted from a long day's work to whip up a nice meal. Luckily, you're home alone — no kids, no roommates, no partners — so you can eat whatever you want for dinner, without having to consider other people's food preferences or nutritional needs. You grab a bag of popcorn, a glass of wine, some bread, cheese, and a piece of chocolate, and settle into the couch for a night of snacking and watching TV. Is there anything more glorious? Welcome to "Girls' Dinner".

According to TikTok, where the trend has over 30 million views, Girls' Dinner is akin to an aesthetic Lunchable: a cleverly arranged stack of snacks which, when eaten in sufficient quantity, constitutes a meal. Or so we think.

Typical girls' dinners might include some kind of fruit, a block of cheddar, slices of salami, a round of fancy crackers and a dish of olives. The girls' dinner is "both chaotic and hearty," as one TikTok commenter put it, requiring none of the foresight, cooking, or plating demanded by a real meal. As another reviewer noted, "There's no preparation, just vibes."

The trend started when Olivia Maher, the assistant to a showrunner currently out of work due to the writers' strike, posted a video on TikTok this spring extolling the virtues of a humble, medieval peasant-inspired assembly she called a "girl's dinner." p>

"I think the concept of girl's dinner came to me while I was on a sexy girly walk with another friend of mine," Ms. Maher said, 28 years old, from her apartment in Los Angeles. p>

She said that she and her friend had discussed the unparalleled perfection of bread and cheese as a meal in itself, as simple as it is satisfying."We love to eat this way, and it feels like such a girly dinner because we make it when our boyfriends don't are not there and we don't need to have what is a 'typical dinner' - basically, with a protein and a vegetable and a starch,” Ms Maher said.

@liviemaher #girldinner #medievaltiktok ♬ original sound - Olivia Maher

She decided to launch the phrase on TikTok. "It's my dinner," Ms Maher says in the video, flipping her phone's camera to display her spread: chunks of butter and cheese, part baguette, grapes and pickles, and a drink of red wine. "I call that girl dinner." Since posting it in May, the 15-second clip has received more than a million views.

Alana Laverty, culinary content creator 28-year-old Londoner who immediately adopted the phrase, said she started making what she called "snack plates" for dinner during the summers when it was too hot to even consider eating. 'light a stove.