How many calories are in a Bloomin' Onion?

(ENLARGE)
Outback Steakhouse's Bloomin' Onion turns 20 this year, but you won't want to celebrate with your own; this app is made for sharing.
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The answer is somewhere north of 2,000, which health professionals and concerned citizens will say is more than you'll find in the most bodacious steak. Or a full Thanksgiving dinner. Or an oil drum filled with molten Velveeta.

But do we really care? After all, who eats a whole Bloomin' Onion? Nobody, that's who. This signature appetizer at Outback Steakhouse — which turns 20 this year — has always been about sharing. You reach to the center of the table for a petal, or two, or six. You rip, and dip, and you're done.

In 1988, when the first hand-cut onion bloomed in Tampa, people didn't share appetizers. Maybe Mexican restaurants served nachos, and Italian ones, calamari. But steakhouses had soup or salad.

Back then it seemed almost un-American to share an appetizer, let alone touch communal food. The restaurant dinner table divvied its space like a Monopoly board; you owned the real estate in front of your chair, and that is where your food stayed. The center of the table belonged to doodads — flowers, salt shakers and little plastic tents that tempted children with pictures of mud pie and adults with Irish coffee. If there was a bread basket, you never reached into it but, instead, asked to have it passed to you.

The founders of Outback must have sensed the coming change in the way Americans eat. They must have seen the large groups of friends and co-workers who had graduated from happy-hour buffets but had no desire to cook. For these diners, that first sip of beer and bite of food wouldn't be the start of a meal so much as a segue into evening. What better than something hot and crisp that required no utensils, around a table where no one told you not to reach?

Outback co-founder Tim Gannon got the idea for the Bloomin' Onion from Japanese cookbooks. After five years, he invented a machine to cut the onions that every table seemed to want. And now — you want the figure? — Outback serves 15 million a year.

During those 20 years, the communal restaurant appetizer has taken over the meal. Customers share and pass plates without any qualms about touching food, and often never even get to the main course. Why should they? They want only that moment of the crisp bite, the cold beer and the promise of evening.