Plating food is intimidating

Plating food is intimidating
                        

You finish cooking some marvelous dish you’ve been sweating over for hours, and it is everything you’d hoped. You reach for some perfectly warmed plates to serve your amazing creation, and that is likely where the whole enterprise goes off the rails. The demon of all cooks, pathetic presentation, drops you from success euphoria straight into pouty-faced dejection.

Putting food on a plate — how hard can it actually be? — isn’t difficult, of course, if that is the sum total of your goals. Just spoon the noddles and slap on the pork chop and call it a day. Maybe add a sparsely sprig.

Of the cooks I know, plating is often the thing they quickly apologize for. “I can cook just about anything, but when it comes to making it look pretty, that’s a whole other deal.”

In the older cookbooks I have, there is often a section devoted to food decoration. Photographs demonstrate how to make various creatures sculpted from vegetables and fruits. It was a required chef’s skill, once upon a time, to be able to produce a swan from a lemon, bunnies from radishes or perfectly shaped tomato roses.

A professional cook wouldn’t think of putting out a mushroom cap without first making it look like a spinning ride at the county fair. This kind of overdone presenting is seldom seen outside of old school Las Vegas buffets these days.

Ideally, a plate is assembled in a way that gives diners a peek at what is inside the dish. It showcases the skill of the cook. It offers the main ingredient — the hero — of the dish in a prominent way.

The presentation must make sense, and all this must be done so the plate could pass for an exhibit in an art gallery. Few people line up this list of abilities, and chefs who can really plate a dish are sure to go far. Most really upscale restaurant kitchens rely on people who are specialists at plating dishes perfectly.

Perhaps the most perfectly elegant plate decoration I’ve ever seen also is the simplest. Thomas Keller places a pepper grinder flush with a white plate and gives the thing one turn before lifting it. Repeat with ground pink sea salt beside it and that’s it. Great plating doesn’t have to be ornate or complex; it just has to be pleasing.

I’m actually grateful our culture has normalized taking pictures of plates in restaurants before digging in. Few things catch my eye on social media platforms as quickly as a picture of food, both taken by friends and supplied by restaurants themselves. The quality of food presentation runs the gamut from “Where can I get my hands on that?” to “Looks like Orson Welles’ liver.”

It’s so hard to pull off a perfectly presented plate that it’s better to just put the food on there than to get it all wrong trying to be fancy. Many times restaurants publish a picture of the special of the day and it looks like something I wouldn’t eat on a dare. The worst was a plate of mashed purple potatoes swimming in a thin, pale-yellow sauce. It looked exactly like what you’re imagining.

Of course, some of the best meals I have ever eaten were presented on a compartmentalized Styrofoam thingy, like the chicken at a soul food place in South Carolina. School cafeteria lunch ladies do a better job of plating, but it was so, so good. Who cares?

Then there were the too-pretty-to-eat appetizers at a Bobby Flay venue, the charcuterie at Alex Guarnaschelli’s “Butter” and just about anything my chef wife turns out. I also appreciated the plain pork hock and potato dumplings with no further fuss and the enormous bowl of pho that required nothing more.

Plating food, for those of us who care about such frivolous things, is intimidating. If I am going to put out someone’s dinner in the most attractive way I can muster, that person is getting a plate of stone-cold food. It’ll take me hours.


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