Some thoughts on food presentation

Describing the degustation meal he’d recently enjoyed at Oscillate Wildly, my friend Stew made the following comment:

“My only (very mild) complaint was the pork dish was just too... frilly... A few too many bits and pieces rather self-consciously arranged on the plate. It was still delicious, but I felt sorry for the sous chef having to balance the little stems of cress upside down in the tiny dollop of sauce.”

Checking the photo of the menu Stew had helpfully attached to his email, the dish is listed as “Pork, kartoffel knodel, kale”, which doesn’t sound like the sort of dish you’d expect to arrive all gussied up. Potato dumplings are pretty rustic fare in any language.

I’m the first one to admit that appreciation of a dish starts with how it looks on the plate – who wants to eat something unattractive? - but a lot of chefs do seem to get carried away with style over substance. No wonder food is often only lukewarm by the time it arrives at the table when the kitchen staff have been drizzling, dolloping, deconstructing, garnishing and otherwise playing with it for the last five minutes.

As American TV cook and French cooking guru Julia Child once pointed out, if, “it's so beautifully arranged on the plate, you know someone's fingers have been all over it.”

One thing that particularly irks me are "stacks" – not honest to goodness ones made from manually placing elements of the dish on top of each other, but those perfectly round and compressed ones which you know they couldn't have created with the help of a mould. They may have been innovative in the late ‘90s but isn’t it time we moved on? I’d also like to see random sprigs of parsley/coriander consigned to the compost bin of life. No one eats them and they don’t add anything to dish, so what’s the point?

For me, food presentation should be honest, attractively supporting the main ingredients and style of cooking, without falling back on gimmicks to make the dish appear to be something that it’s not. At the end of the day, Shepherd’s pie is still shepherd’s pie, no matter how many micro-herbs and edible flowers it comes garnished with.

For some tips on what not to do, check out Traction man's very funny blog about hospital food in the UK.