Food plating is the process of arranging and decorating food to enhance its presentation. Improving the presentation of a dish adds value to the dining experience, and provides room for a higher mark-up on your food. This plays heavily on the cliché that we 'eat with our eyes', but it's also a trick which can play into your hands as a chef or restauranteur.
Sometimes the pressure of a busy service limits time for food plating, but techniques can still be swift and easy to follow if you have the right tools. Though a beautifully plated dish has many advantages, picture-perfect food is still no substitute for flavour. So how can you achieve the right balance of style and substance?
Why is Food Plating Important?
An attractive plate of food has many benefits for the chef, the establishment and the consumer. For the chef, it allows many creative possibilities, a chance to stamp their identity on the menu and create a signature dish. It is also a way to reintroduce flavours that work well together, and present them in a unique style. From the management side it can be a simple way to upscale ingredients and justify a higher price per head. Diners will also enjoy a better experience with a stunning plate of food appealing to their visual taste as well as their palette. Not all dishes require the most elaborate presentation, but a well presented dish can:
- Upscale food
- Enhance dining experience
- Build reputation
- Encourage creativity
- Increase profits
- Create free advertising
- Increase appetite
It's easier to identify the origins of a neatly presented plate of food, so it is more likely to stimulate the hunger response from your customers. The appearance of food is also a key element in marketing your menu. Without a stylist or photographer on hand, you can be sure that your diners will be keen to capture a great looking dish. You can encourage them to post images online and include the name of your restaurant. Use effectivelighting and fixtures within your dining space to make food more photogenic.
It's less likely that a well presented dish will be eaten in a rush. In this way, food plating is a powerful tool which is able to alter the perception of food. Similarly, children enjoy eating food that is fashioned into an interesting shape or design. Therefore food presentation can also encourage healthier eating, making it a useful trick to win the approval of kids or fussy eaters.
Food Plating Tools
Eating is an experience for all the senses, one that implores diners to discuss your food and keep coming back to relive it.The secret to this success is with a set of tools that lets chefs unleash their creative vision, produce various textures on the plate and create a wow factor.Even common utensils such as egg rings, spoons and zesters can be used to create interesting shapes, drizzle sauce on the plate and even bring a desert to life with an elegant garnish. However, to keep your presentation consistent with every service, specialist tools make life easier for chefs and ensure training is simpler than it might be.
Moulin, Chinois and Triturators
When it comes to fine dining, there are usually several items that you would expect to see on the plate. Normally a seasonal vegetable puree, a sear and crisp. At first glance, the puree looks simple, but the rich depth of flavour and silky smooth texture detected in the taste is best produced using amoulin or triturator. The triturator works by pressing and pulverising ingredients, a process that would be impossible to achieve by hand. The advantage of this is to extract every drop of juice and flavour into a fine paste, leaving only a small amount of fibrous waste behind. This is essential for making the purees, bisques and sauces that make the most impressive plates of food.
Squeeze Sauce Bottles
Smaller amounts of sauce look more interesting on the plate as well as adding colour. Parallel lines or those that connect can draw attention to a focal point. Droplets can have the same effect and work brilliantly with two different sauces. Using squeeze sauce bottles is the easiest way to achieve this, the thin nozzle is designed like a pen to give you greater accuracy as you draw lines or create droplets.
Saucier Spoons
Pulls are extremely popular in food plating, a pool of sauce has a spoon pulled through it to create a trail.When dressing mains or desserts, saucier spoons are a great way to control the flow of ingredients thanks to their tapered bowl, and the textured handled gives precision and control when creating visually arresting patterns on the plate.
Plating Brushes and Wedges
Plating brushes and wedges come in many shapes and styles, so you can produce the desired pattern on the plate. Angled sawtooth brushes and horseshoe wedges provide controlled and consistent alternatives to pulls, they allow you to paint any shape or pattern. These are the ultimate in creative plating tools, allowing you to produce an exceptionally unique and attractive dish to call your own.
Food Plating Tips
Presentation can help sell items on your menu and create some anticipation of the food before it arrives. Food plating techniques have very general design principles, because choosing how to plate a dish is very personal to each chef. Therefore, the following methods can serve as a source of inspiration rather than a guide. You can also take a look at our food presentation page to discover the best tableware to match with your food.
Tableware
Sometimes it pays to be bold when choosing the right plates for your food. Natural slate is often reserved for sushi and tapas but there is no reason it can't be used to serve your entrees as well. Its jagged edges and sleek platform make a contrasting canvas beneath brightly coloured vegetables and seafood.
Tip: When it comes to food plating, crockery matters. The shape and colour of plates is itself a trend, find out more in our article on the shape of plates which explains the impact of plate shapes on food presentation.
Focal Point
Most commonly, the focal point of any dish is the protein whether its grilled steak, surf 'n' turf, or seared scallops. In this way, vegetables, starch and sauce play a supporting role to the main attraction. You can also use precision spoons to draw designs which subtly point towards the meat or fish element of your dish, This can also be achieved with the natural shape of certain vegetables such as carrots or parsnips either pointing towards the focal point or vertically placed in a way that draws the eye towards it.
Playing With Textures
A contrast of textures tends to draw the eye, and satisfy the palette. Seared chicken with crispy skin, with the pure white of creme fresh set against finely chopped herbs is particularly striking, for example. This is even more effective if arranging food to include contrasting textures in every bite.
Height and scale
Building your dish with taller sections can point the diner's eye towards the protein of the dish. Raising or stacking vegetables is a great example, creating height and therefore more visual impact on the plate, it can be achieved easliy by using mousse ringsor pastry cutters to construct layers as desired.
Garnish for flavour
All too often garnishing is used purely for colour or visual 'pop' and not because they harmonize with the dish. For example when plating lamb, parsley sprigs which tend to be the go-to garnish whereas rosemary selected instead as it marries better with the taste of the lamb. Adding this level of detail takes no time with the right tools available and will only serve to enhance your presentation further.
Colour
The use of colour can be employed to highlight the strong points of a dish. Playing with the colour of a dish instantly switches the expectation and taste of the food, turning dining into a sensory experience. A mix of bright accent colours and neutral tones provides a pleasing contrast. Bring your plate to life with extra splashes of colour, using ingredients which are known to complement each other.
Tip: Dark brown and green colours absorb light, and therefore tend to look dull when captured in a picture.
Odd numbers
A simple but effective technique, odd numbers are preferred in plating because a lack of balance creates visual allure. Arrangements of three, five and seven tend to work best for visual style, whether its prawns, vegetables, scallops, ravioli or pork belly cubes, for example.
Edible garden
Micro herbs and flowers can transform the appearance of your food, but it's easy to add pretty garnishing for nothing other than colour. Garlic chives are a great example of edible flowers, they have an attactive white or purple colour anda great flavour.
Tip: Use garnish tweezers to handle delicate flowers and herbs as not to disturb petals and help them retain their colour for longer.
Less Is More
A dish is often improved by losing one component rather than gaining one. Especially when it comes to multiple courses, a meal should contain enough to make diners crave just one more bite. So portion size is important as well as the number of components in the dish.
Food Plating Trends
It's not just the dining table where you can find ideas for food presentation. Plating trends are plentiful and have many wider applications including buffet display and shop windows. Like any art form, influences can be drawn out from the most abstract stimulus and there is always room for fresh ideas.
Vertical forms
One of the best known plating trends, vertical forms can include sculptures, and foods built up in layers to create height. This plating trend is a very striking way to present your food to diners. But it can be applied to almost any dish, for example vegetables or shrimps can be layered over a piece of meat, fish or polenta at a 45 degree angle to create this effect.
Scaling
Another popular food plating trend is a technique which involves arranging food into a pattern similar to thescales of a fish. Some examples of scaling use potatoes, fruit, thinly sliced fish or flower petals carefully arranged in layers to give this appearance.
Clock face
Known as classical plating, imagining the plate as a clock face when arranging food was made popular during the 1960s, but is still commonly used today. From the diner's point of view protein is between three and nine o'clock, starch or carbohydrate from nine to twelve and vegetables from twelve to three.
Nordic
A scandavian influenced, minimal style of plating food is one that is unlikely to drift out of fashion. This often involves using ingredients in their purest form and leaving plenty of space on the plate. Serving foraged produce found nearby is typical of this style, and depending on seasonality could include wild mushrooms, berries and herbs, forging a connection with the wild.
Angles
Do angles matter when plating food? According to an experiment by Charles Michel there is an overwhelming preference for items to be plated at zero degrees. So when plating a single crayfish or langoustine for example, face them towards twelve o'clock and arrange other elements in a cross-section to emphasize the angle.
Landscaping
Taking inspiration from landscape gardens not just a plating trend but has also been the influence for many items of tableware such as miniature watering cans which are ideal for serving chips, onion rings and other side dishes. Nature is beautifully simple yet complex the more you look, and this approach works incredibly well in food plating.
Free form
Free form plating is the ultimate abstract form of food presentation, best compared with the style of painting. There are no rules when it comes to free form, but it involves plating a dish in a seemingly random but intriguing way.
Tip: A strong, consistent theme running through your plating style helps it to be identified more easily. Ingredients can be repeated in a garnish, or sauce to emphasize your theme and ingredients.
