What is the meaning of food plating?

•What does “plating” mean? In a

restaurant setting, “plating” refers to the
art of arranging, decorating, and
presenting food in a way that improves
its aesthetic appeal to the diner when
served.
• 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?

• While taste is important, food that is plated

and presented well is more attractive to
customers and can set the tone for the
entire restaurant. Presentation and plating
can draw attention to the specific
ingredients in a dish, whether for aesthetic
or practical reasons.
• 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:
• Enhance dining experience
• Build reputation
• Encourage creativity
• Increase profits
• Create free advertising
• Increase appetite
• Upscale food
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 rings or
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 and a 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 the scales 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.
8 Modern Food Plating Trends & Presentation Styles

•Landscape Technique. ...

•Food on organic materials
Technique. ...
•The Nordic Look Technique. ...
•Bathing Technique. ...
8 Modern Food Plating Trends & Presentation Styles cont.

•Free-form Technique. ...

•Futuristic Technique. ...
•Hide and Seek Technique. ...
•Super Bowl Technique.
1. Landscape Technique

Taking inspiration
from landscape
gardens, this linear
arrangement of food
is usually kept low
and long.
2. Free-form Technique
Like many modern
paintings, free form plating
may seem carelessly strewn
across a plate, but each
stroke and food placement is
carefully thought out to
create an abstract yet
intriguing “painting” on a
plate.
3. Food on organic materials Technique
Using organic materials
such as wood, slate and
stone as a plating
device lends a more
rustic and back-to-
nature feel to dishes.
4. Futuristic Technique

Making use of sleek

materials like metal, glass
and steel, futuristic
plating creates a cutting
edge and futuristic plating
like the example shown.
5. The Nordic Look Technique

Make ribbons or chunks

of vegetables and scatter
herbs on a dish to
garnish for seemingly
effortless style. ‘
6. Hide and Seek Technique

• Layering adds an element

of playfulness and surprise
to the dish. Think a puffed
rice cracker covering crab
meat, thinly sliced
radishes hiding a yummy
sea bass tartare...
7. Bathing Technique

Bathe fish in broth or sauce.

For example, these tortellini
with a shellfish sauce or
coquilles with chicory,
truffle foam, goat cheese and
shrimps.
8. Super Bowl Technique

Bowl food is a massive

trend, with cookbooks and
restaurants to match.
Try a more elegant styled
bowl; used for smaller
dishes, like starter or
entremets.
FINDING THE RIGHT PLATE

• Which plate you choose can make or break your dish, says South
African Chef Jack Coetzee. Try to avoid symmetry, it’s not very
interesting. And you need to create some height on your plate.
However, if you are blatantly going for symmetry, then you can get
away with it because it’s your intention. But the plates do look very
average if you’re trying to do something and you end up with it
looking symmetrical. You can follow his course on plating in our UFS
Academy for a more visual explanation.
• Here are a couple of take-outs he shares on the different shapes of
plates you can use and their possibilities to present your food.
Rectangular or elongated plate
Using a rectangualr plate is effective if you have lots of small
little garnishes that can wind their way through the length of the
plate, making it look like a garden.
Square plate
This is not the easiest shape to work with. You have to use the
Rule of Thirds, which is a theory dictating how an image (in
this case your plate) should be composed in order to create an
aesthetically pleasing result. You basically break your plate up
into a grid system of 9 block and try to avoid using the bull’s
eye itself because that’s a so-called dead spot. Also try not to
use any of the spots in the corners.
Round plate
These are most commonly used. The same rule applies to your
grid system on this plate, except you don’t have to worry about
all the dead corners. Try not to get anything in the middle unless
it’s deliberately in the middle.