It’s not just ingredients that make a dish trendy
“Great chefs love fashion,” says Boston Public’s Pino Maffeo. “And great food, like great fashion, goes through time warps where something that was perfect a year or two ago is totally unstylish today.” Although edible fashion isn’t as fickle as the wearable kind, just as the popular fit of a pair of jeans and the length of a skirt evolve from season to season and year to year, so does the aesthetic of food presentation. Since we eat not just with our mouths but with our eyes, most of us develop a pretty reliable food “fashion sense” fairly early on. So is there a current food fashion trend — or something that’s decidedly not fashionable these days? We’ve had vertical food, squiggly food, fanciful food. We’ve had busy plates, simple plates, and dishes with foams and aerosols. What’s in now?
In a word: less. Less frou-frou. Fewer ingredients. Simple techniques. Smaller portions. Balance, harmony, and respect for the ingredients. Legal Sea Foods chef Jeff Tenner calls “foams and manipulated looks so last year.” Deconstructed presentations and tall plates are also passé. What’s in now, says Tenner, are dishes that are “ingredientcentric.” That squares with my observations. Take a look at high-end food photography, such as the covers of Gourmet and Food & Wine magazines. Gone are the towers and poufs. The chicken looks like chicken, the veggies are bright and crunchy, the desserts look like something you might make at home if you’d been born with the baking gene. How we see fine food photographed, as with models on the runway, molds our vision of what’s fashionable.
As it turns out, many chefs have design talents that rival their palates and technical mastery. A dish is their canvas. But artistry alone isn’t sufficient when you want your diners to clean their plates. The objective is harmony: an artful balance of flavors, textures, colors, shapes, ingredients, and technique. Beautiful dishes don’t happen by accident. How to plate a dish is a highly conscious decision — and process — for many chefs. Peter Eco, executive chef at 33 Restaurant & Lounge, likes to turn a plate and look at it from multiple angles. “I ask myself, how will the plate look in the dining room, and how does the plate eat?” he says. “How hard do I want the diner to work to eat their food? Is the tuile too thick? Is the bacon too big and bulky, requiring excessive biting and chewing? If a person is righthanded, chances are they will eat what is on the right side of the plate first. I try to take this into account and then decorate the plate. Some dishes I splay out on the plate and garnish lightly; o hers I stack vertically.”
Pino Maffeo agrees. “The manner in which a modern, intelligent chef plates is a way of telling the diner how to eat the food,” he says. “You have to look at the dish to decode the way the chef hopesyou will eat it. If the purée is under the protein, or the sauce on top of it, the chef is signaling that you should eat them together in one bite. If the sauce is a long squiggle that cuts across the plate— we call it the ‘swoosh,’ after the Nike logo — then the chef wants you to dip each forkful in the sauce. If the plate is a play on color — like lots of different greens — or on different textures such as foam, sponge, gelée, or a crispy thing on top, that’s telling you something, too. For most cuttingedge chefs, every dish is a play on different elements of shape, color, texture, temperature. But if the meal doesn’t taste delicious and if the presentation distracts you from your table conversation, the chef has lost his way.”
Indeed: no food fashion is a success unless the diners buy in. Boston plates used to be constrained by a perception of “value” coming from jumbo portions of protein and mounds of many foods on each plate. But we’ve moved on from that mentality. “For many years, diners felt ripped off if their plate didn’t look big enough or wasn’t piled high with mashed potatoes,” says Dante chef/owner Dante deMagistris. “Today, the idea is to fill you up with food that is stylish and a little sexy, and that satisfies you. It’s not about how big it looks.”
On the other hand, there are classic dishes, just as there is classic fashion, like the blue blazer or the little black dress. Steakhouses stay true to classics with a nod here or there. And even tall food can be classic in its own way. Peter Eco recalls that chef Alfred Portale of New York’s Gotham Bar & Grill “essentially invented vertical food with his composed salad. To this day, his dinner salad still stands a good five inches or more and looks wonderfully dramatic. Some would say it is passé, but I think it still looks beautiful and impressive.” And that’s worth something. After all, food could taste just as wonderful and be just as nutritious if we ate with our eyes closed, but who wants pleasure without a side dish of style?
Louisa Kasdon can be reached at food@stuffatnight.com.
