Sexy Plates

Thought you guys would appreciate this freakin beautiful plates... http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/04/most-beautiful-dishes-slideshow/slideshow/1/

Seriously nice stuff
Thanks for posting

All I can say is... WOW! I wish I had those kind of skills. Lol

While beautiful, the majority of those do not scream tasty to me ...

Watching this does not makes me want to eat it. It sure is food but that doesn't seems nourishing or appealing to me. I don't want to eat a "beautiful", well defined painting. I have to admit there is a LOT going on visually here.. I'm more interested by the taste and texture. It's nice to see a good plated dish but I don't like to focus too much energy on doing that. To me it's looking like food for someone on a diet or something, who would do that at home for a meal ? Just my point of view, to each his own.

Roger I hear where your coming from but the Chefs turning out these type of dishes are really not catering to the stuffed to the gills kind of dining. I think it's about creating something new that both visually artistic but still be a harmonious composed dish. I think it has its place. It takes huge effort and creativity. They have my respect but when I dine at Michelin stared restaurants I usually hit the Chinese buffet first. LOL

Remember when Nuvo Cuisine was the rage. Fine dining can have a moderate amount of food on the plate not enough to stuff your gills, but more than just a couple bites.

That river salmon from tru was a tough prep item, especially when we did it for 700 person charity event

Roger said:

Watching this does not makes me want to eat it. It sure is food but that doesn't seems nourishing or appealing to me. I don't want to eat a "beautiful", well defined painting. I have to admit there is a LOT going on visually here.. I'm more interested by the taste and texture. It's nice to see a good plated dish but I don't like to focus too much energy on doing that. To me it's looking like food for someone on a diet or something, who would do that at home for a meal ? Just my point of view, to each his own.

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I had the same thoughts. Very few of those were items I'd go out of my way to EAT. However, I think it would have been cool to have worked a line where we had THAT kind of time for plating. Even at the finest dining place I cooked, where we were dealing with insanely expensive product, I'd have been in the weeds by the second plate if I'd had to stop cooking long enough for some of those set-ups.

I hear about these places now with 10 seats or whatever, and at my age I think that may be more my style: taking all the time you need to put out one seating every few hours and just do it right instead of always walking that line of speed/precision. The bad part would be probably never wanting to eat what I was cooking.

Someday you will miss walking that line of speed/precision keeps your blood flowing. Time goes faster always better to be busy than slow.:jumpy:

i agree in some respects to these ideas expressed here. Some of these plates look just too pretty to eat too "artistic" etc.Most of these places have a slew of people working like drones for hours to make the mise en place happen for these plate ups . Trust me when i tell you that its not as easy to do covers doing this kind of food, and from experience i can tell you some is superficial in ways but some have the visual and depth of flavor to match and then some.So it really comes down to taste . Regardless you can judge all you want from a visual aspect but the reality will always be:"what does it taste like".

What really matters is that the ingredients should be pristine. The more pristine the ingredients the less you manipulate them in any way and the simplest the preparation will be. I actually prefer simple simple executions and my focus is impacting flavor and balance with others components , texture etc.

keithsaltydog said:

Someday you will miss walking that line of speed/precision keeps your blood flowing. Time goes faster always better to be busy than slow.:jumpy:

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I totally agree. When I left the industry years ago I purposely kept my brigade under-staffed so that I could pay my guys more money and never had to worry about idle time or busy work. We'd come in to work knowing that we were going to be weeded for the entire service and if our mise wasn't tight then we'd absolutely crash. I loved it and thrived on it.
I was just reflecting that now that I'm a bit older I don't know that I'd still pursue that level of production. I was getting to work with some really nice product and was putting out a ton of food, but the pace was usually such that it was all auto-pilot. My specials were the only time I could still get jazzed about what I was doing and had to really concentrate on the food.

The very first chef I worked for, back in the 90's, just reached out to me about getting back into the business and helping him with a potential new venture. I've been out for a WHILE now, and I'm having to soul-search on what type of pro kitchen would appeal to me at this point in my life.