Basic Plating

"Plating" is the fancy word for putting food on a plate.  It's considered as much a part of a restaurant's menu as the food itself.  You want the food to look at least as good as it tastes.  There is often an employee called the "expeditor" whose function is to check the appearance of an item before it leaves the kitchen.  They wipe off stray bits of sauce, add a final garnish, and make sure the temperature is appropriate.

Some restaurants lately have taken the concepts of plating and presentation to extremes.  The presentation should not overshadow the food itself.  Bubbles of ganache that house mint-infused CO2?  Truffle foam?  That's not food, it's performance art.  That said, there are some practices from finer restaurants that can be applied at home.

The simplest is putting food on the plate in a clean and organized manner.  Not only does it reduce sibling quarrels over who got the biggest piece, it looks nice.  I use this technique a lot when I do cold dinners, arranging the different pieces of the tapas into their own areas of the plate.

Generally, the central focus of the dish should be either in the middle of the plate or the spot closest to the diner.  I'm left-handed, so I tend to put it in the 8 o'clock position, nearest to the hand holding the fork.  You'll notice the edge of the table in the above photo.  Tilt your head a little to the right, and the meatballs are at 8 o'clock.  If you use formal-style table manners, you're holding the fork in your left hand when you cut, so that's still a thing.  I learned how to use the knife with my right hand and don't have to switch.

Garnishes don't have to be parsley.  I made some lemon meringue tarts on a whim to use up pie crust, and garnished the plate with a few grapes.  An already above-average tea treat went gourmet in five seconds.

Negative space is a technique I don't use all that often because it requires a plate larger than the food needs.  I generally do portion control when I plate something, and using a large plate runs counter to that.  I went hunting through my photos and found a decent picture of the concept in yam toasts.  If I'd garnished the board with raisins or some kind of sauce, you'd get a better idea.

I'm not a huge fan of using height as a presentation tool.  If something falls between plating and setting down the dish, it just ends up looking sloppy.  The easiest example of this is leaning ribs or chops up against each other so the bone sticks up.  Here's a photo of doing it with scones.

You could get height by sticking a spring of garnish that stands up, by using a stemmed goblet instead of a soup bowl, and by making a stacked dish like a sandwich.  Again, I don't really care how tall my food is.  It's just another presentation option.

The timing of this post is a good reminder of presentation during holiday parties, but these techniques can be applied to any meal.  Cut a PB&J in a new way and you've made your kid a special treat.  Set up plates instead of serving family-style and a weekday meal feels unique.  A meal can be as interesting as you feel like making it, even something as boring as mac-and-cheese out of a box.