How local chefs bring art to their culinary presentations
This fall, the chefs at Easy Bistro are serving up delicious fine art, creating food that is as pleasing to the eye as it is to the palette. The most crucial part of their visual presentation of culinary masterpieces is the plating process. Sous Chef Benjamin Lee Park is an expert at placing food on the plate, and has become locally famous for his edible compositions.
Before working as sous chef at Easy Bistro, Ben was sous chef at St. John’s and went to UTC for painting and drawing. His experience as a fine artist informs his plating, as does his knowledge of painters and art theory.
“For me, plating involves a lot of playing with space, movement on the plate, and visual weight,” he explains. “A lot of the post-war modernists influence my work: Jasper Johns, DeKooning, Rothko, and of course Jackson Pollock, who was basically the inventor of the sauce throw. A lot of the way they play with the space of the canvas itself really translates into plating, where you put the food, and how you create movement.”
Ben’s colleague Brennen McKay is also part of the modernist culinary movement, and draws a lot of influence from chefs like Curtis Duffy and Grant Achatz. He uses the bistro’s kitchen to practice various forms of molecular gastronomy, using different compounds to change the texture and interpretation of the food.
“It’s all about changing the way people perceive the food,” he says. “For instance, we sometimes take ingredients that have a low calcium content, add calcium lactate, and put that into a sodium alginate solution. Doing this, we can transform something like a simple cranberry juice into a Jello-like pudding. We made orange creamsicle gushers, taking something that is traditionally supposed to be frozen, and delivering it in a liquid-filled orb.”
For certain desserts, he produces a flavored sugar glass, similar to what is used for special effects in films. He creates this edible stained glass by reducing a flavoring with maltose, and baking it. A lime essence causes a light green color, like cathedral glass.
Platforms like Instagram have entirely changed the culinary world. There is now a network of international chefs, and though they may not know each other personally, they all see each other’s work. Instead of waiting for a chef’s cookbook to come out to see how they plate dishes, they can see it immediately on Instagram.
Many chefs in the last 15 to 20 years have taken industrial applications and applied them to the culinary arts to create different surfaces and textures.
“Like with Rauschenberg’s work, using the idea of assemblages, we are creating pieces to work with,” Ben explains. “These may not be the dish as a whole, but the forms we have created are as important as the dish itself.”
The ingredients used at Easy Bistro are all influenced by the season, and most important to the chefs is what’s growing locally.
“We may want to play with strawberries, but if they’re not in season, we don’t use them,” Ben elaborates. “With it being fall right now, we’ve got a lot of great colors to work with, beets providing red colors, carrots providing orange, squashes providing yellow.”
Speaking about his process of combining these ingredients, he tells us about keeping the essence of the dish. “You don’t manipulate something for no reason. Never change it just because you can change it—change it because it will be favorable, because it will accentuate something about the dish. Inherently, it may already be there, you’re just making it greater. I get to the essence of the ingredients I’m working with, and do whatever it takes to make that apparent on the plate.”
The staff at Easy Bistro works very closely with local ceramicists, mainly McQueen Pottery out of Knoxville, and Annie Hanks Ceramics. They recently did a photo shoot with Annie Hanks, showcasing their new line of food along with the studio’s new pottery. They use a variety of plates, with various shapes from round to square, and sometimes even a lid from a cast iron Dutch oven.
“You have a limited amount of time, to use the plate as your canvas,” says Brennan. “I make something that I would want to see on my plate. I add whatever oil, powder, or garnish, and that one little leaf that holds everything together. You let the plate guide the way.”
To make it as simple as possible to understand, Brennan says it all boils down to four simple words: “Think fast, plate weird.”