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When art meets food on a plate
Summary
Art has inspired gourmet menus around the globe and in India, it's everywhere
Ever felt like the food at restaurants is almost too pretty to eat? You’re not the only one. I’m all too familiar with the existential dread of biting into something beautiful, knowing well that I’m demolishing the work of an enterprising chef who worked long and hard to present a delicious work of art on the plate. Of course, once it’s on your tongue, another kind of craft unfolds, but I get ahead of myself.
About 10 years ago, scientists from Oxford used the old saying “cooking is the art we eat" to test how diners reacted to food presented differently. The study, titled A Taste of Kandinsky, used Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky’s Painting Number 201 as inspiration to design a salad resembling the abstract artwork and explore how the presentation of food affects the dining experience. Sixty participants were given one of three salads containing identical ingredients, arranged either to resemble the Kandinsky painting, a regular tossed salad, or a “neat" formation where each component was spaced away from the others. As you can guess, participants rated the Kandinsky-inspired salad higher for “tastiness", suggesting the likelihood of them willing to pay a higher price for a dish that required more effort to put together.
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In the fine-dining world, it’s no secret that chefs have long been inspired by the works of great artists. Massimo Bottura, the much loved Italian chef who runs the Michelin-starred Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, is known most famously for his Beautiful Psychedelic Veal, Not Flame-Grilled, a gastronomic masterpiece whose presentation draws from English artist Damien Hirst’s iconic Veil paintings.
In Alba, Enrico Crippa, an Italian chef helming Piazza Duomo, serves Panna Cotta Matisse, a nod to French artist Henri Matisse’s painting L’escargot. From Chicago, chef Grant Achatz of the three-Michelin starred Alinea, made waves years ago when he introduced his now-famous and often-replicated Paint dessert, which he serves on a canvas laid right on the table, and “draws" the dessert together with diners.
In Hong Kong, chef Vicky Lau of Tate Dining Room uses her background in design to create visual and textural dishes, full of flavour. Lau trained in graphic design before venturing down the path of gastronomy, so she conceives her dishes as “stories that can be eaten", drawing inspiration from Eastern and Western philosophies of art. For Tate’s autumn season menu, Lau presents a vibrant dish by encasing fresh crab and caviar within a white sphere, surrounded by swirls of vividly coloured oils.
While connections and parallels are often drawn between art and fine dining, chefs in India look outside their windows to be inspired. At the now shuttered Smoke House Room, Delhi, chef Gresham Fernandes, who helms Bandra Born in Mumbai, created a dish named A Gathering of Mushrooms that mimicked the way fungi grow out of an edible log of wood in nature. At his most recent collaboration with Trèsind Studio in Dubai, Fernandes and chef Himanshu Saini pulled from the great outdoors for creative plating ideas. Says Fernandes, “I’m heavily inspired by nature—a lot of my presentation reflects how I make those connections in my head about how a dish looks and how it’s supposed to make you feel."
At Bengaluru’s Farmlore, chef Johnson Ebenezer and team designed a series of dramatic-looking plates for a World Biodiversity Day menu in May, to raise awareness among guests about the need to protect the nine biodiversity spots across the globe. Farmlore’s plates evocatively mimic everything from forest fires to ocean oil spills to tell a larger story about the state of the planet. Seataphor, for example, is a metaphor for how we corrupt the ocean with plastic and oil spills, crafted creatively with Kochi snapper, edible plastic, spirulina blue algae and a charcoal oil slick.
At Avatara, a vegetarian fine-dining space in Mumbai, chef Rahul Rana pulls from the Mahabharat for the dish Krishna Phal, which is crafted with passion fruit, spiced guava water, and strawberry chutney. It mirrors the natural beauty of the lotus and references the Pandavas and Krishna.
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Recently, Sage & Saffron founder and restaurateur Aditi Dugar launched a “Raindrop" confection. Designed by Bangkok-based Thai patissier Dej Kewkacha, each palm-sized orb contains a single flower in the centre: sakura, rose, jasmine or orchid, made from gluten- and gelatin-free ingredients.
In India’s regional dishes too, technique, design and craftsmanship dance together. The foremost example of this craftsmanship on a plate is arguably Bengal’s gohona bori. A crispy, savoury snack made by freehand designs of urad dal batter, bori is fashioned into edible pieces of jewellery, a sleight of hand skill that’s passed on through generations of women. Gohona translates to jewellery in Bengali, a nod to the culinary art of creating earrings, pendants and tiaras to crunch into during a meal. So goes the story that when Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore was presented with a box of gohona boris, he had them photographed and displayed as exhibits at the Kala Bhavana in Shantiniketan. Down south, in Karnataka, sakkare acchu or sugar candies made painstakingly with clarified sugar syrup, water and milk before being poured into intricate wood-carved moulds is another work of art that delights young children during Makar Sankranti.
In the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, ghughuti or jaggery-infused dough is conjured into oddball shapes and deep-fried. These fritters are strung into garlands with popcorn and oranges that children are made to wear. On Makar Sankranti, these edible garlands are fed to crows. Legend has it that the practice began to celebrate the humble crow when the clever bird saved a king from being murdered by alerting him of his minister’s evil intentions.
In India, where food is such a big part of how we express ourselves, there’s a larger history linked to seasons, culture, tradition, femininity, storytelling and values embedded in our culinary legacy that goes beyond the look, form and presentation of a dish. What story does your plate hold today?
Word of Mouth is a monthly column on dining out and dining well. Smitha Menon is a food journalist, India’s only 50 Best Tastehunter and the host of the Big Food Energy podcast. She posts at @smitha.men on Instagram.
