Paulius Musteikis
Nostrano's Chocolate Ganache
It was bound to happen. During the Great Recession, restaurants that served precious, artfully constructed food shuttered their doors in droves. Comfort food came back with a vengeance, and chefs hung up their tweezers in favor of unfussy portions and honest fare. With the collapse, came populist “lowbrow” trends like nose-to-tail, shared plates and barbecue.
But then, as inevitably as spring fashion voids last year’s jeans, the current economic recovery has swung the pendulum back again. In part, it comes from fatigue — the butcher-chic aprons, the loud feeding troughs in which diners are expected to rub greasy elbows with strangers — have gone stale. And with the burnout, beautifully plated food has returned.
But the switch back to artfulness isn’t entirely the result of an economic mood swing or boredom. Social media has made food’s visual appeal go hyperactive in the last few years. The phenomenon is perhaps most obvious on Instagram, which has become the thrilling, à la minute chef and pro-foodie platform. When pictures were posting from René Redzepi’s five-week Noma popup in Tokyo, salivating diners and chefs from around the world took it all in, one glorious eyeful at a time. It was a global event, a veritable looking (as opposed to feeding) frenzy.
“It’s one of the best things that has ever happened to the art of food,” says Dan Fox, chef of Heritage Tavern. “In the past, in order to see what was happening, you’d have to buy an expensive book. Now, any kid on Instagram can see it and get inspired.”
The shift toward social media, and the attention to how a dish will look online, has had a very real impact on chefs and restaurants.
“We try to post at least a picture a day,” says chef Michael Pruett of Cento. “We do rustic Italian, but we think about how to make our food clean-looking and focused.”
Pruett, who cut his chef teeth in Los Angeles, cites Jean-Louis Palladin and his protégé Andrew deGroot for getting him into fine plating. “I think about things like how, for instance, a cut of meat will look on a white plate,” says Pruett, “and how we’d like a gray or wood bowl if we have white pasta.”
In an increasingly competitive dining market, local chefs feel the compulsion to post eye-catching pictures of well-plated food for the simple reason that diners respond to them.
“We’ll see people [come in] literally an hour after posting,” to order that same dish, says Dan Fox, who also uploads dishes regularly to both Facebook and Instagram. “I like food on the plate to be exciting and alive, but natural and not forced,” he says.
Fox credits his love of an “organic and flowing style” to his early interest in sculpture: “I love height on food, and I love negative space,” he continues. “But we also take into consideration if it will make it to the table correctly, and how a diner will eat the dish. It needs to work.”
Tim Dahl, chef at Nostrano, agrees: “I can’t stand it when a dish requires diners to scrape their plate or chop loudly,” he says. “You don’t want to hear banging or see confusion.” One-half of a husband-and-wife team, Dahl demurs when asked about plating, saying, “Elizabeth is the maestro.”
Paulius Musteikis
Nostrano’s Elizabeth Dahl demonstrates the meticulous work that goes into her stunning chocolate ganache. First, she transfers frozen marshmallows onto the ganache and toasts them with a butane torch.
Elizabeth Dahl, like Dan Fox, had an early interest in studio art before pursuing a career in the kitchen. “We use plates that are a little larger than necessary,” she says, “because we like to play off the negative space; it’s cool. Sometimes diners perceive that as a smaller portion, but we’re doing it for aesthetic reasons.”
Paulius Musteikis
Then she uses a squeeze bottle to carefully apply droplets of persimmon sauce.
The Dahls describe their style as “refined rustic,” an organic-looking, free-form kind of plating where colors and textures complement and contrast with each other in an eye-catching arrangement. They aren’t afraid if it looks spare. The results are stunning. Known for her desserts, Elizabeth Dahl’s chocolate ganache looks like a tiny forest floor scene — if the forest were populated by pâtissier wood sprites.
At Osteria Papavero, one of Madison’s most eye-catching plates has little or no negative space. The large charcuterie board arrives as a work of art made from house-cured meats, an eye-popping adventure. Also rustic Italian in bent, Papavero’s dishes — daily rotating specials noted on a chalkboard — are frequently plated beyond expectation. Matthew Schieble, who recently spent time at Chicago’s two Michelin-starred restaurant Acadia (known for its exceptionally beautiful presentations), explains: “The recipes come from chef Francesco Mangano, and there isn’t a ton of room for interpretation, but sometimes we do go nuts with how we present it.”
Paulius Musteikis
Next, she uses a mandolin to thinly slice a fuyu persimmon, then curls the slices into little cones and places them on the cake.
Schieble feels it’s “disrespectful to the ingredients if you don’t plate them artistically. You eat with your eyes first — something should look beautiful and then taste beautiful, too.”
The small team at Papavero under Mangano uses a variety of dish shapes — long and sleek rectangles, squares, bowls and boards — as backdrops for its creations. “Pasta can be hard to raise up beyond a certain point aesthetically,” says Schieble, “but come in and order a salad.”
Paulius Musteikis
Clusters of granola are placed on the ‘blank spaces’ of the ganache. Last, she lays a quenelle of Ceylon cinnamon gelato on a next of a nest of streusel.
Standing with the chef team of Jonny Hunter, Tim Smith and Dylan Carlson in the Underground Food Collective’s enormous commissary kitchen is to understand just how much material the group’s restaurant, Forequarter, gets to work with. The kitchen functions as a lab, where ideas sprout organically like mushrooms after a rain, and experiments conducted out of sheer curiosity may or may not find their way onto Forequarter’s signature wooden boards.
“Social media is how Underground grew up,” says Hunter. “We know that today if it doesn’t happen on social media, it isn’t real.” To that end, the group posts to Facebook and Instagram frequently, often taking it a step further to show the behind-the-scenes action that customers love. “We like to show the process,” Hunter adds, “whether it’s on a farm, or pictures of tearing-down a side of beef.”
The Forequarter plating process begins with color. “We’ll notice a lot of blues in winter,” says chef Tim Smith, “like blue potatoes, or we’ll manipulate color with fermentation. We build from lots of ingredients on hand, and compose a dish from them organically.”
For an example of an eye-catching dish grown out of the kitchen, a recent skate wing with buttermilk pudding arrives with slices of chorizo propped up on the plate to give the skate an airy, architectural aspect. When you see it, your mind might snap to the angel-on-the-statue image from the Wim Wenders film Far Away, So Close!, or a building by Santiago Calatrava. Not your typical Midwestern food associations. The hungry mind wants to know what is happening on the plate; the experience is captivating to more senses than just taste. “Why don’t we judge plates in terms of art criticism?” muses Hunter.
But maybe no Madison chef has mined the power of social media as much as Patrick DePula of Salvatore’s Tomato Pies. DePula has created a tidal wave of interest for his from-scratch, market-driven pizzas (from restaurants in Sun Prairie and now on East Johnson Street) due in large part to pictures posted on Facebook.
“It’s gotten to the point that when I don’t post the evening’s special, people call to complain,” says DePula. He understands why some restaurants let their social media presences slide. “It’s labor intensive. I have a new special, I’m prepping it, I’m thinking how it will look, and then I hurry and shoot it maybe five minutes before opening. It’s a lot.”
Not a professionally trained chef, DePula took inspiration from Joe’s Tomato Pies in New Jersey, the pizza he grew up with, and set out to “do one thing very well.” That is farm-to-table pizza — although Sal’s has a growing reputation for wildly inventive tacos with ingredients like pig face.
“I like food to be eye-catching,” DePula says. “I like color and composition, things that look like fallen leaves, organic and natural. I shop at the farmers’ market thinking about layers of color and texture.”
A notable example of Sal’s style is a sausage pizza with purple Romanesco broccoli that DePula created this past fall. The photo of it picked up shares and likes faster than a post of a Kardashian without clothing.
“The return rate on Facebook, and especially Instagram, is incredible,” says DePula. “I like beautiful food. Turns out, everyone does. And pizza dough happens to be my plate.”
