Culinary schools (and every Food Network reality show) make a big to-do about how food is
“plated”---the restaurant term for how food looks on a plate.
I’ve seen chefs lose their
minds over baby carrots that were sliced just a half-a-fingernail-size too
thick.
I’ve also seen customers
ooh-and-aah over a plate that looked (as Andy Warhol used to say of Edie
Sedgwick) “Beeee-u-ti-ful!”
Okay. I mean---I “get it”.
I get that it helps if food
looks appetizing and appealing. Americans
aren’t the most adventurous of eaters so you’ve got to give them something
shiny.
But I’ve never been dazzled
by three slivers of paper-thin parsnips and some foam.
Frankly, the whole foam
trend makes me a little ill. I don’t
care what the flavor is, it just looks like a dog spit up on my plate.
But I’ve seen foodies and
Yelpers go bananas over this stuff.
Cell phones pop
out for some tableside glamour shots and are immediately tweeted out to their
followers---the majority of whom are too busy with their own fabulous lives to
care about an Instagram photo of a filet of John Dory and some purée.
But just then, chefs poke
their over-worked and brain-addled heads thru the kitchen door with the kind of
twitch that can only come from stress and too much cheap kitchen wine. They suddenly turn into Eric Roberts in Star 80 watching their whore being
photographed poorly in the nude by Hugh Hefner and go into an epileptic fit because
the food runner accidentally presented the plate with the protein at 3 o’clock
instead of the classical 6 o’clock position.
“Goddamnit! What fucking idiot puts the chicken on the
right? What the fuck? I can’t work with this shit!!!!!!”
And then he storms out and uses
it as an excuse to go outside for a smoke break.
But yesterday I had one of
THE most delicious things I’ve ever eaten that looked like crap on a
plate. Our Dominican dishwasher
explained that it’s called “Pasteles en hoja” and is a traditional Dominican
holiday dish.
Plantains and ground meat
and spices wrapped in banana leaves? I
grabbed a tasting spoon and dove right in!
The amount of love that goes
into a dish like this is astounding.
Something only a retired grandmother could make.
It contains some
hard-to-find ingredients like plantains, malangas, auyama, banana leaves, and
West Indian spices.
Luckily I live in a
Dominican neighborhood where I can find ALL these ingredients. I WILL make this! Because it totally rocks.
And luckily I have a little
something called faith.
Because for once, I’m not
going to blame my lousy cell phone camera----this dish looked pretty
nasty.
But I ate it.
And my faith was rewarded.
However, PLEASE don’t tell
your chef friends about this dish. They’ll
only spend hours trying to figure out a way to fuck it all up.
