We eat with our eyes. Plating presses the three key buttons of pleasure: expectation, experience and memory, as identified by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003). Thus, deciding how the food will be arranged on a plate is almost like painting a blank canvas: the placement of each element responds to visual and aesthetic factors but must also respect organoleptic criteria because it influences our perception of flavors and textures. For this reason, the fries and the salad surround or are on one side of the sirloin and the fillet and thus prevents it from softening under it and that is why we grate the cheese on the pasta and not on the side, to be able to enjoy the combination of flavors in one bite.

In Plating manifesto (Flavour, 2014, 3:6), Ophelia Deroy, Charles Michel, Betina Piqueras-Fiszman and Charles Spence remind that “plating should not be seen only as something decorative but as an integral part of the multisensory experience of eating.” ”. Cleaning the edges of the plate to avoid stains from unexpected splashes, using bottles or sleeves to shape sauces, using molds, putting micro sprouts or flowers and using precision tweezers as if you were building the gear of a clock are some of the things that today we pay attention to when plating. “Plating has become central to the gastronomic experience and should be recognized as a driver of culinary creation and as a centerpiece of the reception of a dish,” the authors state.

But plating, of course, has not always had the same importance. Although in Roman banquets dishes were decorated with precious stones, in the Song (960-1279 AD) and Ming (1368-1644 AD) dynasties the presentations were meticulously thought out and even intricate sculptures of carved fruits and vegetables were prepared, as well as as dishes that, because they were inscribed with slogans of prosperity (???? ‘wàn shòu wú ji?ng’ or “may you enjoy infinite longevity)”, their ingredients or the ways in which they were cut had a specific symbolism, and Marie Antoine Carême ( 1784-1833) drew on his passion for architecture to design monumental dishes, such as the croquembouche, the conscientious plating began to spread from his successor, Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935).

Escoffier, “king of cooks and chef to kings,” as the press of the time nicknamed him, cooked for numerous banquets in which the food was served from large trays that came from rooms far from the dining room where the agape took place. . Perhaps that’s why it occurred to him that finishing some dishes in the room itself would be perfect to achieve a certain immediacy and a better temperature, and that forced him to think about what each individual dish should be like.

Behind him, the chef Fernand Point laid the foundations of the nouvelle cuisine that would take off with Bocuse: simplicity, elegance, seasonal ingredients. All of this, in the 60s, would be magnified by immense dishes that helped focus the gaze on the gastronomic elaboration in front of us, although it also increased the cliché that haute cuisine left diners (and their pockets) hungry.

Minimalism, deconstruction, landscaping, color blocks, symmetry or asymmetry, profuse decoration with a dozen ingredients and even giving an interactive quality to the dishes (from breaking a yolk to the cloud that rains on the Forest Lluvioso, by Jordi Roca in El Celler de Can Roca) are some of the styles and techniques that currently dominate the plating scene. Peak Magazine established its own chronology: in the 60s-70s there was the rule of putting 3 or 5 elements on the plate, always odd; in the 80s and 90s, a minimalism influenced by Japanese, whose traditional cuisine foresees a strict plating of many of its recipes, from sushi to gohan to bento; In the 2000s, the trend emerged to superimpose recipes like small towers; between 2006 and 2009, spherification, foams and other elaborations of molecular cuisine triumphed; and from 2010, the conceptual.

In between, the more rustic plating, symmetry and asymmetry, precious metals like gold leaf have returned; The slate tables have been discarded and the Carthusian dishes with romanticist motifs have been recovered; It has been plated directly on the table, like Grant Achatz at Alinea, on the diner’s own hand, like Dabiz Muñoz, or on the mold of a face, like Andoni Luis Aduriz at Mugaritz. The design of the plate has been put at the service of nutrition, with the famous Harvard Plate and the Nordic landscapes dreamed of by René Redzepi have been recreated in Noma. And even Karlos Arguiñano’s sprig of parsley has been recovered.