Reddit reviews Cooking to the Image: A Plating Handbook

Cooking to the Image: A Plating Handbook

I personally know the author and have taken a class about menus and plating from her. This is my personal opinion, not just free publicity for her book, but she is one of the most brilliant chefs I know and knows so much about food and the restaurant industry as a whole. She was the exec chef of Le Perroquet in Chicago and is a serious badass in the kitchen. Anyway, this book goes into great detail about all the plating styles, going back to uber-traditional Escoffier styles of service and plating, all the way to modern styles (at the time of publication, 2012). I highly recommend reading this through and getting an understanding of how plating has evolved and how all the styles and designs are related and are still present even in modern plating. Getting a foundation in older styles of plating will allow you to move forward with modern design, and the same can be said of cooking in general: learning and mastering classic French cooking as a foundation to step up to modern gastronomy will yield much better results than just leaping to modern.

Hope this helps!