Dish Presentation
“The days of dinner plates, soup dishes or dessert bowls are over. Nowadays, the serving dish is one of the recipe’s added values. Slate and cloth allow for absolute creativity”
The arrival of free cuisine has also affected the dishes, cutlery and the rest of the instruments that have traditionally adorned the table, constantly seeking to further stimulate the ability to surprise the diner. Nowadays, there are square plates or slate and other materials that serve to highlight the uniqueness of the product and the recipe. At the same time, cutlery is undergoing a transformation with the appearance of spatulas, tongs and skewers. In more or less casual formats, table linen is sometimes replaced with small, individual table mats when they are not done away with altogether. ()
The serving format in creative fine cuisine is part of the recipe or is even mistaken for it in an act of utmost daringness that has become less of a surprise. What’s more, it is now not so bizarre for the chef or the maître to instruct diners on how to eat certain products or recipes to draw the maximum sensorial potential from them. An example is
finger food, which is becoming more and more common on the menus of the most cutting edge restaurants. The very first was Ferran Adrià, who presented more than half of the exquisite elBulli menus without any cutlery at all, not even skewers to accompany the food. Delighting ourselves with these dishes that take us back to childhood has the playful and insignificant component of games, turning a culinary meeting at such an establishment into a sensorial feast.
Today’s Spanish fine cuisine flees from stuffiness and ridiculous lavishness as dining at one of these restaurants should be a memorable occasion, free from all tension. The nineteenth century rules are a thing of the past and the use of cutlery and dishes has been replaced with a much more open approach in which, all said and done, it is the restaurateur who lays down the rules.
What’s more, as cuisine develops on a stage in which the artistic component is more and more prominent, creators and designers from all origins update dishes and cutlery, drawing attention not only to the culinary contents, but also to the format.
What happened to culinary classicism? Needless to say, it seems to have been pushed aside in light of the emergence of absolute freedom at the table and in the utensils we need. However, classic will make a comeback. Before this happens, we will enjoy these breaths of fresh air that contemporary Spanish haute cuisine has bestowed on the world.
