Best of Budapest: What determines the way a dish is served and it looks?
Frigyes Vomberg: This issue is more complicated that one would think. It is important who the regular customers are, what the spirit of the place is: one should know what the customers’ preferences are, what their expectations are when they enter the restaurant. Taking the order is a determining moment: that is when the customer may request changes. The way of serving could be greatly determined by the personality of the chef. In France, you can often identify the chef who had prepared the food just by looking at the way of serving. In Hungary, this is not yet the case but there are exceptions. However, it is very important that the chef does not serve for his own sake as the issue in question is a dish and not a piece of art. The impact of how it looks is greatly affected by the tableware. However, you can perform good serving without proper pieces of equipment – but not without a proper chef personality!
BoB: Is it only the look that’s important?
FV: The look and the flavor are just as important at serving!
BoB: Do you say this as a food stylist?
FV: Yes, but it is not proper for a restaurant to think with the mind of a food stylist, this must not be done. I’m talking now from the viewpoint of the restaurant. A food stylist is a job created by the advertising industry. I set meals for photo or movie shooting. There, it is not that much important how long that given dish had been on the plate, what it tastes like… the only thing that matters is that it should look fantastic. I do not reflect or map reality.
In catering, in a restaurant, however, you must prepare edible, delicious and good-looking meals! You must maintain a permanent high standard and show the real beauty. You can make a meal of medium level more attractive by good serving but if it is not served properly, customers will definitely not be satisfied.
BoB: When do you say the flavors are delicious? Each dish has its own individual harmony of flavors…
FV: First of all, the flavors of the meal should be clean, understandable and harmonic. The ruling flavor should not be determined by the number of boxed spices found in the kitchen! In order to continuously maintain customers’ interests while the courses are coming one after each other, emphasis should not only be put on how the food looks. What’s more, it is sometimes not even enough if all the courses are delicious, you must give something extra. And that something is a play with textures. If we have a fixed order of meals, we can play with the difference of the meals following each other:
It tastes different to have soup, puree, meat, ice-cream in that order.
Photo by: Zoltán Komáromi
However, we can also change the texture within a definite course: for example, the cucumber served as a side dish could have three different textures. It could be, for instance, salty, somewhat warm slices of cucumber, cucumber cream, cucumber sauce or can even appear in jelly format on the plate of the customer. If we play with different textures, softness, creaminess, crunchiness, solidness…, we have an impact on the tasting organs in a way that they do not get tired, and the tasting experience is going to be longer lasting and more intensive.
However, it is also worth mentioning that serving is not a miracle in itself. It only helps if we work with proper basic materials and good chefs!
BoB: Please give example for definitely wrong directions!
FV: There are smaller restaurants where you can still see inedible, meaningless decorations. It looks amateurish when they pour dry parsley on the edge of the plate. It is the same when you can find dry tomato peel on the plate, or – just for the sake of decoration, making things on the plate more colorful –a salad leaf, with its already brown edge is also served with hardly interpretable grey cabbage and slices of orange. You know, a customer also pays for the potato peel but of course doesn’t eat that! Then, why is he planted these ugly things? We should only decorate with edible and fitting things as the decoration is also part of that particular course of meal, so it should be just as edible!
Serving should never be for its own sake! It is unnecessary to serve food on two plates unless we have a definite reason. Food doesn’t have to hang from the plate. A waiter who says he doesn’t serve the food to the customer because it does not hang from the plate because it is not a huge portion, then, that waiter is mistaken about the customers’ demands.
BoB: Is there a difference between serving dishes at different times of the day? For instance, between lunch and dinner?
FV: Of course, there is no difference in the basic materials of the courses of the meal, the quality of raw materials, the proportion of ingredients and the preparation method. At lunchtime, we must not save money on the quality of the basic material when offering a lunchtime menu. However, a lunch is much quicker compared to a dinner, customers have less time, therefore, service must also be quicker. Where kitchen staff can save time is on decoration. A course can also look nice in its simplicity, maintaining quality. In the evening, perhaps, the same meal can be made special, more than delicious, by being served in a different way!
