The Mind Creative
are shown in the photographs and you will get my drift. But you
are in an eatery and not a museum and so you reluctantly deface
the salad plate or whatever and dig into it!
In good restaurants your entrée is also served with some kind of
decoration–a sprig of cilantro or carrot julienne artistically placed,
a radish shaped like a flower, or tendrils drawn with sauce on the
plate, so that you look at it for a while before putting your knife
on it. But that, of course, does not guarantee that the food is
equally exciting. It could even be as ruse to take your mind away
from the quality (or lack thereof) of the food that you are about
to consume! I recall eating at Maxims’s—yes, THE Maxims—and
ordering Sole meunière and realizing that the fish was uncooked
inside!! And it is a well-known fact that you DO NOT send the
food back, because you have no idea what an offended chef would
do to get even with you. Spitting in it is a common form of
retaliation, I am told. Perhaps one is better off settling for Kung
Pao chicken served on a luke warm plate in a Chinatown restaurant
than for braised chicken however redolent with garlic and however
embellished, served in Noma restuarant in Copenhagen.
But this article is about the lengths to which a culinary artist would
go to present you with something as ordinary as a cup of coffee.
A cup of latte, for instance.
Basically latte means coffee with steamed milk. But ‘latte art’ is
the latest rage in Japan. Look at this spectacular latte and tell me
if you ever will have the heart to drink the product that is in the
cup:
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