High end restaurants love to up-sell their dishes. You get lured in by the fancy digs, the matching waiters with delicately draped white cloth slung over their wrists, the menu items with words you've never heard of to describe what seems like food you've never tasted before...and is that a harpist that just set up? Oh my! Now granted, the chefs really do tend to be masters of their craft, and the food is rather tasty, but it's all so overly pretentious and most of the time, overpriced for what most of it actually really is. So how did you get here, to the point where you're paying $40+ dollars per plate or per menu item? Is there some method to the madness? Why yes, yes, there is!
Step One: Take whatever vegetables you have on hand, cook or boil them, and then blend them to the consistency of baby food. Then just as if you were an actual baby, smear it on the plate once or twice. Be sure to place three to five random diced portions of the cooked veg on the plate so as to let your taster know exactly what type of creamy smooth vomit they will soon be ingesting.
Step Two: Pull out your protein (note: it must be referred to as protein, not by its animal name) and read about how little Marco grew up on a farm eating "organic" grass and was gently sung to sleep before it was slaughtered to make it the most tender a scant 2 miles from your home or establishment. Take whatever normal sized portion of meat, I'm sorry, PROTEIN, regular everyday humans eat, and then cut that in half, and then cut the half down by another fourth to obtain your ridiculous new serving size. Make absolutely certain the meat is rare or as close to salmonella levels as possible before you serve it. The words, "well done," are something your..ahem...protein...will never know exists.
Step Three: Shave everything on to the plate; the chocolate, the radishes, the fennel bulb, slices of your finger caught in your mandolin by accident...
Step Four: The only way to make shaving your food on to the plate MORE pretentious is to then use tweezers to delicately place those shavings exactly where you've constructed them to land on your pre-designed drawing of what the plate should look like.
Step Five: Take olive oil or whatever condiment and place it into a squirt bottle and drop it like sweet "organic" tear drops all around the plate. Whatever the actual name of the sauce or oil is, name it something with a country and a color in front of it. Chilean Mahogany Ketchup perhaps... East African Cream Soynut Sauce...Welsh Corn Mustard.
Step Six: One must add one of the following pieces of ridiculousness to finish it off: a crumble, crispy fried slivers of something, microgreens, miniature vegetables, edible flowers, or truffles, truffles, expensive expensive truffles.
Step Seven: Pick a ridiculously large white plate to display what amounts to a palm full of food. The bigger and more oddly shaped the plate is, the better for confusing your diners as to where or how they are supposed to eat it.
Step Eight: You will of course serve some high priced alcohol with whatever this thing is, but as an aside, you may not just serve American or wherever you're from tap water from the sink like some common peasant. It must be imported water, fizzed about, and forced into a large wine glass looking blue bottle at $5/oz from France, no doubt. If you look to the fine print, you will see that it is indeed actually just French tap water.
Step Nine: Name your beauty using any of the following wording: Farm fresh, sumptuous, toothsome, organic, medley, trio, harvested, deconstructed, duo, foam, hand selected, and/or foraged. Make sure to overstate the obvious while you're here such as your "farm fresh tomatoes" are gluten, fat, salt, dairy and sugar free.
Step Ten: And finally, after all this over-complication, employee or deploy servers like this to put all your BS together for the customers
A note about the images in this take:
"Fake chef” Jacques La Merde, using a fictional name, created junk food dishes re-imagined and plated as high end nouveau cuisine. All the dishes are composed of things like corn dogs, donuts, eggs, chips, hotdogs, chicken nuggets, pizza, potato salad, mustard, ketchup, etc.
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