PRO PLATING James’s dish: chocolate, orange and coffee; a tower of contrasting tastes and textures
RECIPE AND FOOD STYLING POLLYANNA COUPLAND
PHOTOGRAPHS INDIA WHILEY-MORTON
Kitchen Table – a restaurant in London’s Fitzrovia with two Michelin stars – is about as far removed from home cooking as you can get. Up to 20 courses make up a meal there, created and served in a flurry of action from the open kitchen in front of you. Each dish is a tour de force in its own right, but the way they flow from one to the next, creating an overall experience greater than the sum of its parts, is where the real magic lies. Let’s just say it’s a bit of a step up from last night’s cobbled-together fridge-raid pasta.
FLAVOUR COMES FIRST…
At the helm of Kitchen Table is chef James Knappett. He controls the crew of chefs, who cook and plate up the dishes in full view of the diners each night. His food is always flavour-led, but at this level of fine dining, it needs to look as good as it tastes.
“All chefs are different, but any good chef will always put flavour above all else,” he explains. “Saying that, you do need to think about what a dish looks like. Desserts are where I tend to be more adventurous with presentation because I like to keep things like meat and fish simple – I’d never turn fish into a mousse or even marinate meat, because I think the best way to enjoy those things is in their natural state, both visually and flavour-wise.
Something like a cake, however, can be cut into shapes and still be a cake. I wouldn’t take a fluted pastry cutter to a duck breast, but with sweet dishes there are more opportunities to play around.”
…BUT PRESENTATION MATTERS
We’re at Kitchen Table to see how James plates one of their desserts. ‘Chocolate, orange and coffee’ is a tower of ice creams, sorbet, infused oils and tuiles, all showcasing how the three ingredients go perfectly together. The inspiration for the dish came from, of all things, eating a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. “Even though it’s not the finest-quality chocolate, I love the nostalgia of eating a chocolate orange, so I thought why not play around with that?” he says.
“We added coffee because it pairs so well with the other two flavours and makes the dish feel a bit more mature. When it came to how we’d serve it, we could have had the ice creams next to each other, each topped with a tuile, but the reason it’s stacked up like that is so you can crack your spoon on the top and cut through all the layers. That way, you get a little bit of everything with each mouthful.
It’s a bit like a trifle. You wouldn’t ever just serve yourself the top layer; you want a cross section of the cream, jelly and sponge. Individually they are OK, but it’s when you experience them all at once that the dish really stands out.”
IT’S ALL ABOUT BALANCE
This is a perfect example of how texture can inform the presentation, and this in turn has an important bearing on the taste. The three ingredients are served in different formats (frozen, infused into oil and in crisp shards), each offering a different strength of flavour. Stacking them on top of each other is visually striking, but also helps the diner experience each element at the same time. It’s about balance – sometimes literally.