I love food, and I love drawing it, particularly.
Whenever we create dishes, we work very carefully and ask ourselves, 'Is there anything on the dish that really doesn't make the dish better?' Then we eliminate that. We try to stay very focused on really showcasing everything on the plate so nothing gets lost.
If you only design menus that are essentially junk or fast food, the whole infrastructure supports junk.
I like the prop food so much that I eat it between takes as well as on camera.
Our kitchen is a kitchen that makes food designed to be tasted with the five senses and it requires concentration to appreciate all that we want to express.
I was experimenting with ways of creating edible objects from digital content, and I was working to three criteria: 1. They had to be delicious. 2. They had to be personalized. 3. They had to fit through a letterbox or in a mailbox. After much experiments, Boomf! There it was: photo marshmallows.
Years down the line, I became a food stylist.
I love to draw and paint. I did all the illustrations in my books, so I always have my watercolours with me. I was creative as a child and studied art at Central Saint Martins before getting into food.
In my case, vertical food was less about standing things up than layering things: more an attempt to gain texture by weaving things together.
Food is like clay; you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.
I think cooking has the same creative process as designing, where you have the ingredients, you have the alchemy part of it, and you have the satisfaction of seeing your creation become a reality.
All my dishes are engineered.
