Don’t settle for boring or disorganized plating presentation! Ensuring your dishes look as great as they taste is essential to impressing customers and presenting yourself as a professional foodservice establishment. Follow some of these simple tips to make plates of pasta, sandwiches, and more look and taste fantastic!

While presentation is key, stylish and functional plating is also necessary to prevent messy or disorganized looking dishes. To make your dishes look stylish and ready to serve, follow these simple tips:

Think of Your Plate as a Clock
This method has been used time and time again and helps to allow for portion control, as well as organized plating. When using this method, place your main or meat dish between 3 and 9, potatoes or other sides from 9 and 12, and small sides, fruit, and vegetables from 12 and 3. This way, all the components can be organized neatly and avoid giving dishes a jumbled or disorganized look.

Leave Some Room
While giving customers adequate portions is important, don’t overcrowd plates with piles of food! Choose the right size plate for your dish to prevent messy presentation, and allow an attractive plate to shine through.

Garnish Away
Garnishes are ideal for giving predominantly darker colored or brown dishes some extra flair. Use lemons, fresh herbs, sauces, or fruit and veggies to give dishes some extra style that is guaranteed to impress customers and keep them coming back for more. Use our garnishing kits to peel vegetables, zest lemons, and carry out other intricate tasks to make creating garnishes a snap.

Plating Sauces
Sauces can make or break a plate, or, if plated improperly, run off the plate. Keep plate rims clean by plating sauces or runnier ingredients on the bottom of the plate, and main meat or pasta dishes on top so the flavor soaks through the main dish. Dishes such as stew should be drained of sauce before serving to prevent excess amounts of sauce from running over plates and rims and making dishes look unprofessional.

Extra Tips!
Check out CiboWares’ selection of cooking and serving utensils to make serving up portions of salad, meat, and other delicious food items a snap!

If the clock method of plating seems boring and uninteresting, try stacking food to create a tower of delicious flavors that not only enhances the look of dishes, but allows customers to experience traditional dishes in a new and fun way.

Don’t settle for unattractive plating. Keep it clean and simple, or use your creativity to stir things up! Bring your plating game a few levels up with CiboWares.

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