Edible Art: Wisconsin Chefs Create Masterpieces in the Kitchen
Amanda McGowan

Imagine. A fresh, clean plate in front of you. First, you pool the deliciously savory sauce at the base of the plate, its dark brown color sharply contrasting with the bright white plate. Then, add the fresh, steamed—yet still crisp—vegetables: peppers, beans, corn, all locally grown and bought. The rainbow of the Wisconsin-grown produce looks vibrant atop the brown sauce, making the white edges of the plate pop. Next, add the centerpiece—a perfectly grilled, medium-rare steak with a pink and slightly cool center, browned and steaming on the outside. The grill lines are fresh, and the meat’s natural juices are oozing out, mixing with the sauce and vegetables to create a tantalizing aroma and impeccable taste. Top the dish off with a little green garnish, and it’s ready to eat. You dig the steak knife into the meat and cut off your first bite. Now on your fork, you take the piece and roll it around the plate, soaking in the sauce and catching vegetables along the way. You bring the piece up to your mouth, about to indulge in this brown, yet bright, chewy, sauce-smothered concoction that will satisfy a growling stomach and craving taste buds.

Did you see it? If your mouth is drooling and your stomach churning hungrily, you pictured what Leonardo Guevara, executive chef at Restaurant Magnus, sees at the grocery store, shopping for different vegetables and meats while thinking of how to combine and use them. You visualized dinner.

Visualizing how a dish will look and then creating it into a tasty masterpiece makes cooking an art form. Chefs, as artists, combine flavors, colors, textures and ingredients to create dishes that not only taste delicious, but also engage diners in a sensory experience of sights, smells and textures. Through their cooking, Wisconsin’s chefs explore the art of visual taste and provide diners with an artistic experience in every bite.

The Art of Taste: “100 percent, hands down flavor”
“I always admired the fact that like every artist—like people who can just open their mouth and sing beautiful songs or people who can pick up an instrument and play beautiful music—I admired the fact that chefs could take raw ingredients and create something natural out of it,” said Barbara Wright, chef and owner of The Dardanelles, a Mediterranean restaurant in Madison.

When Wright opened The Dardanelles 11 years ago, she felt uncomfortable being called “chef” because she lacked formal culinary training. However, she slowly began to realize that not everyone has attended culinary school and many people, like herself, are self-taught. She was finally able to see herself as a chef. She creates art by mixing ingredients, flavors, textures and colors to create food people want to eat.

Wright accomplishes her art by looking at a dish from many perspectives. First, she uses the best ingredients she can find—mostly grown on local farms around Madison—and enhances the experience of eating a food in its natural form.

“For instance, if you are making a dessert with apples, you want the apples to stand out in the dish. You don’t want to cook them to mush,” Wright said. “The second thing you have to think about is the visceral pleasure of eating it. It’s crunchy. It’s sticky. Is it savory? The things you want people to come away with after they eat the dish.”

According to Juan Urbieta, executive chef at Ristorante Bartolotta in Wauwatosa, the key to the art of cooking is learning the basic techniques of mixing the components of food to create a flavorful dish.

“For me, the art of cooking is 100 percent, hands down flavor,” Urbieta said. “An artist is somebody who puts their own signature on whatever they’re making. First thing you have to learn is the techniques, you have to learn the basics. You apply the techniques and now you’re ready to create something fun, something cool.”

To create a dish, many chefs describe visualizing it and then using their mental picture to apply the techniques to create a taste. Shinji Muramoto, chef and owner of Restaurant Muramoto and Sushi Muramoto in Madison, compares the mental preparation of a dish’s taste to painting a picture.

“Sometimes I explain to my cooks that creating a taste is just like mixing different colors,” Muramoto said. “You need to know what kind of color you want in your head. And like blue plus yellow makes green, taste is the same. First, you need to know what kind of taste you’re looking for, then you need to pick what else you need to use and how to mix them up.”

The Art of Presentation: Eye Appeal
As chefs artfully intersect flavors and ingredients to create taste, the visual presentation of a dish is essential to its success.

“I think food has to look attractive to the eye because when it sits down in front of [people], that’s the first thing they see,” said Charles Lazzareschi, executive chef at the Madison Concourse Hotel. “Layering flavors, layering foods. You have textures. Crispy, crunchy, soft. It’s all going together in the same plate.”

Just as artists who create paintings or drawings want to catch a viewer’s eye, chefs use techniques to present food in a visually appealing way to diners, Lazzareschi said. Placing an odd number of different foods on a plate is one such technique that makes food stand out on the plate.

Wright added chefs use a diametrical art philosophy to present textures of food. A spicy dish could be paired with a cool yogurt atop. Or the crunchy outer texture of a crème brule dessert gives way to a creamy, smooth filling.

In his presentation, Guevara focuses on how the taste and color of ingredients work together, using contrasting colors, shapes and flavors of ingredients to make his mental visualization of the entire dish a vibrant reality. For example, he describes a dish using halibut.

“The contrast of the green, white and yellow fish and some South-American peppers,” he said. “It's art.”

For some chefs, a dish is like a rainbow on a plate. Guevara prefers to pool sauces on the bottom of the plate, then layer an array of colorful vegetables before placing the fish or meat on top. The diversity of colors on a dish is what brings the dish to life and allows for innovation and creativity that makes cooking an art form, Lazzareschi added.

“Colors, you can look at a plate and say ‘what does that need? What does that need?’” he said. “Well, it needs some red, but I don’t want to use tomatoes, I’m sick of tomatoes. What else do we got?”

Although it’s a complex combination of colors, textures, flavors and placement that make food visually appealing, diners must be able to evaluate the plate in front of them and understand how they should go about eating it.

“It’s got to be practical also,” Lazzareschi said. “When you look at it, is it, ‘what the hell is this guy thinking?’ Or, ‘this is beautiful’.”

Wisconsin Dining: Experience the Art

“Every chef has their own idea and their own philosophy, and their own style,” Guevara said. “That’s why I think it’s unique to go explore different restaurants.”

And dining in Wisconsin is changing. Especially in Madison, Muramoto added, diners are seeking out a new, different experience in restaurants and a new perception of food.

“I’m just different from everybody else,” Muramoto said. “I was born in Japan. I grew up in Japan, so I know something different to cook than all other cooks. It doesn’t mean I’m good, just different. That’s something new to Madison, I think that’s why I’m doing so well.”

Lazzareschi said people are becoming more educated and interested in food, especially with the increase of restaurants in the Madison area. "They’re learning and they’re developing and there are a lot of good restaurants making good meals," he said. "People are starting to understand what good food is.”

Wave Kasprzak, chef and co-owner of The Dining Room at 209 Main in Monticello, attributed the change in Wisconsin dining to the availability and diversity of ingredients now available to restaurants. While locally sustainable ingredients, such as produce grown on state farms, thrive among Wisconsin restaurants, chefs are able to obtain any ingredient they need to create their art.

“The world is really getting smaller,” Kasprzak said. “We might get someone who’s visiting from the east coast say, ‘I’ll never order fish in Wisconsin, you can’t get fresh fish in Wisconsin.’ Well, that’s a big lie. We can get fish 24, 48 hours out of the water anywhere in the U.S.”

Diners in Wisconsin should try going into a restaurant, even into a local diner down the street, with a new outlook and perception about the food served. The chef cooking the dish is, in fact, creating art to be appreciated and enjoyed.

“When people come into a restaurant for an experience, they should just be open,” Wright said. “They should just be ready for that new experience.”

Kasprzak recommended ordering multiple appetizers, entrees and desserts. Although it could be too much food for one sitting, try a little bit of everything and take it home for later.

For a new take on food, ask the chef to do a tasting menu. In a tasting menu, Urbieta explained, instead of guests choosing their meals, a chef cooks a multi-course meal. Every course has different textures and flavors, including meat, vegetable, cheese and more in miniature portions presented beautifully.

“The chef is creating something that is your print,” Urbieta said. “They express something different. You can understand how cooking is a form of art when the chef creates the menu.”

Scott Johnson, chef at Captain Bill’s in Middleton, whose cooking philosophy is simply “fresh, fresh, fresh,” agreed the best way to maximize the dining experience is to let the chef create food freely.

“Like a painter already knows what it looks like before it’s done, that’s what you do when you cook,” Johnson said. “You already know what you want to do. That’s the best way to do it, to just say whatever the chef says is good today. They know what’s fresh that day.”

Chefs in Wisconsin are creating art before our very mouths. How the flavors, colors, textures all combine to create a dish is an experience for diners—an experience Wright says American society still misses too often and Wisconsin independent restaurants are trying to re-establish.

“I’m all about reclaiming our food traditions,” she said. “I’m very concerned about the generation of kids who started out with Pop Tarts for breakfast and ended up with McDonald’s for dinner.”

Dining can be more than a meal. It can be an artistic experience. The vision a chef starts with, how a plate will look, is realized in the final presentation. The essence of the art of cooking lies in how the chef gets from a mental picture of a dish to presenting it to a guest for a visual taste experience.