The Reason Chefs Plate Food With Their Hands, Not Utensils

If you've ever enjoyed a great meal at a fine-dining restaurant, watched any of the countless cooking competition shows, or scrolled through a beautifully curated Instagram feed of fancy food, you probably already know the importance of plating. Sure, a dish has to be made from the right ingredients and cooked properly using the right technique, but it also has to look good — a study by the late Debra Zellner, while she was a professor at Montclair State University, showed that more attractive food presentation can cause diners to enjoy the flavor of a dish more. And a key to more attractive looking dishes is proper plating. And if you've ever had a chance to watch chefs plating food, you might notice that they tend to use their hands, rather than utensils, for that final step.

We spoke with Danny Kim and chef Jae Lee at Walmart's bettergoods launch to find out why they were plating with gloves or with their hands. According to Chef Lee, "I just think it's you can get more meticulous with your hands," something which Kim referred to as "human tongs." Lee further explained, "We're born with these utensils. You can add more finesse. Actual tongs, the food can get clumpy."

Chefs use many plating tricks to add personality to meals, from placing foods on a curve to achieve an aesthetic framework to using contrasting textures when plating food. But none of that will matter if the end result is a clumpy mess, or worse, food that's been broken apart by the use of unwieldy tongs or other utensils.

Most kitchen utensils can't match hands — human tongs, as chef Danny Kim calls them — when it comes to precision. Our fingers are the best tools for being able to place an ingredient exactly where it needs to go on a dish. It's possible that the one exception is using culinary tweezers, which are designed to give chefs more precision and control when handling delicate ingredients or when adding that final touch on a plate. But using their hands to plate a dish also has another important benefit, as it allows chefs to ensure that different ingredients of a dish have been properly cooked. Judging food by feel is a skill that most chefs pick up early in their career, ensuring a dish that is both perfectly cooked and beautifully presented.