Book excerpt: Plating exposes a chef's deepest beliefs about what food is, and how food should be. This book provides the prerequisites to cultivating a professional viewpoint, to investigate these deeper meanings, by considering the different ways a chef looks at food. The goal of the text is to provide a map of how a chef creates a plate of food by considering common questions such as: Where in the menu is this food item to be placed? And how will it be served? Structured as a design process, this book outlines how personal creativity and professional traditions fuse to create successful plated presentations of food.