Food styling: Setting the stage for the perfect dish

At some point, all of us have been guilty of ordering dishes off a restaurant menu or a food delivery app because it looks tantalising. What we might not realise is the immense effort put into styling and photographing the food, to make it look appetising. India is no stranger to delicious food, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s that the hospitality industry here realised that food also needed to look good to sell better.

Witnessing the change sweeping across restaurant kitchens and the F&B industry, Michael Swamy had already set his mind on a career: he wanted to make food films, and was influenced by his mother, a documentary filmmaker.

“My mother said, ‘Become a chef first. Otherwise you are just a photographer or a stylist who doesn’t even know food’,” Swamy says. And that’s how Chef Michael found himself working two jobs: cooking good food and styling them for various magazines.

Swamy’s foray into food styling began during his chef training at a culinary school in London. For almost a year there, he spent every weekend working with a food stylist and accompanying him to shoots. “I was just helping out but in that process I was also observing and learning.”

When Swamy returned to India, there were very few food stylists in the country and they all juggled jobs as chefs. “When I started out, all ad agencies were working with fake food. My challenge to them was that I’m only going to use natural food,” he says.

His multiple skillset saw him not only creating menus for restaurants but also styling and shooting the food for those who couldn’t afford separate experts. Gradually, Michael began mentoring chefs on how to shoot during kitchen trials and advising the clients on building their social media presence.

Finding a niche

In the early days, it wasn’t easy. Most food stylists worked with art directors, who usually mimicked international trends. Work was scarce and most stylists succumbed to the pressure. Today, experienced professionals are able to refuse assignments that don’t align with their principles and instead, can focus on their own projects. Food styling has also gone minimalistic, compared to the prop-heavy style from a few decades ago. With Indian food, there was a practice of using antiques to enhance the tone. “Today, we use more colours, a lot of textured backgrounds to enhance the food. At the end of the day, the food is the hero and not your prop,” says Michael.

And even though the food and beverage industry has grown rapidly in the past 20 years and food media has gained prominence, food styling still remains a niche profession. For Swamy, who started out in this niche space quite early, food styling is a perfect amalgamation of the artistic, the photographic, and the culinary. A strong work ethic, relentless research and a constant honing of skills are also crucial to become a good food stylist, he adds.

Today, the realisation that people are increasingly “eating with their eyes” has pushed a growing number of amateur food bloggers — aided by the internet — to become self-taught food stylists and photographers, to enhance their own work and take up collaborative projects with restaurants and food brands.

While a good social media presence and a strong network can indeed make this career commercially viable, Swamy believes that becoming a good food stylist requires a solid grounding in the culinary arts — there are no shortcuts. Swamy has been teaching in Manipal for seven years now and has been trying to address the lack of good food media courses in India. “My goal is to educate chef and culinary students to put out their work, create portfolios and use food media for knowledge-sharing to help Indian cuisine grow.”

Mapping Niches is a fortnightly series that sheds light on careers that are off the beaten track, through the eyes of professionals working in the particular field.