Cooking to the Image: A Plating Handbook provides the prerequisites to cultivating a professional viewpoint for students by considering the different ways a chef looks at food. Its goal is to provide a map of how a chef creates a plate of food by considering such questions as: Where in the menu is this food item to be placed? How will it be served? How much will it cost? What food is selected? How is the food prepared? How is it presented in relationship to other food on the plate? This book makes visible the fundamental meanings in plated presentations. Plating exposes a chef’s deepest beliefs about what food is, and how food should be. Structured as a design process, Cooking to the Image: A Plating Handbook outlines how personal creativity and professional traditions fuse to create successful plated presentations of food.