~ 5th December 2017

Butter Chicken & Traditional Daal

There's an EAT Club dish called "Butter Chicken" and it's something of a touchstone amongst employees and clients. Some people genuinely eat Butter Chicken every single day for lunch. So accustomed are they, to the flavours of that dish, that when the chefs occasionally tweak it, they can detect the changes instantaneously. I wouldn't be surprised if they felt a jedi-style frisson when new spices are first being toasted.

This is not that Butter Chicken - a distinction I discovered after ordering it. This is actually a restaurant partner dish with a similar name, so I'll have to wait for that opportunity. Plating Butter Chicken would be like painting flowers in Provence - something I feel I'd have to have my plating shit together for.

In the meantime:

Ok. There's 3 elements to this dish and I applied them all to the plate in a workmanlike fashion. I just don't know what to do with it. How do you plate Basmati rice? It's like trying to get my hair together in the morning.

The Naan had been cut into a triangle segment, and I thought better of treating it like an Ice-Cream Wafer; that way lies sogginess EDIT: HAHAHAH NO I JUST RAMMED IT IN THERE LIKE A CHUMP.

Apparently I am also incapable of working with rice without getting it sauced (ack).

I think I was trying for some kind of yin and yang distribution of rice and sauce, but it was all executed rather poorly. It'll be some time before I'm able to determine if it was too high-concept, or too tacky, because I don't really have the skill to do what I set out to do yet.