My Night of Eating Very Oddly Presented Food

One night last week I got to be E’s guest at a fancy-ish fundraising soirée in Manhattan. As you expect at such an event, there was lots of free food — much of it presented in very unusual ways.

I should say here that I rarely attend this type of event, so maybe this style of presentation is nothing new. But it was new to me (and E said she’d never seen anything quite like it either), so I thought I’d share some photos that I took.

One station had little kebab-style offerings — a shrimp with a piece of pineapple, or a piece of steak with a piece of eggplant. But instead of sticking these on wooden skewers, each little serving was mounted on a two-pronged metal fork, and then each fork was displayed on a magnetized display, so the food-laden forks sort of stood at attention, waiting for the guests to grab them off of the magnetized surface:

It was really clever, and there was something fun about interacting with the magnetized forks. Also, the shrimp/pineapple thingies were really good.

The next station had an assortment of salad-y things on endive leaves. They were presented on curved pieces of plastic mounted on tree branches, all of which seemed completely ridiculous (but I’m probably biased by not liking salad-y things on endive leaves to begin with):

Next up was a station with pizza, which for some reason was being hung on metal hooks:

This seemed like a bad move. Like, if your pizza can hang like that without the cheese dripping off of it or any topping falling off of it, you’re basically telling me that it’s cold. Also, the workers at the station were not adding the holes to the pizza slices — the holes were already in the slices, and the workers were just hanging them. Which means some poor soul was in a back room somewhere endlessly punching holes in these pizza slices. The whole thing made me sad.

Later, while we were hanging out in the main area, several pairs of workers came out. Each pair was holding a long-ish tree branch, each branch was studded with little cups, and each cup held some sort of fried item:

From a distance, we couldn’t tell what the fried items were. Maybe prawns? Upon closer inspection, they turned out to be little clumps of potato sticks — or basically french fries:

The fries were fine, but it seemed kind of silly that they had to be served by pairs of workers holding long sticks.

The two-pronged metal forks were back for dessert. This time they were used to serve little smores-like confections, each magnetically affixed to a tray carried by a roaming server:

Much like the other magnetic display, this one seemed clever and fun to interact with.

There was also a server who was serving hors d’oeuvres from this hinged wooden contraption. I didn’t get a photo of it, unfortunately, but here’s a drawing of how I remember it looking (the black dots are the hors d’oeuvres):

So that was my night of oddly presented food. I really should have gotten the caterer’s name, because they clearly take an unusual approach to their work.

Update: Reader/commenter Rob S. has pointed out something I really should have noticed, namely that the caterer’s name — “Pinch” — is visible on a server’s apron. Shame on me for not picking up on that! Here’s their website, and here’s the serving gizmo I tried to draw (as you can see, I didn’t remember it accurately):