Post-Tweezer

What plating looks like now, and what that says about us.

There was a time—recent, yet already sepia-toned—when the future of fine dining fit between the teeth of a pair of tweezers.

Tiny herbs arranged just so. Microdot sauces. Shells of vegetables too perfect to have touched a hand. It was ballet, yes—but rehearsed within an inch of its life.

And now?

Now the plates are louder. Not in colour, necessarily, but in gesture. Swoops instead of symmetry. Smears that look like brushwork. Puddles, not pearls. There's a looseness creeping in. A confidence, too.

Some call it lazy. But it's not. It's earned. Because for a generation of chefs who mastered the language of tweezers, the evolution wasn’t to abandon control—it was to hide it. To plate something wild with the hands of someone who still knows how to tame it.

This isn’t anti-technique. It’s post-technique. You can still taste the precision. You just don’t see it coming.

Look at any of the best new plates in Ottawa right now. They’re not tweezer food. But they could be—if the chef wanted them to be. That restraint is the new flex.

And in its place: imperfect folds of crudo. Creams that slide where they want. Desserts with a broken crust or a melt in the middle. Food that breathes. Food that moves.

The tweezers aren’t gone. They’re just in the drawer. Where they belong.