THE “FOOD PLATING” CONCEPT IN THE RESTAURANT BUSINESS OF UKRAINE

Abstract

The global protracted Covid-19 crisis and comprehensive digitalization have activated a new wave of transformations in the restaurant business. Modern restaurants compete more and more actively on the Internet, on search and booking platforms, in smart applications, etc. In fact, competition with ratings, consumer rating scores, and digital storefronts on Instagram and mobile applications becomes decisive for business success in the 21st century. In such realities, priority attention is focused on culinary art and visual aesthetics of restaurant dishes. Today, hundreds of thousands of photos of beautifully presented dishes “flicker” in the daily content feeds of consumers’ private social networks. They form a new worldview of potential restaurant visitors about how food should be designed and look like in a progressive (fashionable, highly rated in Internet reviews) restaurant establishment. The ever-increasing consumer demands encourage restaurateurs to search for and implement innovative concepts and creative techniques for preparing dishes and customer service. Oversaturation of the market with the offer intensified the desire of restaurateurs to distinguish their own establishments from the environment of the standardized mass market. The authors justify the statement that food plating will turn into a key competitive advantage of a restaurant in the conditions of total digitalization of the economy in the coming decades. he article systematizes the foreign experience of spreading the innovative “food plating” concept from the fine dining restaurants to many gastronomic establishments of a budget format. In order to survive in the unfavorable years of the pandemic and war crises, the restaurant business of Ukraine actively joined the global trend of introducing fashionable elements of food plating. The locomotives of innovation are the enterprises of the restaurant industry in the largest cities of Ukraine. This article presents the facts and summarizes the trend of dynamic introduction of fashionable elements of food plating by the restaurants in Ukraine. In 2023, the majority of restaurants in the business segment of the capital of Ukraine demonstrate impeccably aesthetic samples of the author’s food plating of fine cuisine dishes. Based on reviews on Instagram and ratings on the Tripadvisor platform, at the beginning of 2023, dozens of Kyiv restaurants can be included in the cohort of leaders in terms of food plating aesthetics. Today, more than two dozen “magnets” of local food plating create the gastronomic and touristic identity of Lviv. Restaurants in 5-star hotels of Ukraine occupy a separate leading market niche in terms of food plating creativity. The authors concluded that Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa and other centers of gastronomic tourism of Ukraine today are gaining leadership positions in terms of food plating creativity in the Central-Eastern Europe region.