Vivian Lui

The New York-based food stylist reveals the unglamorous side of her job.

She reveals the unglamorous side of food styling.

                                                

What exactly does a food stylist do?
In the States, there are a lot of unglamorous moments. I’m a glorified dishwasher or glorified grocery shopper sometimes. It encompasses everything. You get your set of recipes and you plan out your grocery shopping. A lot of times, when you need beautiful ingredients, you go to the farmer’s market and pick out really nice herbs or some vegetables. You’re moving your bags back and forth from your place to the shoot studio or the location. You get there and then you just start cooking. Sometimes, there are eight dishes in a day, sometimes 14. So you’re cooking madly. And then you have an assistant that helps you because you personally need to be on the set with the art director and prop stylist and photographer to figure out the best way to show the food, figure out how to present food nicely.

Tell us about a major project you’ve been involved with.
One was a travel story for Food and Wine magazine. It was about an underground food club that calls themselves the Four Course Men. They put on a dinner for 35 people once a month. They develop the recipes. It’s at a house that no one lives in but they turned it into a very casual dining place. I went there to prepare their dishes for a photo shoot.

What makes for a good food stylist?
You need solid knowledge of food and techniques because ultimately it’s all about knowing how to make food look beautiful. So you need to know how to cook meats properly, for example. You need to be able to adapt to every situation and be able to organize yourself. And you have to have a fun spirit about it. At the end of the day, it’s cooking and you need to have passion for it.

Do you need a culinary degree?
No. You know, some people that I’ve worked with have a very different background, some are self-taught. They’ve done catering or are personal chefs. And you learn a lot when you do roles like that.

But you also cook, right?
I have always loved cooking. Even before culinary school, I would just experiment in the kitchen all the time.

What ingredients can’t you live without?
I’ve learned to season my food well. It makes such a difference. When you’re making something simple, like stir-fried mushrooms, it’s important to season with salt and pepper as you go and to taste it at the end. For people who don’t enjoy salt too much, I learned that lemon juice, a little acid, really adds flavor. And I think that is a nice change as well. Since I’m Chinese, I cook a lot of Chinese food at home. For that, I have to have soy sauce in my pantry. White pepper, too—I grew up with it, eat a lot with it, and I enjoy it. It’s spicier, not as earthy as black pepper, and has much more depth of flavor.


Photography by At Maculangan | Interview by Angelo Comsti

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