Have you ever had a gourmet meal? In addition to the hard work from the chef slaving away in the kitchen preparing this delicious food, the chef makes sure the dish looks perfect. In the fancy restaurants, presentation is important. I used to think this was silly.

Yesterday I went to Olive Garden for lunch. At Olive Garden you receive soup or salad and bread sticks with every meal. When the waitress brought the salad to the table, I immediately noticed the croutons. Croutons are normally chunks. Instead it looked like this was the pile of crumbs from the bottom of the box of croutons. It resembled saw dust. Now I LOVE salad. I'm not a big fan of salad dressing. I usually just use extra virgin olive oil. I do like the dressing from Olive Garden, but in small doses. I actually enjoy tasting the veggies in a salad and don't want to ruin that taste with dressing. As I grabbed the salad tongs to dive into the salad, I noticed the tongs were soaked with dressing. As I glanced over the bowl, I noticed large wedges of lettuce and chunks of red onion. I just couldn't eat it. I pushed the bowl away. 

I pictured the cooks in the kitchen preparing salads. They toss the core of a head of lettuce on their work station. They delicately slice the red onion and lay the "butt" end of the onion in their pile of rubbish on the work station. The next thing you know some kid waltzes in the kitchen and instead of tossing the pile of rubbish into the trash, they put it in a bowl. As they drizzle the salad dressing, the top of the container falls off and the dressing just pours all over the place. Lastly, to hide this mistake in a bowl, they grab the box of croutons and dump it on top just to discover it is just crumbs. They must have been pressed for time because they delivered this bowl of a mess to my table.

This is when I discovered that presentation is key.