50 Dishes That Are So Stupid, We Can’t Believe What The Chefs Were Thinking (New Pics)

u/Clackpot, the founder of r/StupidFood, believes that pretentious bs "needs confronting head-on, to have its feet held to the fire of ridicule, it needs us to laugh in its face." Without customers ready to eat up whatever dastardly 'aesthetic' concoction the chef throws at them, there wouldn't be much pretentious food. And, perhaps, there wouldn't even be a need for r/StupidFood.

"For culinary pretension to work requires credulous individuals to buy into the conceit that, for example, dropping salt onto your steak via your elbow—lookin' atchoo Salt Bae—is somehow an improvement over a salt cellar or a grinder; that serving dishes directly onto tabletops and worktops gives them an indefinable je ne sais quoi which is simply not available from common-or-garden crockery; or that adding gold leaf to excessively expensive liquor effects some great improvement which is too subtle for the hoi polloi to understand. It is essentially a confidence trick."

According to the founder of the subreddit, u/Clackpot, they feel like having the moderators in place "is probably a good thing," however, they still feel like the step is "surrendering a part" of their project.

In the founder's opinion, a lot of the higher-end food service appears to be imbued with "ridiculous workloads, very masculine attitudes, competitiveness." However, the redditor is unsure of how it could (or even should) even be changed at this point. "It is what it is," they told Bored Panda.

Something that irks them about the current culture of r/StupidFood is the fact that there are "hundreds of truly appalling look-at-me videos submitted to the sub, that are almost entirely without merit" that receive far too warm a welcome. "People still lap them up and upvote them enthusiastically."

Pie artist Jessica told Bored Panda that at the core of any chef's philosophy should lie the fact that, at the end of the day, no matter the presentation, their food has to be edible. "You may be an artist, but if your chosen medium is food, remember that somebody has to eat that art in the end!" she said. The only exception is if your food art is literally going to be in a gallery. "In which case, don't worry about it," she quipped.

However, Jessica pointed out that she personally doesn't think that there even is such a thing as 'pretentious' food: "Only food that has wholly sacrificed flavor, texture, and the general eating experience in service of aesthetics," she explained how certain chefs shift this balance for their purposes.

"If your food is complicated, presented in an unusual fashion, or requires a little more interactivity from your guests than they may be used to, that's all fine provided you've used fresh ingredients that combine to create a pleasing flavor profile and mouth feel. If your guests' mouths are as happy as their eyeballs at the end of the meal, then your fancy food is not pretentious, it's just delightful!"