Nick Walsh, Food Stylist
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What I do… I’m basically responsible for preparing and displaying food for so it fulfils a brief. I normally get the brief from the client a week before the shoot so I know what’s going on depending on the job. For some jobs it’s literally styling a product that’s already there and made, for example tomorrow the client is bringing their product from their café, and then I’ve just got to style it. Other times I will have to prep the food as well. Food stylists arrange the food differently to the way a chef might do it. Quite often for the jobs the client will send over a moodboard or they give me a Pinterest link so I have an idea of what I’m working around.
When I wake up… I normally get up and my pet rabbit Boggle is waiting for me at the top of the stairs, so I feed him. I don’t normally have breakfast unless I’m on a shoot in the morning and they provide it. If I’m working on a TV commercial then call time is usually 7.30am so I have to set off quite early. TV commercials usually run through until about 7 or 8pm at night so it can be a long day.
If I’m on a job I normally get in my car and drive to the studio or location but I’ve got a decent sized kitchen at home so I can prep from there rather than from an office or a studio. This week I’ve got 10 turkeys coming in for a shoot so I will probably prep them from a studio where they've got more fridge space! I think my wife would kill me if I tried to store 10 turkeys around the house.
How I got where I am… I actually started being a chef just because my friend was a pot-washer in local pub where I’m from in Nottingham. I saw the chefs doing their thing and that’s the first time I ever really thought about it. It’s not a romantic tale: I just thought it looked really cool and I always enjoyed eating food. I always have liked trying different dishes – my favourite place to take girls on dates when I was like 15 was a Teppanyaki restaurant.
I was training Brazilian jujitsu with one of the casting bookers at BOSS and I mentioned to him that I was thinking about trying something different. He mentioned that BOSS represents food stylists in Manchester. I’d thought about food styling before but I didn’t know how to get into it and I didn’t know anyone in the business. Two weeks later I quit my job, handed in my notice and was like ‘Right, I’m a food stylist now,’ and that was it! I did a little bit of assisting but it’s been quite an easy transition for me. I’ve been doing food styling for just over a year now.
The challenges I face are…. I’ve learnt that you don’t have to season everything all the time now! I’ve gone from my whole adult life being screamed at to add more salt and more seasoning and now it doesn’t really matter. It is more about how it looks, but I do try to make it taste nice because we normally get to eat it afterwards.
The one thing that took a lot of getting used to is the waiting. My first shoot that I did on my own we took the first shot and then waiting two and half hours until it was approved and we couldn’t do anything else because the next shot was on the same background and we didn’t want to move anything or do anything in case we only needed a tiny little movement that was like a tomato up a centimetre – so we couldn’t do anything! I was freaking out because in a professional kitchen if you don’t do anything for two minutes you’re lazy so that took a lot of getting used to. But of course it’s part of the creative process and I’m getting used to it now. It feels slow to me but we always get the expected shot rate done.
Apparently I hear that a lot of chefs struggle transitioning from cooking food to styling it, especially if you’ve been a head chef somewhere and you could tell people what do and that your way is right. They might not be used to taking criticism. But for me most people that I deal with are more experienced and they’re the client so as much as sometimes I think it might not be the right way to do it I always trust their judgement.
What I love most about my job… I really love the creative side of being a food stylist. My favourite thing used to be playing with food, creating new dishes and finding new ways to present them. One of my favourite things as a chef was shopping for new plates, which is perfect for what I do now! My old boss always used to make fun of me because if I had a spare half a day I’d be out or on the internet looking at new plates we could order and how much we could get away with spending! But now my job is massively about that. The shoots that I work on all have different styles but they all want interesting crockery. I’ve been out buying roof tiles and I got a plank of wood this week to build up my own little stock. I really enjoy playing with backgrounds and sifting through antique shops.
What surprises people about my job…There’s a technique that happens with a lot of the birds like turkeys where they’re cooked at really low temperatures and then they are brushed to colour them. I’ve heard stories of people using varnish but I always try to use food products like the meat juices. The idea of doing that is to reduce the way the meat wrinkles when it is cooked properly. If you cook the bird super slow it stays in a nice shape. There’s also the use of dry ice for ice cream which obviously melts really fast normally, but if you put it in a box of dry ice for an hour it will stay frozen for quite a while, even under hot lights it will stay frozen.
When I get home... I used to be sick of cooking by the time I got home for dinner when I was a chef. I was a chef for 14/15 years before I became a food stylist. Back then I was cooking all day, every day whereas these days I’m much more open to cooking slightly more elaborate things at home. Now that I’ve got more time at the weekend my wife likes to book in friends to come round and have Sunday lunch – which is nice for them!
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