Sitting there, right in front of Puji Purnama, was the best-smelling bowl of capcay that my nose ever smelled, but the Puji didn’t care. Instead, he was busy lightly spritzing broccoli stems with a bottle of fancy French facial mist, and then greasing them down with olive oil.
A camera flash lit up the bowl of stir-fried vegetables. Puji glanced at the result and looked displeased.
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“The orange from the carrots is too much,” Puji told the photographer. He took every thin piece of carrot from the bowl and replaced them with peas.
It took a while, but eventually Puji, a food stylist, noticed my presence. He must’ve seen the hungry look on my face because he then reassured me all the food I was blatantly salivating over was purely for show.
“This capcay looks so good that you probably think it tastes good too,” he said. “But that’s not the case. We don’t care about taste.”
That’s when Puji, and his four assistants, taught me the secret behind all those mouth-watering food ads—what you see on scene is never, ever as delicious as it looks.
The day I shadowed Puji, he was working on a campaign for a well-known kecap manis (sweet soy sauce) brand. He decided that the chicken with soy sauce was the “hero,” of the ad. The rest of it, the capcay and the nasi goreng, were just complementary dishes for the background. But just because a bowl of capcay wasn’t the star of the show didn’t mean it wasn’t deserving of the star treatment.
The broccoli stems had to look perfectly shiny. The chicken skin perfectly golden brown. He looked at the sunny side up egg and then cooked another because the yolk wasn’t perfectly centered in the first one. Everything had to look like it was fresh off the stove top. The dishes were like movie stars, and Puji was the careful director.
But that’s not even all of it. With some brands, it’s not enough for the food to look downright delicious—it needs to jive with the company’s corporate ethos as well. So if he is working with a brand that really believes in feng shui, then he will avoid using certain colors or numbers in his commercial shoots.
“I have a story about Selat Solo (a traditional dish from Central Java),” he told me. “This dish is a legacy from the Dutch colonial era. So we need to pick the right color scheme, because Dutch cuisine uses certain colors. But we can’t just put things all over the place. Just because it’s colorful it doesn’t mean it makes sense.”
Puji is one of only a handful of food stylists working in Indonesia. He started polishing his craft back as a student at IKIP Jakarta—now called the State University of Jakarta—where he learned culinary arts. He then went all the way to France and Italy to take additional courses before he was able to land jobs as a food stylist at culinary magazines back in Jakarta.
“I used to create recipes,” he said. “We needed photos for each recipe, and during the photoshoots I needed to be quick on my feet. If the vegetables didn’t look fresh enough, then I had to do something about it. But it’s all common sense too. If I’m taking a picture of tempeh, then I need to have soy sauce and chili too.”
Puji’s career began his career as a food stylist in the late ’90s almost by sheer luck. A lot of the foreigners who dominated the Indonesian food styling industry at the time left the country during the economic crisis, and their departure helped him jumpstart his career.
Today, Indonesian companies only trust three people to make their food look amazing in commercials and films. Puji is one of those three. It’s a small scene, but his prominence is one of the pre-eminent names in food styling allows him to work on films like the recently released Aruna dan Lidahnya, an adaptation of a popular novel by Laksmi Pamuntjak.
The movie, which tells a story of friendship, corruption, and, of course, food, required a lot of close-up shots of the dishes that the characters enjoy as they travel throughout Indonesia. So when Edwin, the film’s director, needed to figure out how to shoot a bowl of steaming hot soup outdoors, he knew there was no one better to call than Puji.
The close-ups had to be taken after the the film crew had shot everything else, so Puji and his assistants had to recreate all the dishes—and there were a lot of dishes, they eat a lot in this movie—to ensure the scenes matched flawlessly, down to the spoons.
But even something far simpler, like a soy sauce commercial, had the air of a big production. That’s because part of what makes Puji so good at his job is his obsession with perfection. It took forever to get the right shade of golden brown on the chicken skin.
“Look, there’s still blood in the meat,” he said as he plated the chicken. “To create mouth-watering soy sauce chicken, you need to boil the chicken first, then sew the meat together to make it look perfect. Then you half bake it until looks brownish yellow and make sure the skin doesn’t get wrinkly.”
It was an attention to detail I’ve never seen before. I left feeling really astounded of Puji’s skills as a food stylist. But I also couldn’t help feeling cheated, in some ways, too. I mean I respect his skills, but I’m also a bit annoyed that his entire industry exists to convince hungry consumers that their package of instant noodles will look as good in my bowl as it does on the package.
I guess the saying is true. Some things, like ridiculously good looking meals, are just too good to be true.
