Plating is the way food is arranged on the dish. Careful plating, the plating is beautiful, plating up.
It is judged as part of the cooking in professional kitchens and is what much of the visible difference between a good restaurant and a great one consists of. Plating up is what the kitchen calls the final assembly under the pass. The other sense is a thin coating of metal on another metal — gold plating, silver plating, electroplating — which is the older meaning of the word.
1nounplatingThe way food is arranged on the dish.
“The chef spends as much care on the plating as on the cooking.”
2nounthinA thin coating of metal on another metal.
“The gold plating on the cheap ring had worn off, showing grey metal underneath.”
plating is an arranging or a coating.
Plate plus -ing, from Old English platung, a thin sheet of metal. Both senses come from the same plate: one is a coating of metal and the other an arrangement on a dish.
Old English
platung — plate, thin piece of metal
Middle English
*platynge
English, today
plating
From Middle English platynge, from Old English platung (“plate, thin piece of metal”), equivalent to plate + -ing.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA