AI in the Kitchen: Designing a Logo Rice Bowl

I have worked as a professional in kitchens for over 25 years with fine-dining as a majority of that experience. While I love coming up with new platings, sometimes I struggle with ideas to keep things fresh or interesting. So, I used Stable Diffusion AI Image creation to get an idea and bring something interesting to life.

Above is a selection of some of the platings I have done, or created while working at a variety of restaurants.

Creating Something Different

I wanted to do something a bit different with this plating. Namely to create a design that mimics a specific logo. Being that I worked at the time at a Korean restaurant, I chose to do a rice bowl.

Now, what I wanted to do to make this plating personal, was use our company’s logo. So I attempted to take a few pictures, but could not get it right, and later did a Google search, and just went on the website and stole an image off of there… so credit for this image can fall under the licensing of ‘it was stolen, and that’s something you need to accept’. The old Starbucks and Starpreya logo license I think it’s called. Regardless, I can’t remember where I got the actual picture from, get off my back.

Now that I had the logo image, I decided to make a mask of it and send it over to ControlNet. I essentially just posterized the image and reduced it down to 2 colors.

The Process of AI

I wasn’t sure where to use Depth, or QRcode monster, so I essentially set up a batch of about 24 for one, walked away, and 24 for the other, and walked away. Due to my sluggish GPU, it did take some time, but it did result in some results that inspired me. I believe the prompt I used was ‘Korean rice bowl, fine dining’ and that’s it. As it turned out, the QRcode monster results were much more interesting.

After not generating much of anything useful, I made some weeks to the mask, adding a circle around it to represent the bowl, and placed the logo more central and zoomed out.

Above are some of the few designs that made any coherent sense as becoming food. The first shown above is the one that I took away the most from. The main takeaway was that using cucumbers for the edge of the logo was a GREAT idea, and shredded carrots could complete the inner workings of it quite well.

And this is what I came up with:

I decided to add grilled gochujang chicken into the mix and gave a quick pickle with rice-wine vinegar to the cukes. The shredded carrots served to accent the logo, as well as an ingredient on the side. Additionally, I drew inspiration from the avocado(looking thing) in some of the other images. I used a soy-marinated pineapple underneath the ‘logo’ portion to make it stand out more.

Thoughts

Utilizing AI as a tool for culinary inspiration is a pretty fantastic process. I am sure this could easily done by simply entering a prompt with the ingredients you wanted to include as well. Additionally, adding a personal touch with something like ControlNet definitely can take it next level.

I utilize AI to envision things frequently, but this was the first time I applied it to a physical creation, or introduced it to my work. There will be more AI usage for inspiration in my future for sure.