Shanghai Street Food NYC
Yaso Tangbao is a chain of fast casual Chinese restaurants located in New York City. I’ve worked with them for several years now. They’re charming people and it’s fun to watch their small business slowly grow from just one location to now six. They must be doing something right. And I can tell you that something is providing their customers with delicious Shanghai style street food quickly and conveniently.
I love photographing their food because it always looks delicious. It’s hard to go wrong when your subject matter is meat dripping with sauce and delicious long noodles. But there are ways that we’ve developed in the years that I’ve worked with them to enhance their photography. While truth in advertising is important and we always follow those rules a little extra sauce never hurts anything. I always encourage my clients to hire a professional food stylist but when the budget doesn’t allow I am myself an amateur food stylist. It is always worth the extra investment but I can find ways to use my expertise to work with the clients chef to make due.
In this case all of their sauces are homemade in house (I have a bottle of their chili oil in my own kitchen at home) and adding a little extra fresh right on top of the meat before we shoot is always essential. It makes the meat really shine and feel more full and delicious. Another thing that we do is play on color. A lot of their food is very brown. Brown meats or brown tofu against tan noodles. Scallion is an ingredient in almost all of their dishes and we use it liberally. Adding a little extra freshly chopped green scallion to an overwhelming brown dish really helps it to pop. A chili pepper here and there can add a pop of red. In their dishes they also use a lot of cooked cabbage that typically photographs as white instead of green. In that case I often I digitally enhance in post to appear more green in color without getting fluorescent-ly unnatural in appearance. And to finish off our color palette we typically shoot on a neutral slate background. Picking a neutral color to shoot on helps to colors in the food to pop off the background. And it also helps their branding to appear more consistent over the years that we’ve worked together.
