This ‘Hotel Quarantine Karen’ Is Transforming Her Meals With Restaurant Ready Plating Skills
MasterChef meets COVID quarantine.
After finding herself with a fair chunk of spare time within her mandatory 14-day hotel quarantine, returning Australian Sarra Costello decided to make the best of a boring situation by ‘fixing up’ the less-than-photogenic meals she and her husband were getting three times a day. And thus, the delightful Instagram @forgedfoodie was born, where the self-labelled “Quarantine Karen” transforms her daily quarantine meals by the power of MasterChef style plating.
Returning home from Bali, where she lives with her husband, Costello wanted to inject a bit of fun into her day-to-day stuck in a hotel room. Her “Quarantine Karen” Instagram only has a few hundred followers, but her creations have a rabid following within a handful of Facebook groups for those undergoing hotel quarantine.
The food itself wasn’t too bad, she says, but didn’t exactly look terribly pretty. While she didn’t really care (save for a few very questionable meals), it became something a little less serious to enjoy in groups, where many are seeking advice on fee exemptions and flight caps.
“[The groups are] a nice platform for all us quarantine team members to share our stories and chat it up with questions, funny moments, and even have a little whinge,” she says.
“It was humorous to me being in a 5-star hotel (The Sheraton Grand at Sydney’s Hyde Park) and getting served meals that looked like they had been blended on the way up to get dropped off.”
In her normal life, she’s worked across restaurants for years, and so knew how to make the so-so food look a little more desirable. Using only what was offered from the hotel, she began to break common etiquette and focused more on playing with her food than eating it.
“I’d say life’s not that hard in quarantine if you can find something funny and laugh about it,” she says. “It turned into something I looked forward to doing every day 3 times a day, as strange as it sounds .”
While she and her husband are now five days out of quarantine, Costello’s creations have inspired others to try their own hand at prettifying their hotel meals, meaning she’s still posting a few more things — and might even keep going with some IRL shit meals from servos and markets.
“I feel bad coming from a country where people are struggling to put food on the table and here I am in The Sheraton complaining about the shit endless food supply but it was funny and worth it to keep people laughing,” she says.
Find a few of her best creations below.