This food looks too good to be real — and it is

Inside a new exhibition on ‘shokuhin sampuru’ — the highly realistic food replicas commonly displayed in front of restaurants in Japan, intended to lure customers inside.

A perfectly twirled bite of spaghetti hangs off a fork mid-air. Next to it, a bowl of ramen and a katsudon — freshly cooked eggs and pork cutlet – fall fresh out of the pan. Plates are stacked high with colorful sashimi and elaborate parfaits. It’s a feast for the eyes — and the eyes alone. These are “shokuhin sampuru” — the highly realistic food replicas commonly displayed in front of restaurants in Japan, intended to lure customers inside. A familiar sight in Japan, a vast array of these replicas are now on display in London in an exhibition that is the first of its kind, according to Simon Wright, the show’s curator and director of programming at Japan House London. “Looks Delicious!” features replicas made by the Iwasaki Group, the first company dedicated to the production of these fake foods which remains today the largest producer in Japan. (The company needs to make on average one replica every 40 minutes in order to keep the business viable, according to Wright.) Its founder, Takizo Iwasaki, was reportedly inspired to create wax models of food from a childhood memory of seeing candlewax fall into a puddle and form into the shape of a flower. A version of Iwasaki’s first ever replica — modeled after an omelette his wife made — is on display at the exhibition, named “kinen omu,” or celebration omelette. Over time, Iwasaki developed a production method using wax and agar jelly molds, though now the company mainly uses PVC. However the origin story of food replicas more broadly is a “mess,” according to Nathan Hopson, a professor of Japanese at the University of Bergen who has studied the subject in-depth. Hopson told CNN in a video call that there are a myriad of theories as to how the replicas came to be introduced in Japanese culture. One popular explanation, according to Japan House, is that they were made to familiarize Western dishes to a “curious yet cautious” Japanese public who otherwise wouldn’t know what to expect if they made an order. Among the swaths of traditional Japanese food, the exhibit also features strikingly realistic renderings of bacon, eggs and grilled cheese.