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Image: NBC

The best thing about NBC’s Hannibal isn’t the will-they-won’t-they sexual tension between FBI agent Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and our resident cannibal psychiatrist (Mads Mikkelsen). It’s, arguably, the beautiful and macabre dishes that Lecter plates: whole trout regurgitating their own tails, roasted baby lamb with rib bones trussed like praying hands, aspic with an infinity loop of pickled anchovies—all the creation of the friendly Toronto-based food designer, Janice Poon.

Last Thursday’s third season premiere showed Poon at her full devilish power, as Hannibal served a man his own leg, candied and studded with sugar cane skewers like Pinhead, then snails that Lecter raised in his own cochlear garden. She has garnered her own cult following with her blog, Feeding Hannibal, where she shares her recipes, designs, and misadventures combing Chinatowns for striking offal, and she talked to GQ about how she makes the repulsive look so damn tasty.

You have to come up with some ghastly dishes every week. Hannibal wouldn’t dare cook the same thing twice, would he?

Absolutely not. Bryan Fuller [creator and showrunner] is the same. "I don’t want an osso bucco episode again." He’s like feeding a child. [Laughs] I’m happy to say the snails were my horrible idea. It’s circular also, the bottom of the food chain eating the top of the food chain and then back again. You don’t know me but I’m really a nice lady. I don’t think of diabolical things to do except when pressed to by an employer.

But you’ve come up with a lot of real-world meals, like a traditional sheep guts curry. For someone who used to work in advertising, where did you get such a thorough understanding of food?

I’ve been eating for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a family with restaurants and in a small town, so that means food twentyfour-seven. That means chopping vegetables and doing mise en place before you go to school. I’d think, "I’ll put on my lace-up blouse and eviscerate these chickens." All you need to do is grow up in a restaurant to never want to do anything with food professionally. That’s why I went to art school and became an art director. Three of my accounts were food: McDonald’s, Kraft, and Maple Leaf. That was my first exposure to food styling.