Thank you very much for the critique, @cheesestick!
Yes, I do feel like the background in the second photo should just be the black cloth…and come to think of it, maybe in the first photo also, as, like you said, it is colourful and distracting from the actual food. Thank you for pointing that out, as I hadn’t really thought of that before, and am wishing that I shot the same scene without the checked cloth. As you can imagine, it’s too late to retry as the soup is all eaten now lol!
–Laura