Carpaccio is a dish of raw meat or fish, cut into pieces so thin you can almost see through them, then laid flat on a plate as part of a meal. The classic kind is raw beef, often with olive oil, lemon, and hard cheese on top. Restaurants also make it with salmon or other fish. People sometimes stretch the word to anything sliced the same way, even vegetables, though that is a looser use. It comes from Italian cooking and sounds a little fancy: you meet it on restaurant menus more than in ordinary home kitchens. It is not cooked. The thin slicing is the point — it is not a thick chunk of raw meat, and it is not chopped into a paste.