How a Ceramics Master Makes Plates for Michelin-Starred Restaurants — Handmade

[Music] it's super exciting to me that our company is sending 300 350 pieces out the door every day to a lot of the world's best restaurants lots in the u.s canada south america in europe we're in australia in the middle east now occasionally i'll try to figure out how many people eat off my plates every day quite a few we operate almost the same way a kitchen does we come in early and what are we making that day call that our menu start up with the prep the clay prep make sure you have the right amount of raw materials getting the stages ready so there's definitely like a rhythm to every day a lot of teamwork and coordination necessary and communication makes us feel more connected to the world of restaurants that we are so interested in we run our clay through our pug mill which de-airs it over time certain types of rock under certain conditions of pressure and moisture and heat they decompose and clay his forms tiny flat little particles and that gives them their plasticity the way they stick together with water something that humans have used for thousands of years doing what we do [Music] we take the canvas texture off the slab because if we left it on there the back of the plate would have a canvas texture on it so now we're going to lay out our plates all of our different shapes are marked on this pastry ring when we make 10 and a half inch interplay we put it there when we make salad plate there so this is our guide for our forming people [Music] the three kinds of clay are earthenware stoneware and porcelain earthenware is generally still porous like terracotta pots porcelain is is more of a pure form of clay and is similar to stoneware higher fired it's very hard very low absorption we work with mainly stoneware more of a harder product less porous really does help for dinnerware and gives us a beautiful durable finished product each mold has a corresponding blade this is made of plexiglass and this is what shapes the face of the plate so we have over 50 shapes that we can make here i'll design a plate and i'll make a drawing these are made of plexiglass so i cut these out and i'm constantly kind of reshaping these this is a blade that would have made the molds because you can see the exterior you can see the foot this would make plates you can see how i kind of design the thickness yeah so and then it's all adjustable too so here's a coffee cup like here's a blade that forms the inside of a bowl so we make all the molds here we make all the templates here we make all the blades here that's what allows us to not only make a great amount of pieces per day but to make a great variety of pieces per day now i'm just looking at the gap here to get the plate the thickness that i want smooth side down [Music] the restaurants we work for require a consistent and a uniform product because they're running a restaurant one of the hardest things that you can ask a potter to do is to make hundreds of nice uniform plates when they see that they can have a uniform product with you know a nice bit of handmade variation to it that's kind of what a lot of them are looking for and that's what we do [Music] i took my first ceramics class in ninth grade it's the kilns the firing the glazes the smell when you walk into a studio it just hooked me right away [Music] there's a bit of a void on my rim but if i just give it time gradually the clay will move and compress and fill that see that now that void is filled see a little bit of air bubbles in the clay but even that nice steady pressure won't want to move when i fire it a lot of other processes might leave a bit of a memory in the clay which can kind of come back during the firing in the form of warpage it's important to really take your time with this pressure that clay is all really compressed and happy [Music] there's something beautiful about a handmade plate where each one is going to be one of a kind we leave kind of just the minimal amount of handmade touch and that's always enough the first really big job was the nomad hotel in new york city so this was an order of about 6 000 pieces i was pretty much working alone i actually outsourced a lot of the work to ohio one piece they couldn't really do well was the coffee cup while they were finishing production i was back here stressing out about how was i going to make them 400 coffee cups by the time they opened which now seems like something that would be really easy for us but that was what led me to the jiggering process which is the process of placing a mold onto a wheel then you have an arm with a template attached and that's what has really opened up doors for us in terms of being able to do the entire collection ourselves the entire thing here let it dry for about an hour to two hours then it gets to this stage what's called leather hard still wet but firm and workable and we trim the rim of the plate very important for durability to have a thick rounded edge not a thin edge all you're doing here is you're making the exterior of the plate look good because that's going to be unglazed you want this to be pretty like flawless so after we finished the nomad all i really wanted to do was kind of take a month off but their sister restaurant 11 madison park needed new plates so that was kind of a one-two punch um the eleven madison park stuff we did in our studio here 100 that was a pretty amazing look and i think doing that job really helped the handmade dinnerware movement kind of take hold because 11 madison park was using handmade stoneware all of a sudden lots of other restaurants were really interested in it there was kind of a line of restaurant tours and chefs waiting to work with us and talk to us now we're in about over 250 restaurants during the bisque firing which is the first firing that's about a 24-hour process the heat is removing all the water and burning off any remaining organic material that's in the clay about 1800 degrees this is the bisque inventory so this is all of our dark clay this is all of our toasted clay so we can take stacks of bowls out of here glaze them up throw them in the kiln tonight and they'll be ready for the restaurant tomorrow glazing is kind of the most important step because if you screw that step up there's really no way to save the piece glaze is composed of clay glass and flux and then some colorants or other minerals to give it color then you can vary the proportions of those to give your glaze more of a matte look more of a shiny look the key to glazing without having a lot of defects show up is having good bisque if you have little voids in your clay body that could cause pinholes in the glaze if you have a dirty piece of bisque the glaze might not stick [Music] it's all about just getting it even then i wipe it just to give a little more crispness to that edge you can see how fast it dries [Music] the second firing which is up to about 2200 fahrenheit heat and thyme are working on the piece to melt that clay melt that glaze fuse it all into one really strong product [Music] the maturing temperature refers to the right amount of heat and time that a clay body requires for it to melt and become a durable ceramic product stoneware and porcelain will shrink 12 to 14 from when they're wet to when they're a finished plate well we buy clay that is formulated to fire to cone six so this is cone five and cone six this is before this is after and these measure temperature and time so every firing we have probably at least a half a dozen of these scattered throughout the kiln to see just how hot or cool the kiln is the glaze firing is about a 14 hour process and that is to 2200 fahrenheit it's going through so much heat melting and vitrifying and maturing all the minerals that are in the clay this has been fired to 1800 and had glaze applied that glaze is still powdery and loose once this is fired again this is what will come out of the kiln we'll darken down to this there is still a fun aspect to opening the kiln every day [Music] there's our matte green midnight moss this is our barista espresso cup which has a perfect curve at the bottom my biggest plate 13 inch my philosophy as a designer is i like to let the materials really speak for themselves one of the most important things that i think about always how does the food look on it [Music] we're trying to think like a chef look at their menus look at their past experience [Music] not only you know have we built up a level of knowledge about what we do and about how restaurants operate and what they need we'll also be here in five years or ten years down the road and they'll still be able to get the same ten and a half inch coupe plate with dark clay and a certain glaze now the responsibility is more on us to keep creating a really good product something unique locally made handmade and something they can't get anywhere else you

Channel: Eater

Views: 4,239,869

Rating: 4.9221201 out of 5

Keywords: Pottery, pottery making, ceramics, ceramic dishes, ceramic plates, ceramic mugs, handmade plates, handmade dinnerware, restaurant design, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, dining, dish, foodie, chef, foodshow, handmade, best ceramic plates, best handmade plates, handmade plates for restaurants, jono pandolfi, jono pandolfi ceramics, pottery, Jono Pandolfi Ceramics, ceramic dinnerware, ceramic dinnerware sets, handmade ceramics, clay, working with clay, fine dining ceramics

Id: H1QYeuy3buE

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Suprerius]

Wewantthoseplates

[u/triedandprejudice]

That was really interesting!

[u/Vinifera7]

That is some pretty handsome crockery.

[u/lunchbane]

This is super interesting! It brought back memories of stuff I learned in high school classes for making clay products.

[u/oioliv]

Honestly, I love this video and these plates, but when I worked with events and had to serve 50 people with these plates I thought I will die, they were quite heavy and because of their edge I couldn’t cary more than 2 at a time, BUT they have a very good „instagram” look so it actually made our place more popular on social media. Still: Amazing product!

[u/rabbit395]

This man is a god