Utter the words ‘Ottolenghi’ and ‘dinner party’ in the same sentence and chances are you’re in store for a mouth-watering, laboriously-prepared, Middle Eastern-inspired feast. Anyone playing host for such an event will have no doubt spent most of the day breaking a sweat in the kitchen, and thinking about how to plate and present their masterful creations no doubt an unwanted extra consideration.
Thankfully, the London-based chef has just released a new line of tableware to make that final task a bit easier. The Feast collection includes 100 pieces of tableware, including cups, glasses, cutlery, serving stands, and eight different-sized plates: two styles of dishes, two tapas plates, bowls in both small and large and a generous salad bowl.
The pieces are decorated by Italian artist Ivo Bisignano with an expressive ‘O’ for ‘Ottolenghi’ or abstract vegetable patterns in a nod to the food group that forms the basis of most of the chef’s creations. They range in colour, from vibrant aqua blues to deep navy, from mustard yellow to soft pink, and cream to black.
Working with the Belgian design label Serax, Ottolenghi and Bisignano have created a line of dishware that both looks good and functions well.
‘Alongside our newly found co-creators in Serax, we have tried to tell the Ottolenghi story in objects,’ says the chef himself about the collection. ‘It is a story of the tension between the earthy and the sophisticated, between passion and refinement, tradition and novelty. Ostensible opposites, existing together in dynamic harmony.’
Throwing an Ottolenghi dinner party might be a complex affair, but at least now one aspect of it has been made easy. §
