There are several ways to remember an excellent meal. You could take a photograph. You could buy the cookbook. Or, if your taste runs to the more acquisitive, you could bid on the plate.
That is the thinking behind a new auction of ceramics from some of the UK’s most lauded restaurants, including L’Enclume, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, and Ynyshir. The collection comprises broken plates, bowls, and vessels that have been painstakingly restored using traditional Japanese kintsugi, transforming something that would usually be disregarded as a kitchen write-off into a one-of-a-kind object.
The sale, being held by Tennants Auctioneers in aid of Cancer Research UK, is thought to be the UK’s first dedicated kintsugi auction. Every penny raised will go to the charity, with the ceramics restored by kintsugi artist Nicole Campbell MBE.
Campbell came to kintsugi relatively late in life. Having previously worked at Sotheby’s and developed a particular affection for Chinese and Japanese ceramics, she says the craft had remained dormant until a chance encounter with chef Luke French at Michelin-starred JÖRO in Yorkshire.
“If it wasn’t for Luke, I would not be doing this at all,” she says. “He went around the back and he’d sort of been saving up breakages over the years. He came back with a caseload of the stuff and said, ‘Fill your boots and just have some fun.’”
At JÖRO, French designs the crockery around the food itself, with the depth of a bowl determined by how much sauce a particular dish needs to hold. “Every piece of crockery is developed around an individual dish,” he says. “It’s a really beautiful thing. It’s a big part of the creative process.”
The same goes for Roberta Hall, chef at Edinburgh’s The Little Chartroom. “Plates and crockery play a very important part. They elevate dishes. They tell stories. They transport what could be something very basic on the wrong plate into something that’s just magical.”
For Hall, the handmade nature of much restaurant crockery makes breakages particularly painful. “I know how much work goes into that one plate from a potter – who just puts everything that they know into it, and the love and care and time that it takes to make these stunning things.”
Campbell began approaching some of the UK’s leading restaurants, asking for two or three damaged pieces. Her proposition was that she would repair them and try to raise money for charity; if the auction did not happen, the restaurants would receive their pieces back as a gift. Two and a half years later, the result is a collection of one-off ceramics with a rather unusual provenance.
The process is considerably more involved than gluing a broken plate back together. Campbell works with traditional kintsugi, rather than the modern versions that use epoxy glue and gold paint. Instead, she uses urushi lacquer, made from the sap of the urushi tree, for the glue, putty, and successive layers of 23.7-carat gold. The pieces then have to cure under carefully controlled conditions of temperature and humidity. A simple chip can take up to three months to complete; most pieces go through at least 10 stages.
“If you look into the philosophy [of kintsugi], it’s all about beauty in imperfection, sustainability, and transience,” Campbell explains. She says she would never break something simply to repair it – the damaged ceramics in this collection all have a history of their own.
At The Black Swan at Oldstead, chef Tommy Banks takes the bespoke approach even further. “Every dish we create in the restaurant, we also create a pot for it as well,” he says. “We work with four different potters. It’s a really beautiful thing. It’s a big part of the creative process.”
Many of the ceramics in the auction were never available to buy in their original form. Banks says that makes this sale particularly unusual: “You’ll never get another chance to own a piece of crockery from the Black Swan, because everything we make is totally bespoke. We’d never actually auction it off. So this is a sort of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Campbell has deliberately kept the auction estimates low to encourage raising profits for charity (most pieces have estimates ranging from £200–300 or approx. $270–410). She says a single chip repair would typically cost easily £50 (approx. $70), while a clean break in a small plate might be around £150 (approx. $200), with more complex pieces starting at approximately £250–300 (approx. $340–410), not including the cost for the time of her labor. The estimates therefore do not reflect the full cost of the restoration.
“You’re ending up with an object where the breakages are not hidden, but they are honored,” she says. “The thing becomes stronger as it ages, as it is not weaker.” She recognizes it’s an apt philosophy for an auction raising money for cancer research – and for the prospective buyers, it’s a rather good way to take home a piece of a restaurant that would otherwise have been destined for the trash.
