For her 73rd birthday in April, Felice Macchi had a seafood-based lunch at La Bettola del Gusto restaurant in Pompeii, Italy.
He ordered the restaurant's signature dish, spaghettoni, thick spaghetti topped with fermented anchovy sauce made with black truffles and butter, made from buffalo milk native to the Mediterranean region. The meal consisted of spaghettoni dishes and served on ceramic plates with a whimsical hand-painted design depicting a smoking volcano reminiscent of nearby Mount Vesuvius.
Mutch finished his meal, which he said was “excellent,” but did not leave the restaurant empty-handed. Instead of leftovers, he brought home a plate of pasta.
It was the newest addition to his collection of Italian tableware, known as Buon Ricordo plates. He has hundreds of them and eats many of them. Some decorate the hallways, kitchen and dining room of his home in Varese, Italy.
Since 2022, Mr. Macchi has been the President of the Buon Ricordo Plate Collectors Association. The group, which has about 400 members in Europe and South America, is planning an exhibition of the plates at Palermo's SanElia Foundation Museum.
When asked why he started collecting plates, Mr. Macchi, an insurance agent, responded romantically.
“Why do we like women?” he said.
The tableware was introduced as a marketing tool for a regional Italian restaurant association called the Buon Ricordo Union, founded in 1964. This tableware can still be found not only in the Society's restaurants, but also in Italian flea markets, antique shops, and design fairs. These include high-end decor stores like Maison & Objet in Paris and ABC Carpet & Home in New York.
At the time this plate was introduced, Italian national cuisine was primarily home-cooked and was largely considered not worthy of being served in restaurants throughout Italy, replacing it with French-influenced menus. There were many.
The idea for “Buon Ricordo,'' which means “good memory'' in English, came from Dino Villani, an Italian advertising executive and credited with founding the beauty pageant now known as Miss Italy. He proposed a restaurant association as a way to promote and preserve regional Italian cuisine in domestic establishments.
Restaurant owners wishing to participate had to prove they were using local recipes and ingredients. An annual membership fee is also required to join the association. (This year he received 1,000 euros.) In the 1980s, the union began accepting restaurants from outside Italy that adhered to its membership standards.
Once in the union, each restaurant's plate featured its name and hand-drawn motifs that included cartoon-style depictions of marlin, rabbit, snail, cow, squid, and more, along with each restaurant's signature dish. They were given unique tableware designed to highlight.
When patrons ordered the restaurant's signature dish, it was served on a Buon Ricordo plate and they could take it home as a souvenir. This practice continues more or less to this day in the union's 112 restaurants, 11 of which are outside the city. Cities like Italy, Paris, Tokyo, and New York. (These days, restaurant patrons only receive plates if they order Buon His Ricordo's multi-course Tasting Homemade dishes as part of his menu.)
Suki Rabar, ABC Carpet & Home's vice president of merchandising and e-commerce, said the store will begin carrying the plates in 2022. Initially, she and her colleagues spent more than an hour reviewing various designs, resulting in a small selection of about 50 pieces. Last year, she ordered about 600 more plates for her store from a supplier that specializes in midcentury European ornaments.
“We've been focusing on the story of the fish, not the meat,” LaBarre said of the types of motifs featured on the $60-a-plate plates sold at ABC. She attributed her interest in this style partly to its playful aesthetic and partly to its history.
Daniele Tassi, 36, bought several plates from ABC in February to use as decorations at Tele, an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. “I was surprised to see them there, but I understood why they were there,” said the owners, who share their roots with Milanese couple Monia Soriguto and Alessandro Trezza. said Tere chef Tassi.
In January, Mr. Tere became the first and only member of the Buon Ricordo union in the United States. Mr. Solighetto, 49, said he wanted to join the union because it represents the Italian tradition of “eating local and using high-quality, seasonal ingredients.” added that it's also “trendy” now.
Terre's signature dish is pappardelle pasta with wild boar ragu. It's a family recipe that was eaten regularly when Tassi was growing up in Italy's Umbria region. Terre's dishes are made with ingredients sourced from Italy, with the exception of the Texas wild boar.
It is served on a Buon Ricordo plate with Italian and American flags and a gray boar standing on a coil of yellow pasta. They are produced in a factory in Vietri sul Mare on Italy's Amalfi Coast, which has been making tableware from local clay ever since it was introduced 60 years ago.
On April 9, the Buon Ricordo Union held a dinner in Vietri sul Mare to celebrate its 60th anniversary. Special plates were issued for the occasion, and tasting menus were prepared by chefs from around 100 partner restaurants. Tassi was among those who returned to Brooklyn after the event with dozens of Buon Ricordo plates. I inherited some of them from my grandparents who collected tableware in the 70's and 80's when interest in tableware was on the rise in Italy.
Mary Reese, 60, has been a fan of the plate ever since she noticed it at an antiques market in Lucca, Italy, in the early 2000s. Since then, she has been buying her dinnerware for herself and for Mercato, a retailer in Kansas City, Kansas, where she sells it for $37 a plate. ing.
Rise explained that pottery is a kind of instant mood booster.
“When I look at them, I can't help but smile,” she says.
