Sustainability is a trending topic, not just in fashion, but in hospitality as well. And while most restaurants are focusing on reducing the amount of food waste they produce, one eatery is taking its eco-friendly commitment even further.
The two-Michelin starred Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant is now serving food in tableware crafted partly from the bones of the cows that it uses for dairy and meat. The tableware that’s comprised of bowls, plates, and cups have extremely thin walls and sport organically curved rims. They were crafted by ceramist Gregg Moore who uses an 18th-century “recipe” to prepare the material. He blends the unused bones from the kitchen—that have been cleaned and fired to turn them into powder-like calcium phosphate and then mixed with water—with English china stone and kaolin. He then pours the liquid into molds and leaves it there only for a few seconds to create the paper-thin walls of the cups. After drying them for a day, the dishes are fired.
“In the whole field of ceramics, bone china is the only material that was once alive, everything else is geological or mineralogical," he told Dezeen. "And so it has the ability, if we look at it closely enough, to tell us something about our interaction with those animals and the environment they lived in."
Blue Hill at Stone Barns was awarded its second Michelin star last October. The restaurant is part of Wasted—a community of hospitality professionals that work “to reconceive waste that occurs at every link in the food chain.” The restaurant sources its ingredients exclusively from neighboring farms foregoing a traditional menu and, instead, offers “a multi-taste feast featuring the best offerings from the field and market.”
You can purchase Moore’s “bone china” cups here.
