On the ascendency of the the bowls that sort of look like plates that are sort of like bowls
“In the end, we’re all just women who want to find bowls that sort of look like plates that are sort of like bowls.” Since this audio clip was first shared in a TikTok in November 2022 to a total of 8.8 million viewers, more than a thousand subsequent TikToks have borrowed it while users show off their collections of wide, shallow, bowl-plate hybrids.
The audio clip’s popularity makes two very important points: one, this is the only kind of dish anyone wants to eat out of anymore, and two, we have basically no idea what to call it. At West Elm, it’s the “pasta bowl.” In the Fiesta ware universe, it’s a “luncheon bowl.” SFMOMA’s museum store goes for the portmanteau of “blate.” And East Fork describes its version cleverly as “the everyday bowl.”
As someone who grew up eating every meal (even saucy pastas) off of flat dinner plates, at some point in the last couple years of pasta bowl ascendancy, I found myself wondering: Where did these come from, and why does everyone I know seem to own a set?
When I asked Scott Vermillion, a Chicago-based historian and collector who’s on the board of directors of the International Museum of Dinnerware Design, where the shallow-bowl craze fit into the American dinnerware timeline, he was quick to remind me that the bowl was one of the first vessels ever invented — long before the plate. “This generation just discovered something that’s been done since the caveman days,” he says. “They’re just calling it a pasta bowl.”
As early as the 1930s and 1940s in the United States, shallow bowls were often sold as part of dinnerware sets, labeled as “nappies,” “vegetable bowls,” or “marmite bowls.” In the 1950s and 1960s, Vermillion says, dinnerware companies began including “gumbo” bowls, which were much wider than soup bowls, in sets.
Vermillion suspects that the term “pasta bowl” didn’t come into play until around the ’80s. Heath Ceramics, a stoneware brand founded in the 1940s in Sausalito, California, added a broad, rimmed bowl to its collection in 1983 with a suggested use for stew, pasta, or serving. In 1987, Fiesta, known for its sturdy restaurant-grade dishes, introduced a similarly wide-brimmed pasta bowl that’s still sold today.
“I remember pasta bowls before the age of Instagram, but they generally had an oversized rim, which seems to have fallen out of fashion,” says food stylist Maggie Ruggiero. “I feel like Williams-Sonoma and Sur La Table always sold them even if I didn’t know anyone who owned them.” (Ruggiero now eats 80 percent of her meals out of a Mud Australia Pebble Bowl.)
In 2012, just as Instagram was beginning to make food photography accessible to the masses, New Jersey ceramicist Jono Pandolfi designed a line of dinnerware for the opening of New York’s NoMad Hotel that included an 8-inch-wide, coupe-shaped pasta bowl. About 2 inches tall, it was deep enough to hold in warmth but shallow enough to show off the food to diners and cameras alike. The unglazed underside of Pandolfi’s design makes the bowl easy to grip and pass across the table.
“Even though we called it a pasta bowl, versatility was extremely, extremely central to the design,” Pandolfi says. The bowl could also hold a vegetable dish, or oysters perched on a bed of ice, or whatever else it needed to hold. “When we created the initial collection for the NoMad, we only could do about eight or nine shapes,” he explains.
Now, Pandolfi’s dinnerware is used in more than 500 restaurants, and about 30 percent of his business consists of people buying his dishes for their homes. “If you only had space in your cabinet for one shape, this would be an option that you could totally live with,” he says. From a practical level, the shape is easy to hold while eating on the couch, making it the perfect vessel to eat from during our current era of endless streaming television. And as Pandolfi points out, the steep sides are ideal for kids who scoop up their food.
In 2014, East Fork Pottery — another dinnerware company that’s beloved by restaurant chefs, food stylists, and photographers — began making its Everyday Bowl, which is now the North Carolina company’s second-best seller. Founder Alex Matisse based the design partially on a bowl that he made as an apprentice for potter Mark Hewitt. “I always loved that low, wide presentation,” he says. “It’s easy for soups. It’s easy for salads. It’s easy for pasta.”
David T. Kim, a ceramicist who designs tableware for Chicago restaurants like Kasama and Esmé, started making wide bowls about six years ago to accommodate the way he found himself eating regularly — rice dishes with a lot of sauce, curries, and Korean stews. “In my opinion, the blate is one of the most versatile and functional pieces of dinnerware,” Kim says. “It works great for people who like to minimize dishwashing as well as for those who have limited cabinet space.”
Today, many of the commercially available pasta bowls from large retailers mimic the rustic stoneware style that companies like Jono Pandolfi and East Fork brought to the dining table a decade ago, or the handmade look of pottery like Kim’s. You can buy a $12.99 four-pack of pasta bowls from Ikea with a matte, natural-toned glaze that won’t pick up too much reflected light when you take a picture of your dinner. For $52, you can buy a four-pack of pasta bowls from West Elm with unglazed edges that will frame your food almost like an East Fork bowl would.
In contrast to the way Americans bought dinnerware throughout the beginning of the 20th century, in formal sets, both Pandolfi and Matisse have noticed their customers building their collections piece by piece, selecting the shapes that will work the hardest in their homes. “Younger folks that are on a more limited budget will buy slowly and collect over time,” Matisse says.
If you are someone who still buys your china in full sets, you don’t have to worry about missing out on the fun, because those brands are retroactively adding pasta bowls to their collections, too. Keith Winkler, a marketing and media relations manager who has worked at Replacements for 32 years, has seen classic tableware brands like Lenox, Wedgewood, and Spode add pasta bowls in recent years. Spode’s Christmas Tree collection, which was first designed in 1938 and is one of Replacements’ best-selling lines, just added this pasta bowl in 2019.
But for those who don’t have a full-sized china cabinet taking up real estate in their dining room (and for those of us who don’t have dining rooms), the pasta bowl might be the only dinnerware collection we need.
“I think plates lend themselves to sitting at a table,” says Vermillion. “But who eats at a table anymore?”
Anna Hezel is a New York-based journalist and the author of Tin to Table and Lasagna.
Halimah Smith, a self-taught visual artist and illustrator from Philadelphia, is passionate about using her creative talents to uplift and celebrate Black people and culture and resonate with her community. To explore more of her work, you can follow her on all channels at @artpce.
