10 years ago, I told my Chef I quit. I loved hospitality, I loved the people I was working with, but I needed a change. I told him that he should take a chance on me and let me make plates for his new restaurant. I had taken classes in college, but had virtually no experience making plates. I was naive and ignorant. For some reason he had faith in me.

When I opened my first kiln filled with the first round of pieces for North, shards of broken plates and bowls literally fell out of the kiln onto my feet below. Through the overwhelming shame and fear, I called Chef Eric to beg for my job back. He half chuckled and said 'Buddy, do you think I didn't expect this might happen. I'm not worried. Get back to work and you'll figure it out.'

I worked in the studio by day, and made cocktails by night. The Twisted Oak became the true testing ground for my new plate designs. The opportunity to see guests' honest reactions to my work was a kind of real time product testing and feedback I could never dream of. Not to mention working directly with Chef Mike to develop and refine the designs on a daily basis.

Chef Dan Barber caught wind of what I was doing from some of his line cooks and servers who I'd share post-shift drinks with at local dive bars. I reluctantly took a meeting with him believing I had absolutely no business talking to one of the best chefs in the world about my silly foray into plate making. Funnily enough, it was a kids project I had worked on that caught his eye. After a year of tweaking, refining, and showing up repeatedly at the back door of the restaurant with new iterations, we finally landed on something. It's a design I still make for them to this day.

Things started to snowball after this and I began to get some really great local press.

Having grown out of my space in Port Chester, I took the scariest leap yet and ventured out completely on my own. I moved from a 10x10 corner, into a 7000 square foot industrial warehouse and co-founded Makers Central along with Stetson Hundgen. A wayward home for fellow restaurant refugees turned maker entrepreneurs creating bespoke handmade wares for the hospitality industry. But that's a story for another day. Say... 2028?

After a year of shuttling fragile half finished work made and bisque fired in my new tarrytown studio, 20 miles across town back to Port Chester to fire it in their kiln, I was finally able to install my very own gas fired kiln. Everything seemed to be going right on track...

Covid shut everything down - but it launched something, too. With restaurants closed, the world's focus turned to the home, and so did ours. We released our first-ever retail line: a collection of forms refined over years of making for chefs, reselected and reworked for the way you live and eat at home. Those pieces became the foundation of our Signature Collection.

Starved for hospitality, the NY restaurant scene had a boom immediately following the lockdowns and we partnered with a handful of incredible new restaurants including One White St., 63 Clinton, Joomak Banjum, Musket Room, The Noortwyck, and Greywind, Many of whom received a Michelin Star in their very first year.

Over the years, working with dozens of Chefs across the country we've developed quite a large collection of hospitality specific designs. Our first ever Hospitality Catalog was our attempt to offer a curated collection of some of the most popular tried and true designs.

We had a brand new state-of-the-art kiln custom built in the Netherlands. It took a year and a half to design, build, and ship over here in a container directly from the factory. Once it's up and running it will 5x our firing capacity, so we've got a lot of plates to make!!