We photograph our food, debate restaurants, and obsess over ingredients – yet barely notice what we're eating with. A new cutlery collection just might prompt us to pay closer attention to what we feel are the overlooked heroes of the dinner table - the spoons, knives and forks we use daily, but too seldom consider worthy of design innovation.
Discover Teodora cutlery
In his studio in San Sebastián, Spain's gastronomic capital where traditional cuisine meets modern experimentation, designer Santos Bregaña found an unlikely muse: a Byzantine princess who scandalized 11th-century Venice by introducing the fork to the dining rooms of her new husband, the Doge. Before Theodora Anna Doukaina, European courts were suspicious of forks, considering them possibly satanic, and preferring to eat with knives or their hands. Her defiance of dining conventions inspired both the collection's name – Teodora – and its eye-catching asymmetric forms that depart from rigid traditional designs.
The set is the result of a collaboration between Bregaña and Tableswing, a Barcelona-based ceramics maker making its first foray into cutlery. The connection was natural: Tableswing's CEO Olga Casanovas had previously collaborated with Bregaña on a restaurant project. When she and her team began exploring the idea of expanding into cutlery design, a category often bound by convention, reaching out to Bregaña seemed a logical choice.
The tools on the table are always a challenge to design, says Bregaña, because 'it is difficult to evolve in a world that often looks to the past. Someone can have a state-of-the-art car and travel in their private jet, but likes to have grandma's antique dining sets. Teodora looks to the future like a space rocket.'
The collection's most striking feature breaks with tradition by acknowledging the natural way humans eat, rather than forcing geometric perfection. 'We are only apparently symmetrical, and we certainly eat asymmetrically,' Bregaña explains. 'Dining utensils must respond to this reality and that was, along with the feminine sinuosity of the curves, the main challenge of this project.'
The collection comes in two moods: gleaming polished stainless steel or matte black, with each twelve-piece set covering all dining occasions from main course to dessert. Made in China from stainless steel, the hand-finishing on each piece highlights the curvature of the design.
The two-year journey from concept to creation blended old and new methods. "I always work with a story," says Bregaña. "With my pencil on a notebook, searching page by page for where a good design is hidden, like an archaeologist of the future. Once the trace appears, together with my collaborator, Javier Zunda, the process moves on to mathematics, geometry and programming, in a marriage between craftsmanship and high technology."
For Bregaña, whose portfolio includes designs for Vista Alegre and spaces like Mugaritz restaurant, Teodora reflects his broader interest in reimagining everyday rituals. His studio in San Sebastián, where eating well is practically a civic duty, seems the perfect place to chart the evolution of millennial dining culture.
Soon to be available through Tableswing's website, Teodora quietly picks up where its namesake left off. In an age of hum-drum grab-and-go meals and impersonal delivery apps, these pieces remind us that, sometimes, the most radical act is setting a beautiful table.
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