J.L Coquet Tableware

If you’ve heard of J.L Coquet then you are either a restaurateur, a tableware buyer, or just incredibly posh. This high-end French porcelain manufacturer designs and produces a beautiful assortment of fine china crockery that is as expensive as it looks. Notably, just about every Michelin-star restaurant that I have dined at recently has served their prestige food on J.L Coquet tableware, usually plucked from the Hemisphere collection; plain white crockery with a delicate rim of grooves running around the plates, tea cups and saucers, very elegant and pleasingly tactile.

You may wonder how I know where the restaurant tableware comes from, and yes, your worst fears are justified; I pick up the plate and look for the name underneath, eliciting gasps of hushed incredulity from neighbouring diners and the odd blush of embarrassment from my guests (“I’m so sorry, he’s not usually like this,” they whisper to the maître d’ who’s sauntered over to take a note of the eccentric customer that he intends to blacklist forevermore). To be fair though, I usually finish my food before peeking underneath the plate, as I would be the first to distress if my confit of quail’s leg ended up in my lap as opposed to my stomach. It’s not like I’m eating the food with my hands, though some people do seem affronted when I mop up the remnants of a particularly delicious sauce with a piece of bread. Come now, people, you are here to feast, not to sit an exam in Victorian table etiquette. How happy do you think it makes a chef when a plate returns even cleaner than it left the kitchen? Bloody ecstatic I can tell you (and it makes the kitchen porter’s day too, one less plate to wash up can never be a bad thing).

Recently my partner has embarked on a quest to stock up on crockery for our home; apparently we need a full tea service for all the dinner parties that I am trying to weave my way out of hosting. So I looked up the cost of a J.L Coquet tea set, with visions of impressing my guests with our marvellous elitist tableware; a single tea cup and saucer will set you back £79, and if you want a matching teapot too, that will be £160 please. Oh you want milk with that? Let’s call it another £79 for the jug and be done with it, and don’t get me started on the sugar bowl. So if you come round to my house for a dinner party, rest assured that you will be sipping tea from cups bought at Ikea, on a sale, with those annoying immovable price tags that have been appended with superglue so that everyone knows how cheap you are.

Now you know why Michelin-star restaurants charge so much – they’re trying to recoup the cost of the crockery you’re dining from. Despite being out of my tableware price range (unless I start presenting my dinner party guests with a bill before they leave), I can see why restaurants purchase this wonderful stuff. If I had a few billion to play with, my entire kitchen would be stocked with it. In fact the dinner plates look so good that if I was hungry enough, I’d probably eat them. So it’s no wonder that top chefs want to serve their premier food on this tableware; the finely honed recipes of artisan ingredients deserve these plates. If you are an artist, a culinary craftsman, then you want a great canvas on which to showcase your work. And J.L Coquet provide this in spades (or should that be spoons?).

Aside from the popular Hemisphere range, they have a wide variety of designs to suit all tastes and the deepest of pockets. They even supply little ‘mise en bouche’ cups and saucers in which to serve up an amuse bouche, if you’re that way inclined. So if you have a few bob to spare and want to impress some dinner guests with your immaculate taste in crockery, you need to visit your nearest J.L Coquet dealer pronto.

Oh, and a large presentation dinner plate, by the way, costs £69. So try not to drop it when you check the underside to confirm that it really is from J.L Coquet. On the rare occasion that a waiter in a Michelin-star restaurant drops a plate on the floor, the first thing that goes through their mind, aside from job security, is how much that plate cost and what proportion of their wage will be deducted accordingly, not the fact that your food is now to be served á l’ étage. Bon appetite!