Handmade servingware from Leucadia pottery house drawing raves — and the interest of chefs nationwide
The Wheel Stoneware’s creative collaborations yield plating options that complement food artistry, and the public can buy them, too
When Animae’s executive chef Tara Monsod came on board in 2021, like any chef, she was keen on putting her stamp on the downtown San Diego restaurant. And that wasn’t limited to the Asian-inspired menu. The environment, including plates and serving platters, had to mesh with the food she was creating — from her Caviar Shrimp Toast and Hunan Lamb Chops to Tuna Kinilaw and Coal Roasted Cabbage.
It took until the summer of 2022 before she made the drive up to Leucadia to meet with Michael Totah, the founder and owner of pottery house The Wheel Stoneware, where she ordered dozens of pieces in earthy greens and shades of orange. She has both glossy and matte dishes; there are bowls with swirls of gray and white, while others have swaths of green and white playing on a gray background.
She already knew the place and the products. Monsod had worked in other restaurants that used Totah’s dishware, and she’d bought some for her own home.
“I love the craftsmanship,” she explained. “I have an appreciation for people who are just killer at what they do. They create a story. You see the guys making the plates from raw clay, watching it being shaped. Then, knowing it’s going to be baked and glazed.
“And there’s the conversation, the back and forth about how to create something that’s a canvas for your food. I think there’s something really beautiful about that — especially when you get to see the people who are actually creating it versus just ordering it online.”
The Wheel’s dishes have a distinctive look and texture. The glazes tend toward earth tones — although when I was there, a few pink platters sneaked in at a customer request. Some are a solid color; others bear the signature of glazes painted over one another to get a distinctive look.
They’re not heavy, but as stoneware, they are solid and convey a warmth that you don’t always get in porcelain, which can also be more formal. And, because they’re all handmade, while they’re consistent in shape, they each still have their own little fingerprint and reflect the style of the restaurant, the chef and the food they make.
Totah founded The Wheel in 1988, but not as a supplier of restaurant dishes. He was an aspiring artist. Originally from Santa Cruz, he first picked up pottery in a junior high summer school class and stuck with it every year through high school.
“I loved that you could stick your hands in the clay and just lose time,” he said. “I was into drawing and then pottery. Really, the tactile aspect of it was really appealing. But I never thought I could make any money doing it.”
But, he added, he had no idea what he was going to do for a living and came down to San Diego to be with friends and attend Grossmont College. Between semesters, his mom, Judy — an artist who now stamps The Wheel’s logo on all the products — had enrolled him in a pottery-making class in Maui, taught by a Japanese potter.
The artist invited Totah, by then 22 years old, to apprentice with him for a few weeks. Totah became besotted with raku techniques, a firing process in which the glowing-hot vessel goes from the kiln to a container full of combustibles, then sealed for cooling. Totah says that the rapid cooling plus smoking, combined with the right glaze, can produce incredible one-of-a-kind artwork. When he returned to San Diego, he quit school and found a place in Leucadia, where he’s been ever since, with the goal to make raku objects for a living under the name “The Wheel.”
The name for his new enterprise “clobbered me over the head,” Totah said with a laugh. He was hustling to get into art galleries and was a member of the Leucadia Art Association.
The reality of raku production, though, lost its fun, Totah said. So did the reality that the pieces don’t last long. He redirected his pottery to the pit fire, messing around with copper and other materials, and selling pieces in galleries. But his professional life took a turn when he went to eat at the now-closed Café Japengo in La Jolla, where he started chatting with its chef at the time, James Holder, a sushi master who now operates James’ Place at UC San Diego.
“They just happened to be really irritated with their supplier in Japan, so he showed me a soy pot and asked if I could make it. And that’s how it all started,” Totah said.
Serendipity hit again — and again, thanks to Café Japengo.
“I picked up a scrap of plywood off the floor and it was a trapezoid,” he recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Huh, that would make a cool plate.’ So, we folded up a couple of them as raw clay, hadn’t even fired them yet. And this restaurant group who went to Japengo heard about me from them. They drove up to the shop, and they saw the plate and they freaked out over it.
“And then my lightbulb went off. They just want something they’ve never seen. They want something different than the guy next door. And so that’s really where it started to take off. They bought plates for three of their restaurants in Chicago.”
A tour of The Wheel’s facility is a bit mind-blowing. There’s no formal building, per se, just a reworked structure, more than 8,000 square feet, that’s reminiscent of a greenhouse. When you see the racks upon racks of plates and bowls and platters that have yet to be glazed, it’s hard to comprehend that all of them have been handmade on the wheels or slab rollers in the back. But that’s the first thing Totah will tell you when you walk in. They’re all most definitely handmade.
“We don’t use RAM presses [machines used to press clay into molded shapes] or even a jigger [a mold used to form a shape on the wheel] or slip casting [filling molds with liquid clay called slip] or anything like that,” he explained. “It’s either made on the wheel or on the slab roller.”
But The Wheel does benefit from the creativity of Totah’s friend and fellow potter John Laver, who designed and manufactured the popular woven ceramic baskets that were sold by companies like Williams-Sonoma for more than 40 years. He’s an engineering creative who can figure out solutions to all sorts of things, from unique design features for his own home to ways to help expedite handmade production pottery. He made forms that the potters use to create consistent lips more easily for slab plates, carved wood that helped facilitate making shallow double condiment bowls, and even designed tongs to help workers dipping plates into barrels of glaze hold onto the pieces.
Laver, who closed his Eucalyptus Stoneware business in 2014, has a corner in The Wheel where he continues to throw.
Currently, Totah has 10 employees, down from 14 at one point. The challenge is finding skilled people, he lamented. But he has his mom helping, of course, and his wife, Dominique, an artist who makes mosaics. On that day, she was painting a strengthening slip material on espresso cups where the handles meet the body of the cups. And there’s a process that helps potters produce more swiftly. The clay for every single piece is pre-weighed to help the potters with consistency.
The Wheel uses B-mix clay, a stoneware porcelain mix that works for food safety. Once they’re dry, the pieces are fired in one of three kilns on the property. Totah keeps things simple by not drawing designs on the pieces. Instead, they’re dipped into glazes, or the glaze is brushed on.
“I’m always looking for a cool new glaze,” he said. “I find recipes from colleges or from Ceramics Monthly, and modify and test them. I’m working on a new iron red glaze and trying to modify it to cone 6 from cone 10.”
The cone system is an order of measurement from the lowest temperature to the highest, designed to help potters measure the capacity of what they want to fire in the context of what their kiln is capable of. Totah explained that while his kilns can handle higher temps, he likes to fire consistently at cone 6. With 35 glaze buckets in use, it helps streamline production.
Even with those parameters, with some chemical differentiation between glazes, Totah and his workers can dip or brush one on top of another to get different effects. They can even spring from an intriguing combination that one of his guys has done with their own pottery and then taken up a level.
When a chef or restaurant group comes in to buy pieces for their restaurants, Totah has an array of plates, bowls, serving dishes and other pieces that he can show his clients as samples. That’s just the starting point for a conversation that addresses what the chefs want to accomplish with the pottery in the context of the restaurant’s design, and how they want their plates to complement the food they serve. Chefs have been known to come in groups from their restaurant for a tour so they can understand the process. And those like Monsod appreciate that Totah understands the artistry of food and how it interacts with plating.
While The Wheel’s products are also available to consumers — who can make an appointment to come in and order a set of dinnerware or other pieces — Totah’s primary customers are chefs from across the country.
Laura Warren, the executive pastry chef for Puffer Malarkey restaurants, which includes Animae, said that she loves using The Wheel’s plates.
“They make the most unique and beautiful backdrop that just kick the plating of my desserts up a notch,” she said.
Golden is a San Diego freelance writer and blogger.
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