During the coronavirus pandemic, Diego Oka, executive chef at Miami restaurant La Mar by Gastón Acurio, decided to learn how to make pottery. He bought a potter’s wheel and looked for YouTube tutorials, essentially teaching himself how to make plates, bowls and other dishes, drawing on his own Peruvian and Japanese heritage for inspiration. Oka quickly realized that instead of enlisting artisans to create crockery for La Mar, where he has worked since it opened a decade ago, he could design and create it to his exact specifications.
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“One of the parts I really enjoy about opening a restaurant is selecting the china and how the restaurant is going to look,” Oka tells Observer. “To know what plates are going to enhance the beauty of the dishes.” In the past, Oka presented his ideas to other people, who made the dishes. That changed during the pandemic.
“I love art. I love design. I love architecture,” he says. “At the beginning of this year, I was starting to tell people from my team and directors in the hotel: Why don’t I do the plates?”
Things quickly spiraled, and soon, the Mandarin Oriental, where La Mar is located, had cleared out one of the guest rooms to become a pottery studio. Over the past six months, Oka has created 400 pieces, which will be at the core of a new eight-course tasting menu experience at La Mar called Amano by Oka.
Oka........