How My Vintage Dishware Obsession Got Out of Control

A couple of years ago, I stepped into a cute little vintage shop in Bromont, Que., run out of a historic cottage on the only main street in town. I was killing time before dinner and didn’t plan on buying anything, but on my way out, something caught my eye among the dusky silk robes and novelty teaspoons: a small mountain of ceramic dishware covered in primary-coloured balloons. Pops of blue, red and yellow danced across a set of breakfast plates, coffee mugs and latte cups big enough to be used as soup bowls. There was a cookie tray and a popcorn bowl too, pieces so charming in their particular intended use that was only amplified by the cheerful pattern. I fell in love immediately. 

There must have been upwards of 40 pieces in the whole set, and the shop owner was selling it for a steal. I was travelling with just a carry-on suitcase, but I bought the set anyway. Despite the great deal—the cost of shipping them home to Toronto amounted to almost their sale price—it felt like an extravagant impulse purchase, something I’d only ever do once.   

On the way back home, I googled the pattern: Party Balloons by Waechtersbach, a discontinued style from 1980s West Germany and still available in single-piece listings on resale sites like eBay. Before the dishes even arrived at my door, I’d hunted down a matching teapot and juice jug to go with the set. Within a week, my party balloon dish collection was happily doing breakfast rotation in my kitchen. But something about that first chance encounter with the dishes had me hooked. I wanted to be delighted like that again. 

Specialty dish resale can get quite pricey, so I started combing Facebook Marketplace and online estate sales instead. I thought it would be hard to recreate that spark of culinary kismet, but I was quickly proven wrong. Every search term, from tea set to punch bowl to (if I was feeling particularly frisky) dinner service for six turned up dozens of listings for secondhand tableware that, in some cases, sellers could barely pay people to take off their hands. In one online church auction alone, I took home five separate lots for just under $50: three midcentury tea sets and two sets of dinner plates, an insane amount of dishware my family of four did not need and did not have room for. 

But for months, at least once a week, something called out to me. Perhaps an octagonal salad bowl in that black, opaque glass reminiscent of the decadent ’80s; an eggplant-shaped water jug from the ’70s; the same pattern of abstract-art dinnerware Monica used in her apartment in Friends. Their shape, colour and design looked nothing like the greige, sleek pieces that populate most Instagram-perfect tables these days. 

The dishes had personality, and spoke to personal taste—the idea that these material objects that pass through your hands multiple times a day could still carry a sense of fun, however wacky. (One of my favourite finds: a set of Japanese breakfast plates covered in a bright yellow chickadee print. I picked them up from the seller’s home, which was completely decked out in rooster decor, from the wallpaper to the flower vases to the bathroom soap dispensers.) 

I have some ideas as to why resale sites are so flush with non-luxury dishware these days. The first is a little grim: since the early ’70s and again in the ’90s, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration successively tightened its rules around lead use in dish glazing, we’ve known that some types of vintage dishware carry the risk of containing lead. We also know it’s hard to trace: the NYC Health Department had to issue warnings about lead in what it called “traditional dishware” after investigating 15 lead poisonings in 2021. 

The second is generational. The best deals I’ve noticed in my fledgling dish-hunting career, the ones that stay listed for longest or are auctioned off at ridiculous deals, are what are known as a full dinner service: sets of dishware meant to serve anywhere from eight to 12 people at a time, replete with soup tureens and coffee pots and a specific plate for every course. That’s a lot of dishes to store when households look and are built differently than even a couple of decades ago. 

Families are smaller; new-build houses and condos are less likely to have dedicated dining rooms; Canadians these days are far more likely to eat alone. When we do throw dinner parties, they’re not the formal engagements they once were. Complete matching dinner sets speak to a time of silver-spoon service and stiff manners. For these reasons and more, passing sets of dishware down to your children and grandchildren is a diminishing prospect.

It’s that inheritance aspect of collecting I’ve been thinking about more these days. While I use a lot of my finds—the ones I know to be food-safe, useful and most importantly, fun—the majority of it remains either piled up in a closet next to my furnace or tucked away in storage where I should probably be making space for things like our stroller and winter jackets and the Christmas tree. And yet, if I weren’t writing this essay now, it’s possible I’d be scrolling the Internet for my next find. Other than the thrill of discovery, why am I doing this?

Once, I picked up a tea set at an estate sale where the former owner’s own children were shopping among strangers for their parents’ belongings, a strange and slightly upsetting experience. 

Another time, more recently, I scored a set of Russel Wright Iroquois dinnerware, the best find of my two-year dish-hunting obsession. These dishes were first produced in the 1940s and are instrumental in how contemporary tableware looks today (the Halston of everyday plates, if you will). Each pastel-hued cup and saucer had been collected lovingly and piecemeal by a woman who lives not too far from me, over the course of almost 30 years. She posted the entire collection—easily worth upwards of $1,000 to a serious collector—for $50. When I came upon the listing, I thought it was a joke. When I arrived at her house, it was clear she was serious. 

She opened the door to her home, where the plates were sorted and stacked on her dinner table, ready to be packed and taken away. Her children, now grown, didn’t want them, and she was starting the process of clearing out her house. All that effort and care in bringing those pieces together, building a collection that gave her pleasure, down to a Facebook Marketplace transaction with a complete (and admittedly deliriously happy) stranger. 

I asked her if she was sure she wanted to sell them to me for so little. She insisted yes, so long as the plates would be loved. How can I not try to honour a request like that?