PEWTER Old metal manages to set a new tabletop trend

It was once considered to be the poor man's silver.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
It's not your mother's pewter. The tableware and accessories designed by David Reiss and handmade by Italian artisans are metal of another mettle. More elegant, more refined than the tankards brought back as souvenirs from a European vacation or the reproductions of early American porringers most of us associate with that material.
After a long period of being ignored, says Reiss, pewter, once the poor man's silver, is now collectors' catnip. Reiss is credited with being the driving force behind this trend, having reintroduced pewter, with a few revolutionary twists, to the American public in 1995.
The designer is currently promoting the pewter line of his New Jersey-based company, Match.
What it is
"Pewter is predominantly tin, most of which comes from Africa," says Reiss. "To be fine, pewter has to contain 92 percent tin. Ours is 95 percent. The balance of the alloy is copper for a little hardness and a little antimony for color."
Out of this alchemy, tin becomes temptation to those who approach the tabletop as an art form.
Match's 500-item inventory ranges from traditional candlesticks and boxes to flatware with working ends of stainless steel (because pewter is too soft to make a knife or fork), and glassware with a pewter base.
Most exciting of all is a new line Reiss introduced in January. Called Convivio, his pewter-rimmed soft white ceramic tableware seems to have a built-in siren call to collectors. The center of Convivio dinnerware is a modern formulation of earthenware, made about an hour outside of Venice, that is strong and heat-resistant.
Convivio's marriage of materials is innovative because the pewter is poured, cast and fit together with the earthenware portion, without glue or clips, which were the previous methods of conjoining the materials, says Reiss.
The Convivio line includes dinner plates, soup or pasta bowls, salad or dessert plates, cereal bowls, mugs, and oval and round serving platters.
Reiss believes Convivio "will impress the public with its quality and change consumer's minds about the status of pewter." As he puts it in perspective, "in the Middle Ages you had nobles who lived in castles who ate off silver and guys living off the land who ate off pewter. Pewter was a tradition that was firmly in place until the Renaissance, when the life of ceramics began, which sort of pushed pewter to the side."
On the fashion-forward West Coast, pewter already has made the A-list, even pre-Convivio. Tom Blumenthal, the owner and president of Gearys, a Beverly Hills, Calif., store, was one of Reiss' first customers, placing his first order in October 1995.
To see food placed on Convivio for the first time was nothing short of a revelation for Reiss "because I saw it is a frame for the food," he says.
Reiss is himself a recent convert to pewter.
A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he was a buyer for Zona, a high-concept housewares store in SoHo, New York. He was in Italy on a buying trip when he came upon a booth at a housewares show in Florence displaying picture frames, flatware and alarm clocks, all in artisan-made pewter. "What stood out for me first were the pewter frames. I bought them for Zona and I saw the picture frames were something we could not keep in stock," he says.
"I grew up on the East Coast, and was exposed to Williamsburg pewter," he adds. "I didn't even like pewter. But this stuff was different" because of how it was made.
"When pewter is spun and then molded into a tankard around an iron frame, you can not create forms like these," he says, referring to his own elegant wares.
"The other method is pouring in molten pewter into a mold. It is more expensive, but when you pour pewter into a mold, the level of detail you can do is just phenomenal," he adds.
Inspiration
He spends four months of the year working with two factories in the Dolomite mountains of northern Italy. "What inspires me most are the old designs, which I feel translate well into our modern and also traditional environments," he adds.
One of the beauties of pewter is it tarnishes very slowly, Reiss says, and you can wash it without having to polish it the way you do silver.
"Pewter looks better after it is old and after it gets a patina. I can offer the same product with a high finish, but I don't because it looks like something trying to be silver but isn't. There's a warmth in pewter. You have to live with it for a while," he says.
Reiss himself eats cereal every morning out of a Convivio bowl. "I inevitably hit the faucet with the edge of the bowl. The advantage of the pewter rim is I can't chip the edge. We also have a replacement program. The rim gets sent back to us and we recycle the pewter," he says.
Water could possibly get into the juncture between the pewter and the earthenware, Reiss says, but will do no harm and the food will just wash away.
Reiss believes pewter is now a member of the tabletop family in good standing "and is here to stay." He feels satisfied that "in some way I can help preserve the tradition of handmade artisanry at a very high level," he says.