A five-course farm-to-table dinner with completely 100% organic ingredients, presented on handmade ceramic dishes that you get to take home.
Sound enticing? The Potter’s Table is the Queen City’s most exclusive, best-kept culinary secret—if you know any chefs in Cincinnati, you might’ve heard rumblings about the food, but you almost certainly haven’t been able to try it.
Local queer couple Blake and Colleen Crawford-Larson founded the pop-up dinner series out of a desire to merge their two creative interests: fine dining and pottery. The results are nothing short of stunning.
Guests entering The Potter’s Table enjoy an amuse-bouche and a glass of champagne, followed by five courses made with just-harvested ingredients from local Turner Farms, all of which are sweetened only with natural sugars. Each course is served on a ceramic dish made by Colleen or Bonnie McNett, the owner of Whistlestop Clay in Loveland. And at the end of the night, each guest chooses one ceramic piece to take home with them to their own kitchen.
The setup ensures that no two dinners are the same, even down to the plates you’re eating on. It’s born out of Blake’s absolute revulsion towards any sort of waste, especially when it comes to the restaurant industry.
The couple met in Asheville, North Carolina, where both were self-described “industry rats” — Colleen managed front-of-house at the vegan restaurant Plant for several years, while culinary wunderkind Blake became the region’s youngest executive chef at 23 when she took over French bistro Bouchon.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Blake’s parents purchased a wedding venue in rural Adams County, Ohio, and not-so-subtly suggested she move back to the state she was born in.
“My mom was constantly texting me every other week like, ‘Sure could use some hands! Really wish we had some help up here!’ So eventually, we [moved] up and we were like, ‘Well, we don’t really want to do the wedding thing. But we will utilize your space when weddings aren’t booked,'” Blake said.
Thus began the journey for the couple to open their first venture, Flock. But before that, Blake took on a job that affected her cooking philosophy for years to come.
In the time between moving to Cincinnati and opening their own restaurant, Blake became executive chef at the Hope Springs Institute, a non-profit “transformational retreat center” in Peebles, Ohio that provides “growth and healing” to guests. But her food budget was practically skeletal: the non-profit gave her $300 every two weeks to serve groups of 30+ eating three meals a day. It’s a tough task in a proper city, much less a food desert like Adams County.
“These farmers were growing things, but no one [on staff] really knew what to do with them. I made so many farm connections. We started our own garden, Colleen was growing things, and I had to learn,” she said, extending the last syllable of ‘learn’ for nearly 10 seconds. “Every day was, ‘OK, what am I going to do with every piece of this ingredient to make sure that guests are fed this week and the nonprofit can stay alive?'”
Her time at the nonprofit proved as transformational as it was for the center’s guests. Over time, she’s adapted a no-waste philosophy, noting when it comes to food waste that humans “are so used to, as a society, seeing things as they are and not as they could be.”
Blake said that after watching how much food was wasted for a set menu, she could never work in a restaurant kitchen again.
“I understand people want consistency,” she said. “The same dish every time. And that’s how the world works, but that’s not who I want to be as a chef. I want to be the chef who found 16 different uses for one piece of squash. I don’t ever want to be a chef who says ‘Oh, this recipe has four shallots. If I don’t have four shallots, I can’t make this.’ I’ll be damned!”
Eventually, the two opened Flock in West Union, Ohio, which had a similar focus to their new dinner series: using only the freshest ingredients possible from local sources. Their first night open, Colleen knew they had something special.
“Our first Flock event, it was initially a little awkward. These six strangers showed up… it’s like, they didn’t know each other, they didn’t know us. We had just moved to West Union. We’re outsiders,” she said. “Then [Blake and I] were in the back doing dishes, and we hear them all start laughing and cracking up at the table together. And we looked at each other and just smiled.”
But over time, their desire to keep going decayed. “Three rural winters” was a lot for the two, and the two faced plenty of discrimination for being a queer couple, with Colleen saying it was “no longer fun” to live in Adams County—prompting their move to Cincinnati to be in a place “where we saw and existed around other people like us.”
In West Union, the two had several locals boycott them for making “gay bread,” and even had a customer afraid of “gay water.”
“[He] would not let me fill his water,” Colleen said. “He didn’t want me touching the things he was consuming. Despite him being there to eat my wife’s food, he had a difficult time with me being close to his food because I’m gay. And that was something I never wanted to feel again, and I don’t want anyone to feel again. With Potter’s Table, knowing that people are aware of who we are and what we stand for and still choose to come is really important to me.”
Blake felt like the two “rode a very fragile line” of keeping their lives private to stay in business, and the Potter’s Table was created out of a desire to “pay homage to a part of ourselves that we had to keep silent.”
“Growing up as a queer person in the Bible Belt, there aren’t a lot of tables that fit you, so I think it’s imperative for us to build our own tables… and to find people willing to sit with us and have dinner through hard times and hard conversations,” Blake said. “Even when we can’t control anything else going on in the world, we can sit across from our neighbor and be genuine for an hour.”
After they realized their time at Flock was ending, the two came to a crossroads. Blake worked at the popular Southern eatery Nolia in Over-the-Rhine and eventually transitioned to serving as executive chef at Turner Farm, while Colleen contemplated a return to the ceramic art form she went to college for—and then her wife urged her to “just buy the fuckin’ clay.”
“I went into our spare bedroom with a $100 pottery wheel I got off Amazon, and I went to college in 2013 so it had been some time since I’d even touched clay… I started throwing some pieces and Blake came in and she goes, ‘Oh, these are great!’ and I’m like, ‘No, babe, these are shit,'” she said, laughing.
She decided to pursue pottery full-time and purchased a professional pottery wheel and a kiln. Presa Ceramics was born, and Colleen now sells her wares—mugs, vases, plates, utensils—at shops all over the Cincinnati area.
Eventually, the two realized they missed the sense of community they got from feeding people. Earlier this year, they conceptualized The Potter’s Table to “find their balance again and realize what matters.”
“Being two creative people in a relationship, we really wanted to find a way where we could both shine and both feel supported. We wanted to have community,” Colleen said. “We also always dreamt of having a long table full of people, right? Like, what are you doing in life if you’re not sitting at a table with a bunch of people enjoying themselves?”
While the concept is “a love letter to each other” and a “dream come true,” it’s still a ton of work. It takes the two about a month of preparation for each dinner, on both the culinary and ceramic fronts.
“A lot of the concepts will be me making a shape, then Blake looks at it and goes, ‘I want to put ice cream in there.’ And I go ‘Okay, I’ll make 12,'” Colleen said. “It’s an intersection of my mind and her mind. Like, how can I build something that will showcase her food and vice versa?”
Their food has become a hidden favorite of Cincinnatians everywhere, from Beard-nominated chefs to local influencers. Ben Plotkin, creator of Explore Cincinnati, called Blake and Colleen “incredibly talented” and described the food as “delicious, inventive, and beautifully presented.” One standout dish from his dinner was a turnip-derived ice cream, with honey cake on top and a light sprinkling of puffed mustard seeds.
“I found myself just as excited to see which piece of pottery would arrive next as I was to taste the next dish,” he said.
The outpouring of support and recognition from their peers and fans alike has been “fantastic,” and the two foresee Cincinnati becoming a major culinary hub just like Asheville did.
“I think if we keep inspiring each other to create, and we see things as less of a competition and more of a collaboration, Cincinnati could become the next food destination. That’s how things these start, when fire lights fire,” Blake said. “When we moved to Asheville, it was already a ‘food city,’ but when we left there was any kind of restaurant you could imagine. And I see that for Cincinnati, it’s such a cool and unique space with so much talent… it could be really special.”
The couple will host future Potter’s Table events at different businesses all over the Ohio area. The next two iterations of the dinner series, in April and May, are already sold out. Guests who wish to attend the July and August dinners can join the waitlist—of which, at the time of writing, over 100 people have already signed up for—by messaging their official account on Instagram.