A Chef's Guide to Commissioning a Custom Shape

When No Existing Plate Is Right

Sometimes a dish is designed and there is no shape in any catalogue, ours included, that suits it. A course built around a specific negative-space composition, a bowl that needs to cradle a liquid at a particular angle, a rim built to hide a garnish until the last second. That's what Vipeso, our custom-mold service, exists for.

Where It Starts

Every Vipeso project starts with the chef, not with us. A sketch on a napkin, a rough shape drawn from imagination, even a verbal description of what the dish needs — we work from whatever the chef already has in their head. We're not designing a shape and offering it to you; we're building the shape you already imagined.

From Sketch to Mold

Once the shape is agreed, we produce a mold specific to that design. This is the step that separates a custom shape from picking a variant out of an existing collection — tooling has to be made before a single piece can be produced.

Small Batches, Not Mass Production

Because the mold is new and specific to one client, we produce in short runs of 150–200 units per commission. That's enough to outfit a menu item across a full service run without the volume commitment a factory tooling job would demand elsewhere.

What It Costs You in Time

A custom shape takes longer than choosing from an existing collection — mold-making and test firings add weeks, not days. It's worth reserving for the dish that genuinely needs it, not every course on the menu. But for the signature piece that defines a tasting menu, it's often the only route that gets the shape actually right.