For his 73rd birthday in April, Felice Macchi dined at La Bettola Del Gusto, a seafood restaurant in Pompeii, Italy.
He ordered the house specialty: spaghetti, thicker spaghetti, in fermented anchovy sauce with black truffles and butter made with water buffalo milk sourced from the Mediterranean region. The meal came on a ceramic plate with a whimsical hand-painted design depicting a plate of spaghetti and a smoking volcano, a nod to nearby Mount Vesuvius.
Mr. Macchi finished his meal — he said it was “excellent” — but did not leave the restaurant empty-handed. Instead of leftovers, he took home the plate his pasta was served on.
It was a new addition to a collection he has gathered of this type of Italian tableware known as Buon Ricordo plates. He has hundreds of them, many of which he eats. Others decorate the hallways, kitchen and dining room of his home in Varese, Italy.
From 2022, Mr. Macchi is its president Buon Ricordo Plate Collectors Association. The group, which has around 400 members in Europe and South America, is planning an exhibition of the dishes at Fondazione Sant Eliaa museum in Palermo.
When asked why he started collecting the license plates, Mr. Macchi, an insurance agent, responded romantically.
“Why do we fall in love with a woman?” he said.
The tableware was introduced as a marketing tool for an association of regional Italian restaurants, called the Buon Ricordo Unioncreated in 1964. You can still find it in the association’s restaurants — as well as Italian flea markets and antique dealers, design trade shows like Maison et Objet in Paris, and high-end decor stores like ABC Carpet & Home in New York.
At the time the dishes were released, regional Italian cuisines were mostly prepared at home and were largely deemed unworthy of being served in restaurants across Italy, many of which had French-influenced menus.
The idea for Buon Ricordo, which translates to “good memory” in English, came from Dino Villani, an Italian advertising executive who, among other achievements, founded the beauty pageant now known as Miss Italy. He proposed the restaurant association as a way to promote and preserve local Italian cooking in the nation’s stores.
Restaurant owners who wanted to participate had to demonstrate that they used local recipes and ingredients. Joining the union also requires an annual fee. this year it was 1,000 euros. In the 1980s, it began accepting restaurants from outside Italy that met its membership criteria.
When they joined the union, establishments received unique tableware designed to highlight their signature dishes, with each restaurant’s plate bearing its name and a hand-painted motif that often included cartoonish renditions of swords, rabbits, snails, cows or squid.
When a patron ordered a restaurant’s signature dish, it was served on a Buon Ricordo plate, which could be taken home as a souvenir—a practice that has continued more or less to this day in the association’s 112 restaurants, 11 of which are outside Italy. in cities such as Paris, Tokyo and New York. (These days, restaurant patrons only get the dishes if they order the house specialty as part of a Buon Ricordo multi-course tasting menu.)
Suki LaBarre, the vice president of merchandising and e-commerce at ABC Carpet & Home, said the store began carrying the plates in 2022. At first, she offered a small selection of about 50 pieces that she and a colleague chose after reviewing various designs for more than an hour. Last year, he ordered about 600 additional plates for the shop from a supplier specializing in mid-century European decorative items.
“We’ve gone with the fish stories and not so much the meat,” Ms. LaBarre said of the types of motifs on the plates sold at ABC, which cost $60 a plate. He attributed interest in the style partly to its playful aesthetic and partly to its history.
Daniele Tassi, 36, bought some plates at ABC in February to use as decor at his Brooklyn Italian restaurant Terre. “I was surprised to see them there — but I understand why they are,” said Mr. Tassi, the chef at Terre, which he co-owns with Monia Solighetto and Alessandro Trezza, a married couple with Milanese roots.
In January, Terre became the first and only member of the Buon Ricordo Association in the United States. Ms Solighetto, 49, said she wanted to join the association because it represented Italy’s tradition of “eating local and using quality, seasonal ingredients” – a tradition, she added, that was now also “trendy”.
At Terre, the signature dish is pappardelle pasta with a wild boar ragù, a family recipe that Mr. Tassi regularly served when he was growing up in the Umbria region of Italy. In addition to the boar meat, which comes from Texas, the dish at Terre is made with ingredients from Italy.
Served in Buon Ricordo plates with a design depicting the Italian and American flags and a gray boar standing on a roll of yellow pasta. They were produced in a factory in Vietri sul Mare, on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, which has been using local clay to make the tableware since it launched six decades ago.
On April 9, the Buon Ricordo Union had a dinner to celebrate its 60th anniversary in Vietri sul Mare. ONE special dish was issued for the occasion, and chefs from around 100 affiliated restaurants prepared a tasting menu. Among them was Mr. Tassi, who said he returned to Brooklyn after the event with dozens of Buon Ricordo dishes. he got some from his grandparents, who had collected the tableware in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when interest in them was booming in Italy.
Mary Lies, 60, has been a plate enthusiast since spotting some at an antiques fair in Lucca, Italy, in the early 2000s. Since then, she has been buying the tableware for herself and her retail business, Marketin Kansas City, Kan., which sells it for $37 a plate.
Ms Lies described ceramics as a kind of instant mood enhancer.
“Looking at them, you can’t help but smile,” he said.