The mad potter of Oakland
When top chefs need special cookware, they turn to a local ceramicist with magic hands.
The first time Travis McFlynn walked into the Oakland restaurant Camino, chef-owner Russell Moore barely looked up from his station.
“I know I might be jaded,” Moore says, “but when you have a restaurant, a lot of people come in to try and sell you stuff.”
McFlynn was peddling his handmade ceramic flame ware — that’s pottery speak for clay cooking vessels — and the sculptor wanted to create something for Moore to use. After all, the restaurant centers around live fire cooking, and the chef had amassed a collection for just that purpose from around the globe.
McFlynn was certain his would be better.
It’s this kind of bold confidence that has propelled the artist, 38, to ceramic stardom in the past few years. That, and the fact that his sleek yet rustic work speaks for itself. His custom creations have earned a place in many of the Bay Area’s most popular kitchens, from Chez Panisse to the newly opened Cala.
The potter’s wheel is where McFlynn — a former chef himself — has found his connection to the food world, using the restaurant industry as his gallery and its chefs as both his collaborators and publicists. And it’s working. His little business has grown so rapidly that he can no longer do this alone.
One conversation with McFlynn and it’s clear that he’s the artist and not the entrepreneur. With wild eyes, light auburn curls cascading down his back and a dense spray of stubble covering his face, McFlynn seems more like an excitable nomad fresh off a life-changing mountain trek than a focused businessman.
In fact, the potter talks about his nirvana moment in half-finished sentences: an encounter with a tomato when he was just 16 and attending boarding school in Utah.
McFlynn was taking his first pottery class when he met instructor Joseph Bennion, a ceramicist who invited him into his home studio and decided to make him a tomato sandwich. First they went to his garden to pick said tomato, one so large it curled up on itself.
“The plant was, like, aware of me,” says McFlynn. “I put my hands underneath it and it just let go.”
And, he recalls, it didn’t turn into just any tomato sandwich. The grain in the bread and the salt were from down the road, and one bite was eye-opening.
“There was this little bit of embarrassment, like, ‘Where have I been?’ ” says McFlynn, who adds that the fact that he was from the younger, MTV, fast-food culture allowed him to be more curious about the simplicity of Bennion’s life. “It was amazing. I wanted that. I was kind of like a forest that hadn’t been burned in a long time, so when I went up, I went up quickly.”
McFlynn apprenticed for Bennion before the teacher sent him back to his hometown near Snowmass, Colo., to a place called Anderson Ranch Arts Center. There, while washing dishes to support himself, McFlynn met some heavy-hitting potters who would start him on a series of apprenticeships with the likes of Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner and Peter Callas. To make ends meet, he starting cooking.
“Essentially, my career up to this point has been a series of moments of saying yes when people said, ‘Hey you want to come check this out?’ ” McFlynn says.
One such moment came in 2007, after McFlynn moved to the Bay Area to attend California College of the Arts.
“My friend Carrie (Lewis), who is now the head of pastry at Chez Panisse, said, ‘Hey, you should come work with us,’ ” says McFlynn. He’d gotten deeper into the restaurant industry than he’d ever intended to, and almost said no. “But I kind of thought, ‘OK, if I never do this again, this would be a great last gig.’ ”
McFlynn was hired as a downstairs short-shift waiter, which meant that for the six months he worked there, he ate the same food as the guests.
“It was everything I needed to remind myself of that original tomato experience, to let things just be what they are.”
It’s a philosophy, he says, that has informed his art. It also opened doors McFlynn would have never imagined, and gave him his first place to showcase his work. Around that same time, McFlynn connected with sculptor John Toki, who owned Leslie Ceramic Supply Company in Berkeley. Toki was working on a clay body, or recipe, that could withstand the uneven, high heat most chefs would put flame ware through. McFlynn began working with Toki; he helped him test the clay and develop forms with it. Chefs at Chez Panisse became the first to put the pots into realworld use.
It also gave McFlynn the confidence to approach other chefs like Julya Shin and Charlie Hallowell (Pizzaiolo, Boot and Shoe Service and Penrose) and Moore, who had been Chez alums. And in the years since, many others who were not (see sidebar).
He would gift chefs with his OSO flame ware line — “ceramic philanthropy,” as he called it — and despite initial resistance, at least from Moore, it was hard to say no after sampling the goods.
Years later, Moore’s kitchen features several of McFlynn’s custom pieces, and the two are in the midst of designing a few new ones. Moore says they hold up better than most of the others in his collection, keeping even heat and wearing well without breaking. He says the ceramicist’s unique ability to take a backseat during the design process sets him apart from other local makers.
“He’s really receptive to feedback and he understands that I know what I want,” says Moore. “He doesn’t act like he knows how it should work.”
McFlynn, in fact, says the back and forth is what he loves most.
“My favorite part of what I do is what I call the spark,” says the potter. “It’s this moment where the chefs realize that I’m not trying to sell them stuff that’s already made, and that they have artistic license.”
Essentially, he solves problems for chefs who have something in mind but haven’t seen it elsewhere.
“I think the really unique aspect of what Travis is doing is his association with the chefs,” says Toki, whom McFlynn now refers to as his chief technical advisor. “He’s providing something which is ultimately affecting the way they can cook.”
“He’s up for anything,” says chef Cortney Burns, who most recently had McFlynn make a fermentation jar for Bar Tartine. “He loves anything that’s based in history and has validity in modern day, any new shapes that are functional and beautiful.”
McFlynn’s pieces have become as varied as the chefs with whom he works — he even names his finished forms after them — but the overall aesthetic is the same. He uses a black glaze just over the cooking surface, leaving the bottom of the form a natural unglazed tan.
He throws each piece by hand out of his live-work studio, and finishes it in one of his four small kilns. The glaze, which bakes on like glass, is nonstick. McFlynn says the clay vessels are also nonreactive, so you can make acidic things in there — like tomatoes — that you can’t do in iron.
In short, it’s pretty much the ideal cookware.
McFlynn admits that he’s reaching critical mass, although he sees his operation becoming bigger than him. At his company, which he named Sara mc Design after his late sister — “it also sounds like ‘ceramic,’ ” he notes — he’d ultimately like to have interns for credit and a residency program. Plus, he still needs to fill the orders he’s now getting.
“I just need to put together a team that knows how to do that, because the part that I know how to do is (the creative) part.”
Fortunately, McFlynn has become the first “featured maker” at Workshop Residence, a place where se-
“The really unique aspect of what Travis is doing is his association with the chefs. He’s providing something which is ultimately affecting the way they can cook.”
Sculptor John Toki
lected artists can showcase and sell their work to the public. Started by Ann Hatch, the organization allows McFlynn to create without having to think about the actual retail side.
McFlynn approached Hatch by walking in her door with a bio of his career — and a skillet.
“He’s an amazing combination of chef and ceramicist,” Hatch says. “A real California wonder, not a casual maker.”
McFlynn has made an exclusive workshop residence skillet — a version of the one he showed Hatch — with a fat wood handle. This year, as the featured maker, McFlynn will host a series of workshops and events, and the two hope to further the working relationship after that.
“We’re working with people who know how to make their products but are interested in higher visibility and a sales platform,” says Hatch. “That’s where I come in. Travis can make his work — that’s really where his talent lies — and I can sell it.”
That will leave plenty of time for McFlynn to approach new chefs in order to solve their cooking conundrums and design fantasies.
Only now, he won’t have to be quite so persistent.