Ceramic Dish Set Catches New Canaan Olive Oil’s Eye

 

For this installment of “Biz on Biz”—where we cold-call a downtown shop to ask an owner or worker to tell us about another business’s product, service or something else they absolutely love—we visited New Canaan Olive Oil on Elm Street (here’s their Facebook page), a fellow New Canaan Chamber of Commerce member.

There, owner Heidi Burrows told us about an item that had caught her eye while browsing for the first time in the new Ten Thousand Villages shop down on Main and East Avenue.

“They have so much stuff, but what caught my eye were the ceramic dishes,” Burrows said. “They have them in so many different sizes and different sets and they were gorgeous. They were glazed, on the outside they were brown and on the inside it was sort of a cream color. And you could tell the glaze was crackled a little bit, it was really, really nice.

Burrows said her first thought was that the dishes would be great for serving, so her mind automatically turned to pouring in a bit of oil and vinegar.

“But I actually plan on going back to get some, to put out in the store and help promote them as well, because they were so nice,” she said.

At Ten Thousand Villages, store manager Shawn Webb knew straightaway which item Burrows had described—it’s a popular product that’s made by artisans just outside of Hanoi, in Vietnam. For those who do not know, Ten Thousand Villages is not only a shop, it’s a nonprofit organization that buys artisanal items from nations in places like East Asia and South America, at internationally recognized Fair Trade Organization prices.

“It’s pretty cool, because the basket holds them all together and provides a cover for it, as well,” Webb said of the item.

[Teaser and plug: Be sure to check back for the inside scoop on Webb’s Chow Chow, coming soon to ‘New Canine-ites‘—sign up for our free daily newsletter to be extra sure you don’t miss it.]