Covetable: Cheese boards made from reclaimed floorboards
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Grace Bonney’s long-running blog Design Sponge alerted me to these wonderfully quirky cheese boards from Brooklyn wood artist Ariele Alasko. A sculptor trained at Pratt Institute of Art and Design, Alasko makes her cheese boards from salvaged floorboards at her Brooklyn studio. I love the way she allows each piece of old wood to express itself in the board’s shape and the way she uses the wood’s grain.
“Everything I build is made of 100% recycled and salvaged materials,” she explains. “Most everything is found, meaning that materials are not always plentiful and everything is one-of-a-kind. Sometimes it takes a month before I come across more usable material, but hey, that’s what keeps this interesting!”
Go to her virtual shop to see all the cheese boards she’s brought into the world.
Each comes with a tag advising buyers on how to care for their floorboard cheese boards:
— Don’t get me too wet
— You can oil me with walnut oil or butchers-block wax (but I will get slightly darker in color)
— Eat lots of cheese on me!
View her shop here, where cheese boards run $55 to $90. Or contact her at aalasko@yahoo.com to discuss the possibilities.
Also, if you find yourself in Pacific Grove sometime, check out the restaurant interior she built for Il Vecchio, her family’s traditional Italian restaurant. The menu of mostly Roman dishes looks promising. And they’re using her cheese boards, if you want to get a closer look.
I wish I knew how to wield a hammer and saw the way Alasko does.
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Food events: Beerathon, Westside Connections and LACMA wine tastings
-- S. Irene Virbila
Twitter.com/sirenevirbila