You rarely expect a quiet craft to stop you in your tracks. But that is exactly what kintsugi did — and it happened, as many of the most significant things in my life have, somewhere between a kitchen and a table, in a country where beauty and discipline exist in the same breath.
I recently travelled to Japan with a group of repeat retreat guests, and after they all departed, I stayed on to do amongst other things a kintsugi class. What I discovered was not simply a technique, but a philosophy — one that felt, from the very first moment, instantly familiar.
Kintsugi, meaning “golden joinery,” is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics by mending the cracks with lacquer dusted or mixed with gold, silver or platinum. Rather than hiding the damage, it honours it. The break becomes part of the object’s story — not something to disguise or bury, but something to illuminate. The fracture, once a wound, becomes the most beautiful thing about it.
The origins of kintsugi are said to date back to the 15th century. According to tradition, the Japanese shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a damaged tea bowl back to China for repair. It was returned held together with crude metal staples. Disappointed by the inelegance, Japanese craftsmen sought a more beautiful solution — and from that dissatisfaction, kintsugi was born. Over time, it became closely associated with the tea ceremony, where every object is chosen and appreciated with profound care. A repaired bowl was not seen as inferior but as uniquely valuable — carrying its history visibly and proudly.
It is closely linked to the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, that deep appreciation of imperfection, transience, and the beauty of things that bear the marks of time. There is something deeply reassuring in this. We are so accustomed to discarding what is chipped, cracked or no longer “perfect.” Kintsugi encourage us to stop and think. What if the repair is where the true beauty lies? What if the fracture, the history, the careful mending — all of it — adds value rather than diminishes it?
The break becomes part of the object’s story — not something to disguise, but something to illuminate. The fracture, once a wound, becomes the most beautiful thing about it.
The traditional method uses urushi lacquer, a natural resin derived from the sap of the lacquer tree. It is a slow, meticulous process: the broken pieces are bonded with the lacquer, built up in layers, each one requiring time and humidity to cure, before the seams are finally finished with fine gold powder. A single repair can take weeks, sometimes months. There are modern adaptations using epoxy resins and metallic powders — more accessible, quicker, but still capturing the visual essence of the practice. And then there are creative interpretations, where artists exaggerate or reimagine the joins, turning repair into pure artistic expression.
I had known about kintsugi since my first visit to Japan in the 1990s, but at the time it remained an idea — something I admired from a distance without fully understanding. It became real for me in 2020, when the ceramic artist Martin Miles Moore repaired a Minoan-inspired dish I had used on MasterChef. When it broke, I felt I had lost something significant. What Martin returned to me was not simply a repaired object, but a transformed one — more characterful, more meaningful, and, to my eye, more beautiful than before. His work reflects a deep respect for form, texture and tradition, often influenced by Japanese pottery, and that sensitivity was evident in the way he approached the repair — not as a fix, but as a continuation of the piece’s story.
More recently, I learned that Kemi Sobue, manager at Simon Rogan’s restaurants, had travelled to Japan to study the traditional, more involved method of kintsugi — that slower process using natural lacquer, which demands patience, skill and a deep understanding of the material. I asked her to repair a small cake plate for my friend Kaiti, a piece that held deep sentimental value. She has since been applying her skills within the Rogan restaurants, quietly restoring and extending the life of ceramics used in service. The result was exactly what kintsugi promises at its best: not a disguise of damage, but a celebration of it.
And yet, despite all of this — despite admiring the philosophy, despite watching others practise it with such care — I had never actually had the chance to try it myself. So when my guests departed and I found myself with a rare pocket of free time in Tokyo, I knew I could not let the opportunity pass.
The workshop was everything the philosophy promised. Tucked away in a calm and beautiful Japanese studio, it felt like a world apart — and yet it was only minutes from the thundering energy of Shibuya, one of Tokyo’s most relentlessly busy stations. Inside, there was stillness. I sat with a cup of green tea and a small dish of Japanese sweets, working quietly alongside someone who practises this craft every single day. There is something quietly profound about learning a skill in its place of origin, taught not from a book or a screen but from hands that know the material intimately. The patience required — the small, deliberate movements, the attention to each crack — felt like a kind of meditation. I left calmer than when I arrived, carrying a little ceramic fish whose tentative golden lines are, to me, the most honest thing I have made in years.
As a cook, I have always believed that the vessels we use matter as much as what we put in them. They carry memory — a dish served at a celebration, a plate that travelled with you, a bowl that holds the trace of a particular meal. When something breaks, it is rarely just an object that is lost. Kintsugi understands this instinctively, and perhaps that is why it feels so close to what I do.
I have come home with a repair kit. It sits on my shelf, ready. The difficulty, if I am honest, is resisting the urge to engineer a controlled breakage — just to have an excuse to return to that quiet, unhurried studio in miniature, and relive the most unexpectedly soothing afternoon I have spent in a very long time.
In a world that prizes the new and the flawless, kintsugi offers a quieter, wiser counsel: that what has been broken and carefully mended can become the most beautiful thing of all.