Dinnerware

Stoneware, porcelain, opal glass and melamine:

the body of the plate is what you are really choosing. Stoneware is thick and heavy, with the speckled and reactive glazes that look good on a table. Earthenware is cheaper and its body is porous, so once a chip lets water in, the piece stains and weakens from there. Porcelain is fired hard enough to be white and glassy all the way through, and bone china is porcelain with bone ash in the clay: thinner, more translucent and tougher than its weight suggests. Opal glass, the material Corelle made famous, is light, stacks low and shrugs off knocks that would chip ceramic. Melamine is plastic, unbreakable by the pool and wrong for the microwave.

Soup plates, rimmed plates and hotel porcelain:

shape matters as much as material at a Panamanian table. Wide, shallow coupe bowls look good with pasta but slop a ladle of sancocho over the edge, so check that a set’s bowls are deep enough for broth before you settle on it. A rimmed plate holds a portion of chicken and rice neatly; a rimless one gives more room for a whole fried fish with fried green plantain. Restaurant and hotel porcelain is its own class: plain white, vitrified, with a thick rolled edge built for a commercial kitchen and plain enough to mix with plates from another lot. If the microwave matters, skip gold, silver and platinum bands, which spark, and keep melamine out of it altogether. Mugs and glasses are in drinkware and bar, placemats and tablecloths in kitchen and table linens, and the long platter that fried fish arrives on in serveware.

Everyday sets, bone china and restaurant lots:

an everyday set for four in opal glass, stoneware or plain porcelain costs around $30 to $70 new, and a full porcelain service for twelve with serving pieces climbs past $300. With new sets that cheap, a used one has to be complete and unmarked before it beats a new box. The pre-owned dinnerware that holds its money is the kind that is awkward to buy new: a bone china service that came as a wedding present and spent years in a cabinet, or a few dozen matching hotel plates that would otherwise mean ordering by the case.

Bone china claims, worn gold bands and tired melamine:

hold a plate up to a window with your hand behind it. Bone china lets the shadow of your fingers through, ordinary porcelain barely does and stoneware not at all, which settles a listing that calls a set bone china when it weighs like a brick. Tap each piece lightly with a fingernail: a clear ring means it is sound, a dull note can mean a hidden crack. A gold or platinum band rubbed thin in patches tells you the set lived in a dishwasher. On opal glass, run your eye along the edges. Chips and deep scratches weaken the layered glass, and when it does give way it breaks all at once into sharp splinters, so a nicked plate is one to leave behind. Melamine that has gone dull, stained or scorched in spots has been microwaved or scoured and will not come back.

A dinner service on its way to a new table:

put the material in the title, because stoneware, porcelain and opal glass are searched for separately, and give the diameter of the dinner plate so a buyer knows whether it fits their cupboard and their other pieces. Photograph one place setting stacked, the bowls from the side to show their depth and, for bone china, a plate against the light. Say whether anything went in the microwave or the dishwasher and whether a metallic band has worn. The owner of a small roadside restaurant driving in from Penonomé for a lot of hotel plates will want them boxed with card between each one, and packed standing on edge rather than stacked flat they ride the Pan-American Highway far better.