Day 172: Today's Pick — A Vermont Bowl Co. Lazy Susan

I want to write about a piece of furniture that you can put on top of furniture: the lazy susan.

You know what a lazy susan is. A flat round disk on a small bearing that spins. You put a lazy susan in the middle of a dinner table, you put the dishes on the lazy susan, and instead of asking your friend to pass the soy sauce — interrupting their conversation, requiring them to lift a sticky bottle, possibly resulting in the bottle being knocked over — you give the disk a gentle nudge, the soy sauce arrives in front of you, you pour, you nudge it back, the dinner continues.

The lazy susan is, in my opinion, the most underrated piece of social infrastructure in domestic dining. The Chinese banquet table has known this for hundreds of years. American dinner parties have, for some reason, not. I am here to correct this.

The specific lazy susan I want to recommend is from Vermont Bowl Company, a small father-and-son woodshop in central Vermont that has been making turned wooden housewares — bowls, salad sets, mortar-and-pestles, and yes, lazy susans — since 1996. They use locally sourced maple, cherry, and walnut, all sustainably harvested from regional forests, and they finish their pieces with a blend of mineral oil and beeswax that lets the wood develop a long-term patina rather than a glossy lacquered finish.

Their 18-inch maple lazy susan is, to me, the right size for a dinner table for four to six. The disk is half an inch thick, the grain is matched and bookended on the underside, and the bearing — which is the thing that distinguishes a $190 lazy susan from a $25 Target one — is a steel-ball-race bearing that gives the disk a slow, elegant rotation. You can push it with a single finger and it will spin two and a half times. You can push it with a fork and it will spin slightly less. You can push it with a wine glass and it will spin smoothly without sloshing the wine, which I cannot say for the IKEA lazy susan I owned in 2018.

What I have learned, after two years of lazy-susan-on-the-dinner-table life:

Hosting becomes radically easier. You no longer need to be the human dispatch center for serving dishes. You set everything down on the disk, you sit, the table self-organizes.

Guest dynamics improve. The shy person at the end of the table no longer has to ask three other people to pass the bread. They reach. They turn the disk. They have bread.

Casual dinners feel slightly elevated. A lazy susan in the center of a Tuesday-night meal of takeout and a salad makes the whole thing feel less like a takeout night and more like a small dinner gathering, which costs nothing and shifts the mood substantially.

It changes what you cook. Once you have a lazy susan, you start cooking the kinds of meals that benefit from one — Sichuan dim sum, a tray of Vietnamese summer rolls with three dipping sauces, a Persian dinner with a constellation of small plates. The disk encourages variety. The variety encourages adventure. The adventure encourages pleasure.

A few practical notes. The 18-inch is the right size for a four-to-six-person table; the 24-inch is generous and starts to dominate smaller tables. Care is simple: occasional rub with mineral oil, no dishwasher (obviously), wipe spills promptly to avoid water rings on the maple. Vermont Bowl Co. ships in a sturdy box; turnaround is roughly a week from order. Customer service is, in my experience, two friendly Vermonters who answer the phone.

A small note on alternatives. If $190 is more than you want to spend, IKEA, Target, and Crate & Barrel all sell perfectly serviceable lazy susans in the $20–$50 range. They will work fine. They will, however, not have the wooden warmth, the smoother bearing, the maker's note inside the box, or the small psychological satisfaction of having bought a heritage object from a small American workshop. Whether that's worth four times the price is, fairly, your call.

A final thought. There is a category of object whose value is mostly social — the pleasure it produces is in the gatherings around it, not in its own existence. A lazy susan is one of those. Buying one is a quiet bet on yourself: a bet that you will, over the next ten years, host enough dinners that the disk earns its keep. That is, frankly, a good bet to place. The dinners follow the disk. The disk follows the bet.

This has been Day 172. The pick spins.