The Pepper Grinder That Makes Everything Around It Look Cooler

I’m a sucker for a bold household object. Something that serves its purpose, no doubt, but that also carries with it a possibility — for what, exactly? The possibility of a dinner party icebreaker, or a home fully decorated in restaurant-grade design, ideally with a too-cool Dimes-esque aesthetic.

I found all of the above with the Muuto Plus Grinder (in fact, Dimes has its own similar version). The salt and pepper grinder looks like it could be an object out of a modern museum, like a cheeky Lego contraption for grown-ups, transported right to the center of your dining table.

I found the grinder, designed by design trio Norway Says for Copenhagen-based brand Muuto, at Brooklyn’s Mociun, a store known for its ceramics and oddball housewares that make you want to redo entire swathes of your home with only the contents of the store.

After overcoming my initial (and extremely reasonable) hesitation over spending about $75 on a pepper grinder, my anxiety entirely evaporated when, upon returning home to dress my Cobb salad with freshly ground pepper, I found that its ergonomic design made it vastly better than any shaker I had used before. The size — it sits at 7 inches tall and 3 inches in diameter — is compact, and the engineering ensures there are no cranks that catch, locking it into place. And unlike other grinders, there are no tiny bits of black peppers that get caught on the steel bit underneath, an annoyingly common reality with most other grinders I’ve used.

While the price is undoubtedly steep, you don’t need to buy a new pepper grinder very often, and, well, pepper is the kind of thing you use all the time. It comes in three different colors (black, natural wood, red) and has different settings for your particular grinding needs. In other words, it’s a functional showpiece in every sense of the term. Here’s to the pursuit of making the mundane less conventional.