Want to buy some antique French Cafe au lait bowls? Do you know how to tell real antique Cafe au lait bowls from fakes? Our guide gives you the facts & information you want to know.
Buying a set of antique French café au lait bowls are the perfect way to bring a touch of France into your kitchen and moreover a great way to enjoy a continental breakfast. Café au Lait bowls, which in English means coffee and milk bowls, are bowls that are slightly bigger than mugs but not as big as soup bowls, which are used for drinking coffee out of in the mornings. In France, café au lait bowls can be found in practically every household as it is part of the culture to drink milky coffee out of these bowls every morning, as it has been for centuries.
Unlike antique French lamps, finding genuine antique French café au lait bowls can be quite difficult. This is because these bowls are relatively small and fragile because they are usually made from porcelain – like antique French dolls– making them more susceptible to breakage. Furthermore, the fact that they would have been used every day means the likelihood of them breaking through accidents and general usage is much higher.
Buying Antique French Café Au Lait bowls
If you do intend on buying a genuine set of French antique café au lait bowls, you should be aware of a few points so that you are not sold a set of fakes. Firstly, any genuine set of French antique café au lait bowls will be made from porcelain bone china, which not only has a distinctive feel, but also lends a slightly different taste to the coffee when drunk.
The best place to buy genuine antique café au lait bowls is from a reputable antiques dealer with a long established reputation. These people care more about maintaining their reputation in the long term than jeopardizing it for a short term profit through selling you fakes. Recently, various online dealers have popped up advertising antique French café au lait bowls on their sites. While it is not impossible that such sites are indeed selling authentic French antique café au lait bowls, the chances of you getting ripped off are higher because the chances of you finding the seller and getting a refund are lower.
Reproduction Antique Café Au Lait Bowls
If you are looking to buy some café au lait bowls that you intend to use on a daily basis, why not opt for a set of reproduction antique café au lait bowls. They do just as well at serving coffee in authentic French style and can be bought for a fraction of the cost of a genuine antique. Also, if you happen to break one, which often happens, you can easily replace it with another.
