A side of steel tomatoes for the table?

Vegetables are having a moment, and not just on your plate. Between cabbagecore videos on TikTok and those weirdly entertaining, slightly cursed AI fruit videos doing the rounds on Instagram, fresh produce has become the latest design fixation. ‘Playful Playfood’ is what it looks like when the idea is taken seriously.

Created by Arttd’inox, which is led by Deepika Jindal, in collaboration with French artist-designer José Lévy, the collection turns everyday ingredients into sculptural objects. Our favourite pick is a stack of tomato vases. It looks immediately familiar yet just offbeat enough to hold your attention. The reflective steel gives it depth, so it shifts as you move around it, never looking exactly the same twice. The collection also features eggplants, garlic, peanuts, and other recognisable forms alongside more interpretive pieces like elephant candle holders, lamps, and tree-bark-inspired structures that lean into Lévy’s more whimsical art-led practice.

As Lévy explains, “The forms came from the everyday, from the exuberant world of Indian hospitality and the particular generosity of its culture. I find that world endlessly generous as a source of inspiration. I am drawn to the everyday. Yet, when you render the organic curve of a tomato or the heavy silhouette of an elephant in polished steel, the object is transformed. It becomes something stranger, more luminous, and entirely unexpected. You recognise it and yet you are seeing it as if for the very first time.”

Jindal places the focus firmly on the material. “In India, stainless steel is omnipresent, yet it is rarely viewed through the lens of high design. Arttd’inox set out to change that narrative… This collaboration felt like the natural evolution of our journey.” It is easy to dismiss the idea of “vegetable-inspired design” as a passing trend. But here it feels well thought out. A tomato is still a tomato, but also something you might want to keep long after dinner is done.

The Playful Playfood is available on arttdinox.com. Price on request