Every meat-lover has been saddened by the act of slicing into a beautiful steak and having its glorious juices flow all over the counter. For barbecue aficionado John Pitner, one of those maddening moments got him dreaming of a cutting board that would capture every bit of delicious liquid—a cutting board that was concave.
“You can be obsessive when you become one of these weird barbecue guys,” says John, who opened Mount Pleasant’s The Coastal Cupboard with his wife, Lori, in 2005. So after searching high and low for the cutting board he craved—and coming up dry—he recruited his son, Brad (The Coastal Cupboard’s current owner), to help him make it a reality. A few sketches and a prototype later, Concave was born.
Rather than produce the boards themselves, the Pitners have tapped established manufacturers to put their own spin on the product. “We want them to do what they do best with the woods and materials they use, but we have to approve the design and the packaging,” John says. So far, national companies Architec and JK Adams are producing oval and rectangular boards, respectively. The Pitners plan to sign on more manufacturers in the future. “It’s the first innovation in cutting boards since they were invented,” John notes. “We think our design makes the cutting board a gadget for the first time ever.”
