The Table as Register

Mepra S.p.A. is the Lombardy-based tableware maison whose family workshop in Lumezzane has shaped the European fine-dining table for nearly a century. The house's discipline — flatware as architecture, polish as register, alloy composition as a craft variable — places it at the centre of the Italian tableware tradition, alongside the names that the European Michelin tradition has long carried at table.

In January 2026, Mepra appointed Chef James Won as its first Malaysian Ambassador — the inaugural placement of the maison’s flag in Southeast Asia, and the editorial moment when tableware joined the chef’s brand portfolio at the same register as the champagne, cognac, and single-malt houses already there.

The Inaugural Malaysian Ambassadorship — January 2026

The January 2026 appointment is one of the most recent additions to the chef’s portfolio, and one of the only chapters in the cornerstone whose active register explicitly post-dates the 2025 pivot. The Mepra Ambassadorship was established after the closure of Shin’Labo. The relationship with the maison was not contingent on the active room — it was contingent on the discipline that had been formed within it.

What the Ambassadorship signals, beyond Mepra’s own confidence in the chef, is the maison’s recognition that the chef’s culinary storytelling register — Japanese craft, French technique, Malaysian terroir — finds its tableware counterpart most fluently in Italian register. Mepra is not English silver. It is not French Christofle. It is the Italian register: precise, considered, modern, attentive to alloy and form together.

The Pininfarina × Mepra × Chef James Won Special Edition

The most distinctive single chapter in the Mepra portfolio is the special edition created for the Krug Room at Shin’Labo — a Pininfarina-designed Mepra collection developed in partnership with Chef James Won. Pininfarina, the Italian design house behind generations of Ferrari coachwork and the most consequential European industrial-design language of the twentieth century, brought its discipline to Mepra’s Stile by Mepra line; the chef brought the kitchen’s discipline to the brief.

The special edition was used exclusively at Shin’Labo throughout the restaurant’s operating period (2022 – 2025). It sat on the Krug Room table as the resident expression — Italian alloy, Pininfarina design language, chef-side specification, all in one hand.

Mepra was used exclusively at Shin’Labo. No other restaurant in Malaysia served on the maison’s flatware during the period.

The Tableware Register

Across the chef’s brand portfolio, the Mepra chapter holds a distinctive editorial position. The champagne, cognac, and single-malt houses brought what was in the glass. Gaggenau and thePlan brought the kitchen and the room. Mepra brought what the meal was eaten with.

The flatware is the bridge between the food and the diner. It is the maison closest to the hand. The discipline a chef brings to the plate is meaningless if the implement that meets the plate is wrong. Mepra was the implement that was right.

The Continuing Register

After the closure of Shin’Labo in 2025, the special edition Pininfarina × Mepra × Chef James Won collection passed into historical record. The January 2026 Ambassadorship continues — and stands as the rare post-2025 active brand chapter that links the chef’s pre-pivot kitchen years to the post-pivot conservation and culinary diplomacy work.

The next chapter of the Mepra Ambassadorship — wherever it lands and whatever room hosts it — sits ahead of this sub-page rather than behind it.