On the Edge : Making the Cut

A knife obeys its owner.

--Nicolas Freeling, “The Kitchen Book”

What makes a good knife?

Knife shop owner Fred Wieser is reluctant to say.

“A question like that really can’t be answered,” he insists. “You can’t say one knife is far superior to another knife because it has this or that--it depends on the individual.”

Wieser’s shop, Standard Cutlery and Supply, seems refreshingly out of place, located amid the silk-dress boutiques and dyed-leather mini-skirt shops of Beverly Hills. It is more hardware store than upscale boutique. Standard’s wares--knives and fine scissors and all the paraphernalia of cutlery--are displayed in sensible glass cases that practically touch the ceiling. Not everything is on display; Wieser says he stocks nearly 600 kinds of knives. To sell them, Wieser engages customers in a sort of Socratic dialogue. Questions are answered with more questions: What are you going to use the knife for? How often do you cook? What do you cook? How are you going to clean the knife? How are you going to sharpen the knife?

“If a little old lady comes in here and tells me she cooks every once in a while, I’m sure not going to sell her a set of Henckels knives,” Wieser says. “What would she need them for? She’s not going to take care of them. I’d sell her a couple of serrated knives on the smallish side, which, for her, would be every bit as good, in fact better, than what would be considered a quality knife.”

While department stores, and even gourmet kitchenware stores, hire salespeople who don’t know a lot about the knives they’re selling, Wieser depends only on himself to sell his cutlery. He’s been in the business, as he puts it, “since birth”--his father and uncle ran a cutlery service in downtown Los Angeles. These days, though, it’s getting harder to sell a good knife.

“You not only have to educate the customer,” he says, “you’ve got to fight those ads out there. There’s so much misinformation. I get people who think that the better the knife is, the longer it’s supposed to stay sharp--and of course, it never works that way. Really, the better a knife is, the more easily it can be ruined. And there are a lot of look-alikes out there being touted as quality knives--they’re bright and shiny and garbage.”

Wieser also worries that the best knife manufacturers are being squeezed out by big companies. “A lot of good manufacturers are going out of business because they can’t compete with things like these never-need-sharpening knives,” he says. “It’s the public’s misconception that, first of all, a never-needs-sharpening knife is a sharp knife, and secondly, that it’s going to last forever. That thinking is absolutely wrong. Those knives rip and tear; they don’t cut. As one manufacturer wrote in a letter to his dealers, never-needs-sharpening means it can’t be sharpened. Once it becomes dull you throw it away.

“I don’t expect customers to understand all this,” Wieser says, “because, after all, how often does the average person buy a knife? It’s not something that most people spend a lot of time thinking about.”

Even professional chefs have trouble buying knives. Learning to use a knife and figuring out which is the best knife to use is a long and personal process.

Katsu Michite, owner of L.A.’s Katsu, Katsu Cafe and Katsu III, got his start in Tokyo. “At the beginning,” he says, “the boss never let me use a knife. I had to see the whole kitchen system first. You start off washing dishes and taking care of vegetables. Maybe a couple of months later I was allowed to fillet fish. But it was five years before I was allowed to touch halibut or tuna--because they’re so expensive.”

Like Michite, Kazuto Matsusaka started his career washing dishes in a Tokyo restaurant and worked his way up to chopping vegetables. “I practiced every day, the balance of left and right hand, the way you stand. I wanted to feel good about what I was doing.” When Matsusaka moved to Los Angeles, he went to work for Pear Garden and Benihana, two restaurants known for their knife shows. But Matsusaka was bored. “It was the same thing every day,” he says. “I kept thinking, ‘I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go.’ I wanted to do something creative.” He went to work for the chef who was considered one of the best in Los Angeles at the time--Wolfgang Puck, who was then cooking at Ma Maison.

“My first job was making the salmon en croute, and, of course, I didn’t have the right knives to work in a French restaurant. Someone handed me a thick German knife, a butchering knife really, and said, ‘This is the knife, this is the fish, fillet it.’ No one complained, but oh, the mess! I didn’t like the results at all, but obviously I did a better job than the person who did the job before me.”

Campanile’s Mark Peel started his serious training at Ma Maison too. “I sat on a milk crate in an alleyway behind the restaurant, surrounded by four cases of vegetables--zucchini, carrots, turnips. My job was to ‘turn’ seven sides of each vegetable with a paring knife. It took me about three hours at first, but eventually I got it down to an hour and a half.”

When Peel and Matsusaka first worked at Ma Maison, restaurants traditionally supplied their kitchen staffs with knives. But as California cuisine developed, chefs in Los Angeles wanted control over not only the new ingredients they were using, but over the knives they used too.

“It was a pretty big deal when I bought my first knives,” Peel says. “They might have been fairly inexpensive compared to what I use now, but buying them was an important step.”

“I didn’t even know where to buy a good knife 15 years ago,” Matsusaka says. “At first, I bought one at a department store for $5. I mean, at the beginning, I didn’t know which knife was right for me. I tried Japanese knives, Swiss knives, German knives, straight knives, curved knives, thick, thin . . . so many. I found that the right knife really depends on the job you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Everyone is different.”

“A knife is part of your personality,” Michite says. “You can tell if a chef is good or not by how he uses his knife. I think, especially in sushi bars, food quality is number one, and number two is knife.”

Matsusaka agrees. “The times that I cut myself, I know I’m not cooking 100%. I just don’t fool around with a knife. When I first came here 16 years ago and I worked at Benihana, we used to fool around a lot . . . and we used to cut ourselves a lot, so I learned from that.”

Michite, who worked only in serious sushi bars through his early career, has a different attitude about knife fun. “Cutting can be like acting,” he says. “There’s more quiet acting, nice and slow, and those chefs rarely cut themselves. Or, there’s the more ‘laugh’ acting that you see at sushi bars. Mine is more laugh acting. There’s more movement, more fun . . . and I suppose, more cuts.”