In the world of high quality knives, honyaki has earned a reputation as something special — a bit elusive, often admired, and occasionally misunderstood. The term means “true-forged,” referring to a blade made from a single piece of carbon steel, hardened using a method adapted from traditional sword-making. There’s no layering, no laminated core — just one material, shaped by...

The latest knives I’ve been saving and feel a little guilty about not letting run free are some prototypes from the last few years: especially a few dozen of the first runs of the Invictus butcher knife designed by butcher extraordinaire Dylan Carasco and made for us by K Sabatier in Thiers and some of the first trial steel Greenfield gyutos made by Eli Sideris and finish ground...

Going through a half dozen old stock Sakai Konosuke knives made between 2010 and 2015 that we recently acquired reminds me of something that I first learned about the nature of traditional Japanese knife-making through Sakai Konosuke. At first glance these knives are not super different from the same model knives being made today, but they did give me a...