Bernal Cutlery Stories

Osaki-San & Nemoto-San We are honored to be the only retailer outside of Japan featuring the award-winning cutting boards created by Osaki Mayumi-san and Nemoto Tsutomu-san. Osaki-san and her husband run a family lumber mill founded in 1930 in a small town just outside my birthplace of Mito, and Nemoto-san is an 85-year-old third-generation master carpenter whose meticulous craftsmanship has...

In the summer of 2025, I traveled to Japan with my old friend Sachi, who works with me at Bernal Cutlery, as our Japanese cultural liaison/interpreter/assistant buyer. Sachi herself is not old, but we’ve known each other for about a dozen years, since our sons, Henry and Nalin, became friends on their first day of kindergarten. They are now in...

  Ashi Hamono knives were among the first Japanese knives we imported directly back in 2011, when Bernal Cutlery operated out of a tiny corner of a shared small-business incubator space at 331 Cortland Ave in Bernal Heights.  We initially got very small orders for the 90 sq ft shop, and it took years for the word to get out...

Over the summer of 2025 Josh and I spent three weeks traveling across Japan, exploring regions known for traditional crafts and meeting the shokunin who keep these traditions alive. While shokunin is often translated as “artisan” or “craftsperson,” the word carries a much deeper meaning. It reflects a lifelong dedication to mastering one’s craft, guided by a philosophy of continuous...

Masanori Okuda-sama– maker of our Takayama Chasen Matcha Whisks of over 60 years.   Matcha has been everywhere the last few years, leading to the widely documented matcha shortage. With its pervasiveness also comes the difficult task of discerning what is of quality and what is not. A tin of matcha that has the word “ceremonial” slapped onto it can...

Early this year, Mario Cortez at the SF Chronicle sent the shop an email asking if we could shine any light on the popularity of sheepsfoot knives with chefs at restaurants here in the Bay Area. This email was forwarded to me, and I was initially a little flummoxed. Was I missing some new trend? Honestly, I thought possibly the...

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...

This March of 2025, Bernal Cutlery turned 20 years old, and, of course, that allows for a lot of introspection. Not just starting March first; it’s been happening for at least a year running up to the actual anniversary. I have gotten all maudlin looking at old photos of Kelly and I working the counter at 331 Cortland fifteen years...

At 5 years old, my first job was helping my Grandma Gallagher out on Sunday morning. First, I cleaned “dust bunnies” around the hardwood floor corners, and then, after that, my next and most exciting task was cutting the morning vegetables for her Sunday soup. She paid me $2 for this work, which I greatly adored. Grandma Jane, a mother...

Happy New Year everyone! I want to wish you all a healthy, happy 2025. Hoping it is a big year in the best of ways, and in that spirit, may I offer the following: I recently pulled the 12” chef knife off one of the knife magnets in my kitchen, which doesn't often happen. Sure, if there was an extra...

I was a Girl Scout for a few days, maybe a few weeks, and my mom swears it was the Brownies not the Girl Scouts. I remember feeling way too dusty and tomboyish for the particular troop in my neighborhood but it was probably because the troop leader, Ursula Hutchenson, who was an adult bully who fixated on me and...

Preparing for Bernal Cutlery's next phase, we are conjuring the spirit of Kochi Prefecture with Yuzukararin at the table as Bernal Cutlery turns 20.

For many years, the idea of making a knife percolated in my mind; it always seemed 4 steps out of reach, so it lived in the junk drawer of my consciousness.

Most of the Russell and San Francisco knives that I am the current chaperone of were from the estate of Don Rich, who took a special interest in focusing his many decades of knife collecting on J. Russell Green River Works, A.J. Jordan and the San Francisco makers Will & Finck and Michael Price.

We finally got the Konosuke X Bernal Cutlery Ko-Sabaki knife back in stock. It was the first ever Bernal Cutlery collaboration we did, and getting it back in right now gave some perspective to all the collaborations we have happening and made me grateful to get to work with cooks, butchers, bakers, and of course, knife makers.