Just noticed in the LAT (sorry): a profile of Jonathan Broida.
Mr. Broida runs a shop in Venice (California, not Italy) called Japanese Knife Imports. But:
Walk into his shop as a novice and he won’t just sell you a knife. He’ll want to sit down at the low table in the center of the room, preferably over genmaicha tea served in a lovely ceramic tea bowl, made by his wife Sara’s family in northern Japan, and explore your relationship to knives. Call him a knife shrink. What sorts of things do you like to cook? How are your knife skills? What kinds of things do you cut? What sort of cutting board do you have? What other knives do you own? How comfortable are you with sharpening your own knife?
Mr. Brodia used to be a professional cook, and caters to that community.
With a degree in Asian studies, he had started cooking for a living, and at one point went to work in Japan. There, he asked his chef to show him how to sharpen his knife. Big mistake. Soon he was expected to sharpen everybody’s knives, he says with a laugh. But he learned, and he got better at it.
Every chef he met had a different technique. But they were still chefs who sharpened knives, he explains, not professional knife sharpeners. And there’s a big difference. As he got more interested, he sought out craftsmen who could show him more. During that process he found father-son professional sharpeners who were the best he’d ever seen. And he still goes back every year to work with them.
And that’s the key to his shop. He’s less interested in selling you a knife:
The most important thing, he says, is knowing how to sharpen. He can do it for you, but it’s better if you learn yourself. “There’s always a level of disconnect with your tools if you don’t sharpen your own, and that bothers me.”
This is one of my many character flaws. My father tried to teach me to sharpen knives on a whetstone when I was younger, but I didn’t have the patience to learn. These days, I think I could sharpen a knife if I had to, but I have a lot of trouble holding the knife at a constant angle. I’ve tried various gadgets, but what I end up doing is taking my knives to a local knife shop or the gun show when they need to be sharpened. That’s the lazy man’s way of working; I feel like I should be better than that.
And, interestingly, Japanese Knife Imports has a YouTube channel with sharpening demonstrations.
I’m not going to California any time soon (I don’t have a passport, so I can’t travel outside of the United States), but this place sounds like somewhere I could drop a lot of money fast.