My best guess is that the better one is the Wusthof, but I’m really not sure. The marks have been worn off for decades, now.
Also, the knives they are making today aren’t the same as what they made 30 years ago. In fact, the knives they make today aren’t the same as the knives they make today – both companies make a number of different models with different features, and I’m sure within each brand, some are better than others.
Here’s the problem, when he’s starting out he doesn’t need an expensive knife and when he has more experience he will absolutely want a different one than the one you would buy now.
The aforementioned 45$ Victorinox chef’s knife with the rubber handle is a very respectable knife. It’s lighter and easier to sharpen than German steel. They sell them at restaurant supply stores because they are used in restaurants, where knives will be abused, borrowed, stolen, etc. A similarly priced Dexter Russell or Mercer would also be just fine.
There was a recent thread in which someone wanted to surprise his son with a guitar and the answer is kind of the same. If you don’t know which 350$ knife you want, then you should wait until you do. Until then buy the best of the low-end options.
Consider talking to your friend about sharpening stones and a good steel. Good stones run 50$+ each and you need at least 2. A good steel is 30$+. Buying an expensive knife with no idea how to maintain it really is putting the cart before the horse.
My BIL has a set of sexy, hand-made knives from some some guy in Montana. Because they’re always dull they suck compared to the Victorinox I leave at my Mom’s house.
I have victorinox pocket knives, and i have other pocket knives that are substantially better. But i don’t think I’ve ever used a victorinox kitchen knife.
Something like a wusthoff is more like $150 than $350 for a chef’s knife, fwiw.
Sorry for the double post. If money is no object I’d buy this one, or whatever length s/he prefers. I don’t own one, but it’s very well regarded among the knife geek community. It’s regarded as slightly overpriced, but you have 0% chance of doing better if you don’t know what you’re doing. FWIW I’ve seen it used in some of Ramsay’s youtube videos.
What wolfpup said. My go-to knife is a Zwillig 7" santuko. Best knife I’ve ever owned and has been great for 20 years.
Yet another thread that shows what a great message board this is.
Another lover of my 30+ year old Wusthof Trident knives (I think I have six, plus a cleaver (Hackmesser) with which I could rapidly fell Oak trees.
But I agree with those who say that – like hiking boots, motorcycle helmets, or myriad other things – the one that fits you best is probably the most important thing, provided you didn’t totally cheap out.
As a young teen, I had a lot of knives and a pretty decent set of stones. As an older guy with a wood shop … same idea.
But my conversion to the Chef’s Choice electric knife sharpener has had me never looking back. I occasionally still use a steel, but I’m not even sure why.
Could I get out all the stones and put a marginally better edge on these knives than I do with the Chef’s Choice ? Maybe. But definitely a diminishing returns thing, and people who make their living with their tools don’t generally go that way.
I’m also a big believer in buying fairly cheap first, figuring out what you like and don’t like, and then working your way up the price/quality ladder – again – as long as the ‘cheap’ knife truly gets the job done.
Lots of ‘restaurant quality’ stuff is rather unimpressive, yet it’s usually very functional and either quite robust or cheap enough that nobody worries.
I’ve got an 8" Mercer Genesis chef’s knife, and it doesn’t give up anything to our Wusthof Classic santoku in terms of sharpness or edge-holding. Nor is the grip or balance poor either. It’s a fantastic knife.
In the world of knife geeks this makes me a bad person, but…
I’m a little bit lazy. Most of the time, I use a 30" belt sander from harbor freight and belts from a specialty shop that cost about 3$ each. I get maybe 10 sharpenings off a belt. I find that if I use the steel every time I cook, 3 light strokes on each side of the blade, the time between sharpenings goes up significantly. It’s the difference between a dull knife in one month or a dull knife in 3 or 4 months.
Sharpening devices/stones remove metal and reform the edge. Using a steel maintains the edge.
I’m probably a 3/10 on the grand knife sharpening scale. But my knives are sharper than 97% of the kitchen knives in America.
If I was a better man I’d use my stones all the time, but I am weak, and I like that after 2 minutes on my belt sander I can shave arm hair, or slice a tomato without cursing.
Which one do you use, and what are the major differences between them?
Mine is the 120 model:
It’s been several years since I used anything other than the third ‘slot’ (final honing, “finishing”). I couldn’t be happier with the results (as a home cook).
It’d be hard for me to offer up any model-to-model comparison that’s better than the manufacturer’s grid:
Would you trust good knives, like Wustoffs, to it?
I used to get mine professionally sharpened, but being out of the industry as long as I have, I don’t know any good sharpeners anymore,
The simple answer is yes. I’ve run my Wusthof knives through mine for years now – as I said, mostly with the finest (effectively, honing) stage.
The more informative answer is …
There are three stages on my 120 – effectively, coarse, medium, and fine.
Coarse could get you in trouble if you haven’t practiced on a knife you don’t care about. Coarse removes material, exactly as it’s designed to do.
Medium … far less so. Medium seems to be about setting the angles and forming the intersecting planes.
And I can only speak for my 20 degree bladed Wusthof knives, and assorted ‘European-style’ (ie, also 20* angle) bladed knives that we also have. I’ve never done any harm to any knife that I’ve sharpened with this machine.
But I’ve also only ever used it for ‘knives,’ not cleavers or scissors, or … for that matter … serrated blades, or anything else that it’s simply not meant to sharpen. It’s good to know this (or any other) model’s limitations and be sure it will work for your application(s).
I think the learning curve is very short, but – as I said – I’d probably recommend that people fish around in the drawer for that old no-name knife to learn what to do and what not to do before I sharpened anything I care about.
It’s a tool. It can be used for good or evil 
A chef knife is the tool of my trade and I use it every day. I’ve tried many and have come to the conclusion that expensive knives are WAY overrated. Hands down (or hands on if you prefer) the absolute best chef knife I’ve ever used and the only one I will use from here on out is the Rada French Chef knife. $28.50 plus $8.70 for the sharpener. Posers and dabblers may look down their nose at it, but this knife is utilitarian, durable and exquisite.
Not really answering the question, but I found the most awesome big-ass knife in a thrift store for a buck. Real nice. Only marking on is ‘Solongen’. So, I guess it’s German after a short interweb search. Can’t find a good picture of it. Similar to the one on the far left in this shot: solongen kitchen knives - Bing images
But I really like it!
I got a number of beater knives I can practice on, plus one of my Wustoffs that a roommate ruined by cutting on glass and is just about unusable now.
Think I’ll go ahead and get one of these guys, if it sharpens up my beater knives, it’ll be worth it. If it gets my good knives back into good condition, it’ll be awesome.
Scissors are their own little specialty thing. I spend a ridiculous amount of money sending them out for professional sharpening. Never found anything consumer grade that will work on them, and they cost more than Wustoff knives, so I don’t want to mess with them.
Well, this thread has convinced me to finally get a proper knife sharpener. While I appreciate the various suggestions, after comparing prices and reading reviews I decided to get this Zwilling J.A. Henckels manual sharpener for my Zwilling Henckels knives. To date I’ve mostly been using a honing steel.
When I first met my to-be wife, I bought her a Wusthof chef’s knife. She had some KMart set of 12 kind of knives that just sucked.
She also had an adolescent son.
That Wusthof went to shit in profoundly short order. There was just no edge left on it. It even had a bent tip from … what … using it to open a paint can ?
So it went in a drawer for years.
Until I got my Chef’s Choice. A pair of pliers did yeoman’s work in straightening the tip, and – when the Chef’s Choice piece was done – I couldn’t tell the difference between the farm find knife and its well cared for sibling – the same knife that I’d owned since its birth.
So … yeah: IME, you can really rehab a beater in short order with one of these.
[You can get it good as new … maybe even significantly better than new … but it simply won’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear – a POS knife will still be a POS knife, though it may cut much better and be safer/easier to use when Really Sharp]
@Wolfpup: my brother has an assortment of ‘manual’ sharpeners and reports results equal to mine. I hope this purchase works out well for you.
Yeah. Really sharp knives are a pleasure to work with. I tend to cook a few dishes that – particularly when I make them in bulk – can require more than an hour of chopping. The difference in time, effort, satisfaction, and the likelihood of harder, denser foods (eg, carrots) to shoot away from the knife are all radically improved by a really sharp blade.
That’s the same type I use (not sure if the brand is the same). As far as I can tell, it puts as good an edge on my Global knives as when I used to send them out for sharpening.
I’m kind of stuck with Global because I’m now so used to the integrated handles. I get nervous around knives that have the handles held on by rivets or screws or whatever. Totally irrational, I’m sure, but I don’t need the added stress in the kitchen.
Honing should be done pretty much every time you use your knife. You are not sharpening it by removing material, but just straightening the edge back out, removing imperfections that come from it bending.
If you look down the edge of your knife, you can tell how sharp it is by whether or not you can see any reflected light.
I miss having a knife that can cut an onion with pretty much just its weight alone. Looking forward to playing with this new kitchen gadget.
I bought my parents a set of Chicago Cutlery knives 20 odd years ago. They aren’t bad knives, good enough for most home use. I told them that I would take care of sharpening them.
Then my mother bought a glass cutting board, which dulled them in very short order. Then she tried to sharpen them using the sharpener on the back of the can opener. Of course, the plastic guard was broken, leaving the grinding wheel just sitting in the open. She attempted to sharpen them by putting the edge of the blade directly onto the side of the spinning grinder.
I think the backside of that knife was sharper than the cutting edge by the time she was done with it.
