Did It Start With the Knife or the Chef?
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Did It Start With the Knife or the Chef?
Every chef has a knife story. The one that changed how they cooked. The one they saved up for. The one they still reach for first, every single time.
For Cris, the founder of Chef & a Knife, the story starts long before the professional kitchens of Sydney. It starts around a fire in Southern Brazil.
The Fire Came First
Growing up in the Gaucho culture of Southern Brazil, food wasn't something that happened in a kitchen. It happened outside, over fire, with whole cuts of meat and the kind of unhurried attention that most modern cooking has completely forgotten.
Churrasco, the barbeque tradition of the Gauchos, is less a cooking technique and more a way of life. Slow, deliberate, deeply communal. The kind of cooking where you're not watching the clock. You're watching the fire.
And at the centre of it, always, is a good knife. Not sharp for its own sake. A knife that respects what it's working with. That understands what it's being asked to do.
Cris didn't learn that in a classroom. He learned it standing next to a fire, watching people who had been doing this their whole lives.
Twenty plus years is a long education
When Cris arrived in Sydney and started working as a professional chef, that early instinct got tested properly.
Professional kitchens have no patience for equipment that doesn't hold up. A knife that loses its edge halfway through a Saturday night service gets put down and doesn't get picked back up. Over twenty five years working in Sydney restaurants, Cris went through a lot of knives. Most of them were fine. A few were genuinely good. And occasionally, rarely, one of them was something else entirely.
Those were the knives worth paying attention to. The Japanese makers whose obsession with steel purity and edge geometry produced something that felt almost unfair to use. The German craftsmen whose knives balanced so well you forgot you were holding one. The old French houses that had been making blades for over a century and hadn't changed much, because they didn't need to.
He started to understand not just which knives were good but why. That's a different kind of knowledge.
The Find
Then he came across a French carbon steel knife from the 1970s at the back of a collection nobody was paying much attention to.
The handle had seen better days. The blade had the kind of patina you only get from decades of real use. But the steel was extraordinary. With the right attention it came back sharper than most new knives straight out of the box, and it had a feel to it — a weight, a balance that modern manufacturing hasn't quite managed to replicate.
It raised a question he couldn't stop thinking about. How many knives like this were out there, sitting in drawers, in boxes, in collections, waiting for someone to notice them?
Working with partner GT Edgeworks, Cris started finding out. Old blades reground and honed back to life. New handles shaped from quality timbers, fitted properly, balanced to the blade. Knives that had spent decades doing nothing suddenly performing better than the day they were made. It became the most distinctive part of what Chef & a Knife does, and it remains the part that nobody else in Australia does the same way.
What the Store Actually Is
Chef & a Knife launched in 2019. The range covers the full breadth of what twenty years of searching turned up; Shun, Wüsthof, Tojiro, Sabatier K, Messermeister alongside the vintage and restored pieces that remain the heart of the whole thing.
Every knife has been chosen because it belongs in a kitchen and deserves to be used. That's genuinely the only criteria.
Cris built the store for the home cook who is ready to stop compromising on their tools, and for the professional who already knows exactly what they want and just needs to find it. The Brazilian upbringing, the Sydney kitchens, the years of searching all of it feeds into what ends up on the site.
So did it start with the knife or the chef?
It started with a fire. Everything else followed from there.
Browse the full range at chefandaknife.com.au — including our exclusive collection of hand-restored vintage knives, each one unique.