Cut Brooklyn

One man, one forge, one knife at a time. No assistant, no catalog, no 'add to cart' button. Joel Bukiewicz forges every blade alone and adapts each handle to the client's hand. The novelist who found his medium.

Joel Bukiewicz wasn't a knifemaker. He was a writer. A novelist, actually. One of those who live in Brooklyn, write manuscripts nobody publishes, and look for something to do with their hands in the meantime. He starts forging knives around 2009, in a Brooklyn workshop. Not from ancestral calling, not from family tradition - from curiosity and stubbornness. The thing with Joel is that he's obsessive. He doesn't make knives 'good enough.' He forges, grinds, heat-treats, polishes, mounts the handle, sharpens - all alone, start to finish. Every knife passes through his hands and his hands only. No apprentice, no assistant, no subcontractor. One man, one forge, one knife at a time. Word spreads fast through New York's food scene. Chefs taste, blogs film. In 2012, a mini-documentary about Cut Brooklyn goes viral. Alton Brown - America's most influential culinary presenter - declares Joel's knives among the best he's ever used. The waiting list explodes. It's never come back down. Joel works with various steels: AEB-L stainless (same as top Scandinavian knifemakers), high-performance carbon, Japanese steels. He spends time with each client to adapt handle ergonomics to the user's hand. Not an online catalog with an 'add to cart' button. A conversation, a discussion, a knife made for you. The workshop left Brooklyn for upstate New York - more space, less rent. The name stayed. Cut Brooklyn became a legacy. On enthusiast communities, Cut Brooklyns are treated as collector's pieces. People show them like art objects. The price follows - four figures for a chef's knife. But that's the price of an object made entirely by a single human being, from forge to final edge. There is no industrial version. There never will be.