Why, WHY can't restaurants provide a real sharp knife with meat?

I don’t know that it’s elitist. I was just as obsessed a foodie in my early 20s when my friends and I were working shitty low-wage jobs in San Francisco. We’d go out to great cheap restaurants and schlep all over town to get ingredients to cook with. Alice Waters and the other people who worked at Chez Panisse (I’d stick around a few extra days at a temp job when I wanted to eat there) seemed like slightly older versions of my crowd. Occasionally somebody would bring a friend from out of town along and they’d say, don’t you people ever talk about anything but food?

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Another old thread.

If I need even a serrated knife to cut a steak then, IMneverHO :), it’s a shitty steak. I don’t use steak knives at home. If it’s not ‘cuttable’ with a dinner knife then it’s sliced in the kitchen before serving. But I’ve never been to a chain steak place so what do I know?

A steak that you can cut with a dull knife isn’t one of the cuts I like. In meat, flavor is in inverse ratio to tenderness.

Our favorite steak is a rib eye. I can cut it with a dinner knife.

A dull knife is a problem with the connective tissue in the bone-in ribeyes I eat.

I have several sets of cutlery. All the knives have that fine bit of serration. I have no problem cutting ribeyes. As I mentioned above, if it’s a tough cut, i.e., grilled chuck steak, it’s sliced in the kitchen and those slices are ‘cuttable’ with a regular dinner knife.

I have two sets I use regularly and the knives are dull enough that I regularly encounter steaks and chops where I’m sawing away fruitlessly so I get up and grab the steak knives.

I occasionally have that problem in restaurants as well, though usually it’s just sloppy service that they forgot to bring a steak knife, not that they don’t have them.

I feel my Two-buck Chuck lesson coming on.

Cutting with a truly sharp non serrated blade is such a pleasure, I wonder if people acting like they don’t know what the fuss is have really had the experience on a regular basis. The idea that some steaks are too tough for a straight edge is completely nonsense if it is sharp. On the other hand there is no such thing as a sufficiently sharp serrated blade for it to glide effortlessly through even a tough cut of meat the way a really sharp straight edge can do. And a serrated blade will always shred the meat as you’re cutting it making it ugly to look at.

There is only one reason why restaurants don’t give sharp straight edge knives and that is because serrated edges are easier to maintain. At an inexpensive restaurant this is totally understandable but at a nice place where you spend $50 or more on a steak it is unforgivable.

Didn’t APL provide a fancy knife he forged himself? I seem to recall it out was priced to be a felony if it was stolen

$950.01.

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I’ve probably said this before. If a cutting a steak with a regular dinner knife is tough then the steak is tough. If it’s a cut that is tough then slice it in the kitchen and serve it on a platter.

I don’t want a restaurant to cut up my ribeye, which is neither tough nor tender enough to cut easily with a typical table knife.

The ones we cook certainly are.