A family business born in a little Italian hill town, Bertarelli Cutlery was brought to our Hill in the ’60s. Now it services a large percentage of restaurant knives in the city and does a brisk trade in reconditioning all kinds of kitchen equipment, some of it displayed proudly in the front window. Pride of place when we went, for instance, was a huge green Hobart industrial mixer—the culinary equivalent of a prom dress.
“This is a toy store,” owner Dan Bertarelli says, throwing his arms at huge pizza paddles, wood blocks, toppling stacks of cake pans, ravioli stamps, little Atlas nickel-free pasta makers in jewel tones. But the heart of the business is farther back, where the sharpeners are, along with row upon row of knife boxes either just coming in from local restaurants or going out. Bertarelli says the store processes 2,200 knives a day and has four drivers going from place to place at any given time to swap them out.
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This is where you can find the metal parts, the ball bearings, the pots of lubricating oil, and the vast 60-quart mixers as tall as a small man—or a large one crouching. Whipped cream for 400 cakes, anyone? And tucked almost furtively in one corner is a strangely beautiful 1850s cheese cutter/guillotine.
“But this is the hero of the operation. This is it,” Bertarelli says. He points to a place behind a door, a jumble of unremarkable-looking bits, where the replacement whetstone is kept. When this big disc of stone is lubricated with oil or water and spun up to speed, it hones the edges of any knife to unspeakable sharpness. The machine it belongs in looks more like part of an airplane engine than something that would sharpen a mid-size Kasumi fish knife.
Hanging on a wall on the way out is a photograph of the Bertarelli family’s hometown, slung in a crook of hills, dusted by sunlight. It’s easy to imagine the scent of garlic wafting, perfectly sautéed and simmering in a piquant tomato sauce, or basil, freshly snipped from a sunny window.
At Bertarelli Cutlery, one can be seized by the desire to grab a knife and slice an onion, try out a ravioli punch, put that massive mixer through its paces on a few hundred cakes—or give that ancient cheese slicer a go.
Bertarelli Cutlery, 1927 Marconi, 314-664-4005, bertarellicutlery.com.
