Gyuto • 210 mm • Böhler SP steel • Japanese rosewood handle with black pakkawood bolster • Suitable for both left- and right-handed use

This knife is part of the Grand Chef series by Sakai Takayuki. Made with Böhler SP steel, a high-quality stainless steel with a hardness of approximately HRC 61. This steel is comparable to the Swedish steel used in the Grand Chef series but is praised for its slightly higher purity. As a result, the knife retains its sharpness for a long time and is easy to maintain.

The handle is crafted from rosewood, a natural hardwood that offers a warm, classic look and a comfortable grip. Due to the slightly heavier handle, the balance point shifts slightly to the rear, providing excellent control during precision work.

Elwin de Veld about the knives of Sakai Takayuki

We usually start our trips to Japan in Osaka, from where we take a Shinkansen ( a bullet train) to Seki, in Gifu prefecture. We start in Sakai, in south of Osaka, where we always recieve a warm friendly welcome from Aoki san and Ogawa san from Sakai Takayuki. In recent years the customers in our shop have been asking for special Japanese traditionally forged knives: Yanagiba, Sakimura, Kengata: all the names of models which are used in Japanese kitchens for preparing various sorts of fish. Sakai Takayuki is my key which opens the door to the world of traditional Japanese knives and to top it all, their product range is targeted for the western market. For making of the traditional Japanese knives Sakai Takayuki employs the best of the best: Itsuo Doi and Kenji Togashi, among others. The blacksmith Yamatsuke san, with his stable hand on the Kaiten Toshi (Japanese water stone), is a guarantor of an exceptionally sharp finish. Sakai Takayuki buys lots of their steel from the Aichi steel (their headquarters are situated close to Nagoya) and works among other with carbon steel shirogami white and aogami blue. A nice detail: the colours in the names of the steel have nothing to do with the colour of the steel itself- it's just the colour of the packing in which the raw steel is being stored in the factory. The western models are manually finished at the company's quarters in Osaka (sharpening), but largely manufactured in Seki, in Gifu prefecture. The finish and the quality is sublime- just what we can expect from Takayuki.