I’ve got two knives that I really use a lot: a relatively cheap Santoku I bought from Mervyns on sale last year, and a Henckels cleaver I got from my mom as a gift during my sophomore year in college when I had to start cooking on my own.
Unfortunately, in all the time I’ve had them, I’ve never had them sharpened. After watching as much Alton Brown as I have lately, I concluded that my knives are nowhere near as sharp as they could or should be. So I set out to find a place that would do it.
My first brilliant idea was to call Bed Bath and Beyond to see if they do it. They don’t. I called them, and they were pretty much useless. The people on the phone had no idea who might even do that around here. They actually tried to sell me a knife sharpener instead. And as we all know from watching this episode of Good Eats and this video on Google Video, knife sharpeners aren’t really sharpeners, they’re knife honers. True knife sharpening is best left to the pros. The closest they came to giving me helpful advice was to look on Google. Not exactly what I was looking for in their customer service, but it’s what I ended up doing.
I wasn’t really near my computer at the time, so I decided to try GOOG-411, the free 411 service from everyone’s favorite search engine. I did a search for “cutlery” near Mountain View. The first few results weren’t helpful at all, but there was one that caught my attention, it was the Williams Cutlery Company in Palo Alto. I figured that sounded about right, so I was connected to them. The guy on the phone (incidentally the manager, Eden (sp?)) told me that they could do both knives for about $15, and they would be done tomorrow afternoon.
I rushed to get over there before they closed for the evening. It’ll cost me $15 on delivery as promised, and they should be done tomorrow by 2. Now I’m eagerly awaiting their return…