What is sharpness really? What constitutes a cutting knife’s edge? Is there such a thing as the “best knife?”
Questions of metallurgical metaphysics come up easily in conversation with the knife lovers at Northside Cutlery, a kitchen supply and sharpening shop in the North Center neighborhood founded by former chef Kevin Silverman. After a decade of weathering industry changes in fine dining jobs in Chicago and Florida, Silverman turned his side gig as a mobile knife sharpener into a full-time business. Now, customers — including chefs and other industry professionals — come to the store for his expertise in sharpening, restoring and selling artisanal kitchen knives.
“I treat everybody’s knives as if they are my own,” Silverman said. Oftentimes, even if the customer’s knife is worth less than the cost of sharpening, there are personal and emotional reasons why they want to repair them. “I always like to say everything is worth sharpening if you like to use it … The steel never goes bad”
Customers sometimes come in sheepish about their dull knives or argue that their 10-year-old knife is still sharp as ever — but after Silverman works on them, they realize they’ve been working with a faulty tool. He said the difference is most noticeable in things that are small and notoriously difficult to cut, like shallots and chives.
“The best thing is when they say, ‘You made cooking more enjoyable — I can finally prep,’” he said.
It’s more than just the ease of cutting — Silverman and other fine dining chefs say that a well-maintained chef’s knife is essential to the cooking process. Some say dull knives “crush” and oxidize vegetables. Precise and uniform knifework leads to even cooking and visual clarity when plating. Plus, poorly maintained knives require more force, which can cause the hand to slip and get caught under a blade.
As a home cook, I like having sharp knives that can glide through slippery mangoes or tomatoes, but I have professionals help maintain my tools. When I moved to Chicago with a chipped petty knife and a bent chef’s knife, I ran into Ben Seyfarth, owner of Edgewise Sharpening, and asked if he did knives. Seyfarth said he only does high-end salon and barber shears and instead suggested Northside Cutlery for kitchen knives. I couldn’t think of a better recommendation than one sharpener endorsing another, so I made the trip.
Silverman first started learning the fundamentals of knife maintenance during an internship at Boka Restaurant in 2013. What began as a practical concern of a chef taking care of his own tools transformed into a full-on love for the craft. Slowly, sharpening became more and more of his life.
Silverman’s career as a chef had taken off after a decade of working in Florida. In March 2020, he returned to Chicago with his now-fiancee for a kitchen job that ended up falling through due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He spent time delivering pizzas for Domino’s and ended up as a line cook at Lil’ Ba-Ba-Reeba! in 2021.
The thing that kept him afloat during this tumult was his sharpening. While delivery driving provided good money, it wasn’t very fulfilling. So, he posted on a Ravenswood Facebook page offering his skills sharpening knives.
“I think I got 12 people out of that. It kind of just spread by word of mouth,” Silverman said.
His schedule became bifurcated between the two lives — early mornings sharpening, late nights cooking. There was an obvious demand.
“I had a fork in the road ahead of me — quit the restaurant job, get a new restaurant job or pursue the sharpening,” he said.
He opened Northside Cutlery in 2021, and it’s been growing ever since. The success is due in no small part to Silverman’s easy manner. It’s less like being sold to by a salesman and more like being brought into a world by a superfan who just wants the best tools for you. Sometimes, at his own expense.
“When I opened the store, I had no knives to sell, so I sold some of my personal collection,” including a Moritaka knife that started his journey into Japanese knives, Silverman said. “I kinda kicked myself. For like $100, I sold it to a cook in town. At least it went to a good home.”
For three-and-a-half years, the sharpening business has been his main focus. While online communities and forums have plenty of knowledge to share about knife sharpening, Silverman is developing and growing a service in the city that highlights local makers and promotes safe and sustainable tool use.
For home chefs, there are automated sharpeners and tools that simplify sharpening. Professionals, for the most part, consider these to be inefficient or damaging to knives. Instead, the most common sharpening method within the restaurant industry is completely manual.
The shopping area at Northside Cutlery is flanked by knife sharpening tools, the heart and soul of the business: a humble whetstone and a restored vintage Chicago workbench sit near the window facing the street, while industrial grinders and woodworking equipment sit in the back workshop.
Whetstone sharpening involves soaking a low-to-high grit stone in water and gliding a dull blade up and down it at an angle, removing steel to create a sharp edge. The water below shimmers despite the residue of metal. Each pass up and down the stone, meditative and increasingly precise, sharpens the knife. An expert will rest the edge-side against their fingers in a manner that does not cut them, allowing them to observe their progress. More damaged knives might be fixable on a whetstone, but sometimes, a machine helps speed up the process.
“I’m literally going to take it straight to the edge until I get these chips out” said Silverman, as he grinds my chipped petty knife on a belt grinder machine and the steel screams.
The end result is a reflection of the hands that touched it.
“Steel has a kind of memory,” Silverman told me while explaining how he’d have to carefully repair my lightly bent knife. When he returned it to me, I couldn’t remember the damage, even if the knife did.
Sharpening services start at $7 per knife at Northside. For $18, customers can get a traditional manual whetstone sharpening. For people who want to do their own maintenance, there are small group classes available for $85 several times a month.
More obscure repairs and custom solutions such as thinning, resurfacing and handle replacements are also available. In the very back, you’ll see four acid vats of different solutions for restoring knives to their original finishes. When he returns the knife, Silverman wants customers to feel the curve, patina and soul of the tool are retained.
Northside Cutlery has become a place for restaurant professionals to congregate with peers. Chef Jenner Tomaska of Michelin-starred Esmé has had Northside service the restaurant’s knives and chipped steel, calling Silverman a “great addition” to the hospitality community.
Christopher Jung, a customer and friend of Silverman’s who is the executive chef at Maxwells Trading, maintains his own tools — but he turns to Northside for advanced services such as thinning and restructuring. The restaurant recently sent about 100 steak knives to Northside for sharpening.
Jung said there was a void for sharpeners in the city when the similarly named Northwestern Cutlery moved from the West Loop to the suburbs in 2020.
“My industry has always been very difficult to find,” said Seyfarth of Edgewise Sharpening. “You could find sharpeners, but you couldn’t find someone who does a good job.”
Beyond sharpening, one of Northside’s goals is to curate knives that are a better value than what you’d find at a big-box kitchen supply store.
“You pay a lot for the name brand … I just find that for the price there are better options,” Silverman said.
Northside has display cases and racks of knives from Japanese makers such as Kanetsugu, Swiss chef knives from Victorinox and from Chinese knifemaker Bill Zheng. There are also other tools of the trade that Silverman has curated — cutting boards and ceramics from local makers, Thermapen meat thermometers and whetstones of various grits.
The center of the store, where the most expensive pieces are, is worth observing like an art gallery. That’s where you’ll find an eye-bleeding assortment of custom, one-of-a-kind knives. From Chicago, Marc Weinstock’s knives have dreamy wooden handles with a contrasting strip of color. From Skokie, Sam Goldbroch’s blades have deeply unexpected and elegant angles. From Carol Stream, Kyle Daily’s knives have playful handles with a contoured coke-bottle shape, whimsical file work along the spine and studs pressed in like polka-dots.
Other elite Midwestern knifemakers here include Matt Baldwin, Pig Iron Forge and Dylan Ambrosini. For the majority of them, this is the only place you can find their knives outside of buying direct.
“Kevin has been kind of a champion of independent knife makers as opposed to the major brands, which is different from most knife shops in the area,” said Goldbroch, who was a chef for most of his life before he became a knife maker. “He’s a little more serious about high-quality knives versus just making sure that you leave the store with a purchase.”
Ultimately, the goal is to get customers knives they like to use in the long term; for most, this isn’t the most pricey ones. Silverman remembers vividly the difficulty of living on a line cook’s salary, so he tries to stock knives under $100. Customers can spend as little as $7 to fix their Ikea knives or splurge $1,000 for a wedding present of one-of-a-kind handcrafted knives and cutting boards or invest $200 to restore a Filipino bolo knife that belonged to a family member.
“Everyone deserves a really good knife but everyone has a different price point,” said Jeannie Rakamnuaykit, the only other person who works at Northside with Silverman. “It’s our job to meet them where they’re at because there’s good recommendations at every price point.”
