Some Michelin-starred restaurants have their own vineyards. Some have their own citrus orchards or rare-breed pigsties; others have beehives and butchers. Ynyshir, Gareth Ward’s two-starred restaurant on a stretch of wooded coast near Aberyswyth, has its own smithy. Twenty paces from the kitchen you will find the resident blacksmith, a burly Welsh grandfather named Lee Jones, hand-forging every single piece of metal that the diner will bring to their lips during their five-hour ingestion of Ward’s £385-a-head, 30-course tasting menu.
There’s the two-tined fork for pronging the lobster claw satay, another specialised fork for the pigeon course and a particular spoon for the caviar, too. The Welsh Wagyu beef course requires a pair of sprung tweezers with buffalo horn tips – incredibly fiddly to make, apparently. “If you don’t get the spring right, they’ll snap or stay shut or whatever,” says Jones. “And putting the buffalo tips on them, that was tricky too. I did 22 sets of them, I think it took me about 10 days.”
All in all, he estimates that he has made around 350 different pieces – “knives, forks, spoons, different-size spoons, spikes, skewers, plates, tumblers, pots, you name it. From front door to back door, it’s all my work in there. It’s a big thing for me.” For diners, too, a nose inside the Ynyshir Smithy is all part of the experience, just like the black walls and techno soundtrack.
“I like to use the best and I don’t like buying things off shelves,” is how Ward explains it. “I can have an idea and Lee will just make it.” As Jones says, it has to have that “wow factor”.
These are baroque times in the world of high-end cutlery as chefs seek ever-finer points of distinction, ever wowier factors for their customers. “If you want a Michelin star, you almost certainly have to have some kind of individuality in your tableware,” says Alex Pole, who hand-forges bespoke cutlery for chefs such as Simon Rogan and Masaki Sugisaki. “You can’t get away with John Lewis.”
Employing one’s own on-site blacksmith is clearly one direction – but as long as your cutlery is making a statement, almost anything goes. At Yannick Alléno’s Pavyllon in Park Lane, each course arrives with a special scraping spoon, specifically designed for mopping up the purées and foams that the 17 times Michelin-starred chef likes to smear on plates. For The French in Manchester, Adam Reid commissioned a “spoonular” implement of clay and shell that would perform the work of knife and spoon.
It was arguably Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli that started the trend back in the noughties – there, diners would be presented with items such as Luki Huber’s “baroque skewers”, designed to spear tasting morsels, and “clip spoons”, half spoon, half clothes peg, which allowed bouquets of aromatics to be suspended under the nose as food was brought to the lips. El Bulli-style spoon-docks – special wooden nestling cases for tasting spoons – are fairly standard now. Enigmatic knives are increasingly common: scalpels, switchblades, surgical daggers such as the ones that appear with the meat course at Osip in Bruton, where you can’t quite tell which is the sharp side.
It is fair to say that the days of restaurateurs simply treating “flatware” as an after-thought are behind us. Pole sees his handmade cutlery in line with the organic movement in food. “People are becoming more interested in provenance and where things come from – in individuality,” he says. “It all goes hand-in-hand.”
When I visit Pole at his forge in west Dorset – photogenically arrayed with gorgeous anvils, hammers, axes, knives, and bronze garden implements – he is midway through a 1,000-piece order from Sugisaki’s restaurant Dinings in Knightsbridge. The dainty little sushi plates can be hammered out relatively fast: about 20 per day. Each fork, however, requires a 16-step process of firing, bending, refiring, hammering and drilling, to transform it from a rod of stainless steel to three-pronged eating implement. “If you’re making a batch of 50, say, the trick is not to get swamped by the number,” he says. “I’m going to have to drill 200 holes in these forks but I try not to think of that. What you need to do is to treat each piece as an individual.”
You might imagine that chopsticks are a breeze in comparison but actually they are harder. Chopsticks have to be extremely thin, they have to be extremely straight (“no one wants a wobbly chopstick”) and they have to taper from 6mm to 1.5mm. The thinner a piece of steel, the less it holds the heat, which means there is a vanishingly small window to work on it. You can begin to appreciate why the Dinings chopstick gift set retails at £250.
It is a process that breeds obsession. “Simon [Rogan] and his head chef spent hours testing teaspoons. Hours!” says Pole. “The initial set we made were short stubby spoons with quite deep bowls. They looked great. But the top of the bowl caught your teeth – not a pleasant experience.” He insisted on taking them all back and reforging them. “It’s like a lot of things. The more you get into it, the more obsessed you become.”
It can get lonely in the forge – it’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a life – but Instagram has allowed a lively community of blacksmiths to form and to advertise their wares. “It’s more popular now than it’s been since the industrial revolution, I’d say.” Jones agrees. “Instagram has done me the power of good,” he says. “The teachers at school tried to tell me there wasn’t much future in this. But it seems to be thriving at the moment, anyway.”
Naturally, the really successful restaurateurs have always been all over such fine details. The last fork I can remember remarking upon was at The Park, Jeremy King’s delightful neo-diner overlooking Hyde Park. It was incredibly heavy, deliberately so. King tells me it was inspired by an implement that he had enjoyed eating with at the Four Seasons in New York. “Like all good design, cutlery shouldn’t shout for attention but withstand scrutiny,” he says. “In restaurants, attention to detail should enhance the subliminal experience as much of what contributes to enjoyment isn’t immediately obvious. There is, of course, a particular sensuous feel to silver but even stainless steel can be rewarding if the grade is 18/8 as opposed to 13/0.” What he is talking about here is the ratio of chromium to nickel. “The weight in the hand is crucial.”
Pole tells me that he has now made so many forks that he barely needs to look at them any more – he can feel if it’s a good one. For the same reason, he never wears gloves when he is hammering. “Cutlery is really about weight. It’s really about how it feels in the hand. If you pick that up and feel it, it has a balance to it. Whereas if you have bad cutlery, it just feels bad. It doesn’t work.”
But developing an eye for cutlery can be a curse, too. You realise how much bad cutlery there is. “I sort of think you shouldn’t notice it,” says Corin Mellor, the creative director of David Mellor, the tableware design company established by his father in the mid-1950s, which supplies The River Cafe, The Clove Club and The Connaught, among others. “I always notice bad cutlery. Good cutlery is more invisible. It’s subtle.”
Spoons, he says, should be tapered: “The middle of the bowl will be 2mm thick and the edge will be 1mm.” Knives will ideally be made of a higher carbon steel to the forks and spoons so that they can be sharpened. Otherwise it will need to be serrated and serration blunts over time. “The majority of knives you will find in restaurants have serration on them.” Serration “has its place…” he says, diplomatically. “But it’s not ideal.” A bad fork, meanwhile, will have “brusque edges” that dig into the palm.
Mellor has noticed a shift in cutlery trends in recent years. When he joined the family business, tableware was generally selected by an architect or interior designer, perhaps the restaurateur. “Now what we’re finding is that it’s the chefs themselves who are dictating what knives and forks are used to eat their food,” he says.
In one sense, this stands to reason. Unlike the tablecloth or pepper mill or chair, the cutlery is (hopefully) the only item of the restaurant’s design that you will put in your mouth. “Now – quite rightly – they’re taking the cutlery a lot more seriously.”
However, with the involvement of chefs comes a move away from the cutlery subtlety and towards cutlery one-upmanship. At Albatross Death Cult in Birmingham – a fish restaurant that, like Ynyshir, attracts adjectives like “challenging” and “uncompromising” – there is no cutlery at all. You must figure out how to eat the 16-course omakase tasting menu with your fingers. Then again, there has always been an element of theatre to fine dining. As if to emphasise the point, at Ynyshir all of the seats face the kitchen – and as at the theatre, you get the sense you’re not really supposed to talk to your neighbour.
As for domestic use, we might just be at the beginning of a cutlery crisis. The Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson recently endorsed a ready-for-school checklist of basic skills expected of children starting reception. This is in response to complaints from early years educators that children now frequently arrive at school unable to share, take themselves to the toilet – or use basic tableware.
But who says knives, forks and spoons are the be-all and end-all? Why not chopsticks and sporks or the special fork-knife that Roald Dahl describes his one-armed father inventing for the purpose of eating boiled eggs? I have been forced to rethink my own cutlery use as I recently fractured my left clavicle playing football and can no longer use my dominant left hand for forking and spooning. I have taken to draping a napkin over my shoulder, Tudor style, and using my right hand – modelling my table manners on Mark Rylance’s exquisite performance as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC’s recent The Mirror and the Light adaptation. It wasn’t always impolite to eat with your fingers or from the end of your knife. When my children did this, I used to tell them off.
When my children tell me off, I now remind them that none of our customs are really so fixed – as is impressed on me when I visit Kirstin Kennedy, metalwork curator at the Victoria & Albert museum.
“Everyone has a spoon,” she says, meaning all known cultures have developed some version of the essential slurping implement. (For much of British culinary history, food was indeed a good deal slurpier than it is today, all pap, potage, porringer and posset.) Knives, too, have always been in use though it was generally expected that you’d bring your own. It is the fork that is johnny-come-lately of the table. Traditionally forks were used merely to hold meat in place while cutting it, which Kennedy demonstrates with a handsome 17th-century ivory knife case from Sheffield, comprising six small knives and just the one two-pronged carving fork.
“If you think about forks, they’re quite dangerous really,” says Kennedy. “It is a bit unnatural to put a pointed thing into your mouth. The English weren’t having any of it.”
Forks only became fashionable in the late 17th century, arriving via the Italians who used them for pasta. But it was the 19th century – with the advent of mass production and global travel – that was the great period of cutlery innovation. In the V&A, you can find pudding trowels, marrow scoops (for bone marrow), ice spades, asparagus tongs, sardine tongs, lobster picks, crumb scrapers and cheese scoops. “By the end of the 19th century, there was an implement for everything,” says Kennedy.
Our modern cutlery sets are relatively restrained by comparison. But even here, Mellor reports a subtle evolution. The “traditional” English place setting comprises six pieces: a starter knife and fork, a larger knife and fork, a dessert spoon and a soup spoon. The soup spoon is now the endangered piece, its replacement the large American teaspoon (which David Mellor terms a “fruit spoon”). “This was never part of the English place setting but perhaps it’s a better size for the modern dessert.” The steak knife is another fast riser. “Steak knives have gone mad recently. There’s this mania for steak knives.”
Lee Jones’s knives are in particularly high demand – his knife clients include The Ledbury and St Barts in London – though business is threatened by Instagram’s AI filters, which now automatically edit out anything that might be perceived as a weapon, including occasionally spoons. But Jones’s major concern is that there aren’t enough young blacksmiths coming through. “That’s the biggest issue. There’s no metalworking in school any more and it’s a job getting the right guy with the right kind of attitude and work ethic. I’d love to have an apprentice. But finding the right youngster – it’s difficult.” For any young people who do want to take the challenge, there is a bright future in blacksmithing.
“Cutlery has become a big thing recently,” confirms Alex Pole. These are tools so intimate we barely think of them as tools at all, tools that may be infinitely refined. “Well. It’s always been a big thing. At least since we stopped eating with our hands.”