Dan Bertarelli’s grandfather was basically the Steve Jobs of knife sharpening in St. Louis – he started an empire from his garage on Macklind Avenue in 1967. Today, Bertarelli Cutlery serves some of the same restaurants it did 40 years ago and now runs an addictive kitchen shop on The Hill. After a lifetime surrounded by blades, Bertarelli has become a knife-whisperer, listening to the steel as it rushes over the stone until he hears it attain a perfect edge.
You started sharpening full-time at 18, but you more or less grew up in the shop, right?
Pretty much. Summers when school was out we’d work there. If you got in trouble at school, you’d have to come work there. When I graduated high school, I was there the next Monday. You’d drive to soccer practice in your dad’s van sitting on top of a box of knives.
Did you always want to join the family business?
I didn’t know how much I was going to love it when I started. Some people like cars; some people like guns or books. I like knives. … And now I come up here for no reason. I’ll come up at night and work on stuff. I love working in the shop.
The Bertarelli team sharpens more than 10,000 knives a week. How do you get through so many?
It’s all done by hand. It’s like a seven-step process to do each knife. We’re grinding about seven-and-a-half to eight hours a day, just going, going, going, going. When you can (look at knives) and you say, “That’s Sidney Street. That’s Peacemaker. That’s those guys,” you know you’ve been doing it awhile. … I’ve been doing it for so long that I can actually hear it.
You can hear a dull knife?
You can hear if there are pieces of your stone missing, or if it’s not flat or if there’s a chip in the knife. It’s tough to explain, but you can hear the actual noise the stone is making on the knife. (You can hear) if you’ve done enough on this stone and you move on to the next one. … A good knife sounds like a bell.
Do you recommend a particular knife brand?
With knives, it’s a lot more personal. It’s like Harry Potter’s wand – sometimes it picks you. You touch one and say, “That one feels right,” and then look at me and say, “Is that OK?” If you like that goofy knife, grab it. Global, a Japanese knife we’ve been carrying for 15 to 20 years – people hate them or they love them. If you like them, that’s it, no other knife will do.
How do you advise people to buy knives?
Come in and touch it, because unless you have experience with it, you don’t know. I wish we had a big table where everyone could just start chopping stuff, but then I think my insurance would go through the roof and my Band-Aid budget would get way too high. But we always offer trial months. If anything gives you a blister or you don’t like it, bring it back in. We want to give you something that you can use for the rest of your life. When you spend that much money on something, you have to love it.
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This article appears in December 2015.