Blade stunners
By CYNTHIA KILIAN

It slices, it dices, it’s…$3,500?
At Korin Japanese Trading Corp., the TriBeCa emporium of star chefs and rabid amateurs, a single blade can cost that much.
Take this showcase items – a Nenohi shiro-ko mizu-honyaki mirror-finished yanagi. Translation: some 13 inches of sashimi knife with an ebony handle for $3,450. Catalog prices for some models start at a modest $60 but soar to $2,890.
Clearly, these are not your mother’s Ginsus.
So what puts them a cut above?
Sometimes the gilding. Always the edge. The cuts are so precise, you can taste them.
“You cut without cutting,“ explains chef Laurent Gras of Bistro du Vent. “When you don’t put pressure on an ingredient, you don’t change the nature of the ingredient.”
How sharp are they? Sharp as swords: When sword making was banned after WWII, Japanese craftsmen turned their sharp skills to the kitchen.
“Like a surgeon’s scalpel,” says Korin’s president Saori Kawano, telling how one Japanese chef cut his finger during lunch and didn’t realize it until much later.
Gras is such a Korin fan, he paid more than $5,000 for one knife.
Crafted like a sword with gold-embossed handle and sheath, there are only four in existence.
One sits in Korin’s window, and another in on display in Nobu Matsuhisa’s home in Los Angeles, where the chef has an almost religious bond with it. “It gives me faith as a chef,” he says.
Its appeal, Gras says, is like a Ferrari or a Porsche.
“When you drive one, you understand,” he says. “When you use that knife, it brings slicing to a different level.”
Union Square Café chef Michael Romano likens a German Wusthof knife to “a Mercedes-Benz, which is not too shabby and very high-quality and durable,” whereas Ferrari-like Japanese knives are “high performance, but also demand more of the user.”
An avid collector, Romano recently took home a curved blade with an ebony, silver and ivory handle that set him back more than $3,000.
More than the inlays, he values its craft - it’s one of two made by a very elderly Japanese man. “I look at it as par of a lineage of a very ancient skill…it comes straight down from the sword makers. That’s priceless,” says Romano.
Amy Ruth’s chef Carl Redding recently cut through 500 chestnuts with his $900 model, which was still so sharp afterward, he accidentally cut himself.
When he used a German knife, he had to keep sharpening it.
“What makes it worth it?” asks Redding. “I think confidence has a lot to do with it. You know this knife is going to perform. It’s not going to let you down.”