It’s holiday gift-giving time and between the gift guides and pop-up markets the choices are endless. So when Brooklyn Kitchen and Phaidon team up to present a holiday fair featuring some of our favorite food purveyors and craft makers, we put it on our list of must-sees this weekend to find great gifts for home cooks and DIYers. Besides readings and activities for the kids and a book signing with Daniel Burns of Food & Beer for the adults, pickup cookbooks from Phaidon (we’re especially obsessed with Regarding Cocktails from the late Sasha Petraske and Arita / Table of Contents celebrating 400 years of Japanese ceramics and their more recent collaboration with Dutch designers Scholten & Baijings), sample snacks from Especially Puglia, start your homebrewing project with Bierbox and gift your friends the joy of eating with Eating Tools.
Eating Tools was inspired by the founder Abe Shaw’s decade-long obsession with custom and handmade knives. Soon, Shaw’s love of food expanded his collection into finely crafted eating utensils and sparked a determination to share the work of these artisans with a broader audience. Since the retail site launched in 2013, the offering now includes eating and cooking utensils for eaters of all stripes—anodized metal sporks for the outdoor enthusiast, Red Dot Award-winning polished steel lobster forks from Germany, hand-carved wooden salt spoons and French vegetable cleavers, to start. Over the years, Shaw has forged relationships with a number of his artisans and some interesting collaborations have resulted including the TiStix, titanium chopsticks designed by Alan Folts, and most recently, the Crescent Brass Pincers.
Left to Right: Designer Laura Rittenhouse and metal artist Erica Moody (photo by Jane Messinger)
The Crescent Brass Pincers is the evolution of the Chork, a hand-crafted wooden eating utensil that is a cross between chopsticks and a fork, originally designed and crafted by CCA graduate Laura Rittenhouse. Inspired by the popularity of the Chork on Eating Tools, Shaw tapped a metal artist to refine the wooden utensil into an elegant and more durable serving and plating tool. In time for holiday hosting, the Crescent Brass Pincers are hand built in collaboration with the Maine-based metal artist Erica Moody and feature ebony wood spacers and nickel silver pins.
Head over to Brooklyn Kitchen this Sunday and check out Eating Tools collection and more products from a select group of craft makers. Sunday, December 11 from 10AM – 4PM at 100 Frost Street, Brooklyn, NY.
