Blade Runner

A conversation with Chicago's Custom Knife Maker, Sam Goldbroch

Dec 21, 2023

It’s interesting to me how close fetish is to grief. You can never predict when either will hit, but when one does, oohwee. But, you need to see or feel something that unleashes that emotional well.

Ultimately, this is how I tell you, I have a fetish.

I didn’t know I did. The signs were there tho.

I bought this Global cleaver just because it’s beautiful. I have used it approximately 20 times in like 10 years.

Of course I had the Henckels starter set from when my wife and I got married. The only real useful blade has been the paring knife.

When the seven year itch set in, I fell madly for this Wusthof santoku. It’s my daily driver.

I thought I was done, but no, Damascus ripples, gotta have ‘em and no less from Bob Kramer, the guy who made a knife for the late-Anthony Bourdain which recently sold for $231,250 at auction.

These are not serious knives. These are bougie dad wanted to be a chef at one point in his life knives.

I’ve been in enough kitchens. I see the honed Japanese blades the cooks use. Some of them use the fruits of artisans, handmade numbers, the kind of big plans that stir the heart.

Some of them use the blades of Evanstonian Sam Goldbroch, a former Chicago high end dining chef.

I know this because one day, there it was, the stimulus I didn’t know I needed, an instagram story about a triple Damascus knife set, black as my soul rippled with waves of copper. It was then that I knew I had a problem.

I am not alone. Chef Jake Potashnick must have felt this too, because he commissioned the cutlery for his forthcoming restaurant Feld. I asked him why he used Goldbroch and he said, “Obviously, because he’s got a rocking beard. And I trust anyone with a beard.”

This is true. Here’s Sam:

Ryan Owen Photo, courtesy of Sam Goldbroch IG

But, it was obviously a little more than Sam’s facial coif. Potashnick added, “If I were a skateboarder I would want to buy a board made by someone who skateboards. Knowing the product as a tool is almost as important as knowing how to make it, and that’s an area where Sam excels.”

Indeed Sam does. His work also inspired Dylan Trotter to get some custom blades to invoke his dad Charlie Trotter’s memory.

Trotter told me this story about Sam

Sam I met recently when I hosted a get together to commemorate the 10 year anniversary of my father’s passing (November 5th). I asked 8 chefs to do food stations, one of them being John Hagedorn, an incredibly talented chef who I worked with at Trotter’s To Go when we were both teenagers (he went on to work at the main Trotter’s restaurant, Alinea, and many other places). He brought Sam with him (they went to high school together!) and they both cranked out a Savory Roasted Potato Maritozzo with potato infused crème fraîche and ossetra grand reserve caviar 😋. Sam is a great chef!

That night I also learned that he makes chef knives! So I scheduled a time to come by Sam’s workshop. I walked in and his brother Phil is there doing some intense woodworking! Small world; Phil also worked with John and I at Trotter’s To Go.

Okay I know this has been long winded, but now Sam and I are in the back talking about…

Knives! It was interesting to learn about the metal smithing aspect of it, but it turns out the handle can be much more varied in design. He pulls open a drawer filled with all different types of wood. Some 50,000 years old, from all over the world. He then pulls out some other decorative elements, crushed mother of pearl for instance, and then a gorgeous piece of abalone shell. This triggered a memory. When I was 14 I took a trip with my dad to New Zealand and Australia. It was the first trip out of the country the two of us took alone. It was the trip that opened my palate up. He insisted (heavily) that I eat everything on this trip. I couldn’t say no. It was the first time I tried Abalone, which really stood out as something foreign to me. I enjoyed all the unique seafood and it changed me forever. Now I love being an adventurous eater! So it was obvious, the knife would have a handle made of abalone shell and New Zealand wood to remember my father every time I cook.

Goldbroch’s work is fascinating, and while I didn’t know very much about knives, I had to sit down with him to find out more. Enjoy the interview.

Michael Nagrant (MN)

I came across your work on Instagram. We're probably tied into a lot of the same food people. My first reaction was that your work is incredibly beautiful.

Obviously there's other knife makers out there, although I don’t know any local ones. And obviously there are knivemakers who’ve become famous. I'm aware of Bob Kramer from the Anthony Bourdain mentions and all that, but also it seems like a fairly unique kind of thing. I’m wondering how one gets in to this? You started as a chef right?

Sam Goldbroch (SG)

Thank you for the kind words. Yeah, I was a chef for about 12 to 15-ish years, depending on how you count teaching as well. But yeah, I worked in restaurants in Chicago for quite a long time.

What kind of restaurants in Chicago?

Mostly fine dining. I was at North Pond for about three years. I was at Blackbird for a while. I helped open up Elizabeth. And then I kind of stepped out of that world a little bit, helped open up The Radler when that was going for a couple of years.

I always say that North Pond that was basically like the master's degree of French cooking.

And you worked with Nate Sears at The Radler, huh? I was sad it closed. The stuff you were doing was great.

Yeah, I worked with Nate for two years. I was a sous-chef there. I think I was the first person he hired.

I always like what you guys were doing at The Radler and I always thought Nathan was super talented, but I also understand how this profession is. Food writing is the same way, honestly. I have a real job on top of The Hunger.

Oh, no kidding? This isn’t your full-time?

I was a full-time freelancer from 2005 to 2013 which coincided with the Sun Times food critic gig ending and then I went to Red Eye, but at that point I had two young kids so I picked up a side job and so I was doing it part time and doing this part time and then ever since it's been part-time.

I will say The Hunger has grown in a way that I could not have expected and if nothing changes in my growth rate with the newsletter you know like there isn't like some big burst or it accelerates, but if I just grind at it, I would say in the next two years I think I could make it my full-time, so yeah so it's it's kind of cool that way. So what happened after the Radler?

After The Radler, I took a little bit of time. I was actually about to open a restaurant, possibly two. I had a partner. And we had a pretty cool space that the lease was on.

However, the city kind of made it a little bit difficult with that because it was part of the park district. And so you have to negotiate with the park district and the lease wasn’t great terms.

Then at that same time, my wife got pregnant and I was like, you know what, I don't need this. You know, as I'm sure you know, with your two kids, when you’re working in a restaurant, doing anything is difficult. And I was like, I have to kind of make a choice.

So what year was this?

That would have been 2016. So yeah, 2016 I ended up working at The Chopping Block. I taught there for three years.

I was teaching at culinary school too, but I have a complex relationship with that. They charge massive amounts of tuition and then you get out and you're making 10, 12 bucks an hour, you know. Now it's a little bit different, but even still, it'd be hard to get out of, from under that debt.

So I decided to start teaching, as we call them, regular people. And that was great. I loved it. I liked teaching.

And then, uh, how do you get into knife making? Obviously a knife is your main chef’s tool, but that’s a huge leap from chef to knifemaker, right?

Right. Well, yeah, it's kind of a confluence of events. When I was working at Chopping Block, one of the classes that I was pretty well known for was knife skills, you know, just coming out of fine dining and everything, you just get obsessed with the idea of like having perfect knife cuts.

And I was really interested in teaching it. And when I teach, I try to always kind of anticipate whatever the most ridiculous questions are.

Basically, the most simple question is always what makes a good knife?

And then I realized I had absolutely no idea.

And more so, I realized that, even though I had been using a knife for however many years at that point, I didn't know anything about knives.

So I started doing a bunch of research.

I did a bunch of deep dives into it.

I started buying cheap knives off of eBay and restoring them.

I was kind of teaching myself how to sharpen properly, which is something that I didn't really know how to do before.

At least I thought I knew, but I didn't actually know.

So what would you do before that? Would you just us like a like a whetstone or would you take it somewhere to get sharpened even early on?

No, I never took it anywhere, but you know in culinary school they give you this whetstone as part of your kit and it's a 200 grit and a 400 grit stone.

And I did everything on there thinking that I was doing something decent. I did that for a couple of years and I ruined, I don't know, probably two or three pretty decent knives just because I didn't really know what I was doing.

200 and 400 grit is what I would use now to basically repair a broken knife. It's not something you would actually use to properly sharpen a knife. So I was just removing so much material and they would get really thick and wedgy and they would have these really coarse edges on them that didn't really cut properly.

I got better at it after a while and I started getting more stones and stuff like that I still didn't necessarily know why I was doing what I was doing or what the best practices were.

When I would buy these knives off of eBay they were always carbon steel because they're cheaper and you get a lot more feedback from them like you would know if you're doing it right a lot quicker than a stainless steel knife and I would end up with this pretty good knife, but the handle was always beat up and broken and had busted rivets and the scales were coming off.

And so I would go to my brothers. Both of my brothers are furniture makers. We share a shop together now.

So I would end up, going to these like exotic wood lumber yards. I had no idea how much cool wood there is.

I would buy these like really crazy different colored pieces of wood from all over the world and then I put a nice handle on this knife and then I had this pretty cool knife and I would show them to people and they'd go, Oh wow, that's so cool.

They’d say are you a knife maker? And I would always say, no, I just make the handles.

And I hated saying that.

So you learned carpentry from your brothers too?

Well they showed me how to use some of the tools and showed me where to get the wood and then yeah I would basically go into my basement and my daughter was super young and a baby at this time and so I was at home for a bit.

I would have some more free time than I normally would. I would just go tinker and make stuff and break stuff and I made a whole bunch of really nasty looking knives and some pretty decent ones but after a while I hated saying, I just make handles. So I went and took a class up in Wisconsin with a guy who's a really, really good knife maker.

And then I kind of just jumped into it from there.

What's the guy’s name that you took the class from?

His name is Isaiah Schroeder. He's up in Madison. He's a super, super talented knife maker. I spent, I think, three days with him and he showed me a whole bunch of stuff.

I came home.

I bought all the materials, I made a whole bunch of really bad knives, and then after a while you kind of get into the hang of it and you kind of start to develop your style, and that's where it took off from.

So did you set up a foundry?

Well I didn't have a forge back then because I was working in my basement then and that would have been dangerous.

But, I wanted to get into a real shop because my basement just wasn't cutting it and then both of my brothers were both kind of tinkering with furniture making as a job.

They were looking into thinking about getting a space as well. So we ended up just kind of pooling resources and pooling all of our tools that we all had in garages and basements and we ended up renting a shop in Skokie and so that's kind of where I started doing everything.

I was doing my own heat treating and things like that and so we did that for about three years and then after our lease was up we ended up acquiring a different building that's much bigger And now I do all my own forging, all my own heat treating.

That's crazy!

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Kind of everything just kind of clicked at the right time really

Before you knew anything about making knives, what would your ideal of a knife have been then? Were you like a Shun guy or I love carbon steel or I love stainless. How did you think about knives before you knew anything?

Yeah, I didn't really know what I was looking for.

This is actually something that I always included in my class. I always used to say, I can tell you the technical specs and the hardness and all this stuff about pretty much every mass-produced knife, but in the end, the thing that's going to make you buy a knife is if it looks cool or not.

So I would just get a really cool looking knife. It was always Japanese. I kind of knew that I didn't like the big German knives. I liked the really thin Japanese knives. That's pretty common in the industry.

I hear that. It's probably my least favorite knife, but I bought a Global cleaver because I'm like this is the coolest looking thing I've ever seen.

Yeah, man. I think it's 50% of the importance of spending however much money you're going to spend on a knife is that it’s got to look cool.

Yeah. My ride or die is it's a a Wusthof 7-inch Santoku. I just like the thinness of it and the way it feels in the hand and the way they did the handle on it and I know maybe it's not the greatest knife or whatever, but it just has the feel and the balance and whatever they did on thus one particular knife is just the one I always go to.

And that's how it is, you just kind of click and it's kind of like that Harry Potter thing where the wand chooses the wizard kind of situation. Some knives you just have an affinity for, for whatever reason.

And a lot of times you get drawn to it because you think it looks cool.

And I always say, if it looks cool, you know, if it's decent, you should just get it because if it doesn't look cool, you're not going to want to maintain it. You're not going to be excited about using it.

So, yeah, that's a big part of my style is like I try and make what I think are pretty cool knives.

So now that you know what you know, how has your view of a knife changed?

Like obviously coolness and look is great. I can see that in the way you design, so it's still important. But when you're thinking about creating the ideal knife, and I know everybody's ideal is different but like let's just talk about now how do you think about your ideal knife?

I love patina because to me that's kind of telling a story of how you use the knife because you can actually control the patina with different fruits that you cut.

So ideally these days, I look for a knife that's really thick by the handle and tapers into an extremely thin point and something that has a really, really thin geometry.

The edge is relatively important but the geometry is the most important factor about how a knife performs and I think any decent knife maker would probably say the exact same thing.

How would you advise somebody if you're teaching the knife skills class and they're like I want to buy a knife…obviouslyit'd be great if they bought a custom knife from you but we know maybe that’s out of reach.

Let's say it's a young cook and it's their first knife and they say I'm just gonna go with something commercial like how would you advise them today in terms of how to pick a knife?

I actually do this all the time.

People always ask me, you know, because of course, not everybody can spend four or five hundred bucks on a knife.

I always tell people if it's your first knife and you have, you know, a decent budget, even just like, you know, fifty to a hundred bucks, you can get some pretty good Japanese knives from that. I always tell people to look for Japanese knives because they're thin on the average, much thinner than like a Wusthof or a Henckels or something like that.

What about sharpening? I've always been a guy who likes to do stuff myself. I like to usually take things into my own hands in general. But also, when it comes to knives, if it’s a knife I don’t care too much about I'm just going to go to Northwestern and have those guys do it on the grinder. Or, if it’s a knife I do care about, I'm going to have them hand sharpen it rather than the grinder. But also it feels like maybe I should do it myself. Is that true? Can a normal person do it? How would you advise people about that?

So that's a great question. It's kind of difficult to advise people what they should or shouldn't do. In my opinion, if you are not interested in taking care of your own knives, it's totally 100% okay to take it to a professional knife shop. But, also there’s a lot of great YouTube videos out there, and you can absolutely learn how to do it. You should practice on cheap knives first. Don’t use a knife you love. Also carbon fiber gives you a lot more feedback than a stainless steel knife, so start with those.

As somebody who doesn't know anything about knives, and remember we started talking about how if something looks cool that matters, the thing I'm of course aware of is the Damascus look and that whole kind of like ripple effect, which I know you've been doing some stuff with.

I think what everybody knows is it looks cool. I guess the question is what does that do? Anything or is it just about aesthetic. Also maybe at a high level like how is the Damascus look achieved?

Yeah, it is cool. I should mention there's an article, a pretty big spread in the Chicago magazine that I think is coming up today about me making Damascus knife. So there's in detail how it's done literally in the magazine.

So basically when it comes to Damascus, for example, I would say it's 98% about aesthetics. There are a few people that could make an argument that there's a performance boost with Damascus because basically you've got two different kinds of steel. So when you sharpen it, those two steels sharpen slightly different.

So you'll end up with a kind of a very fine toothy edge, which is really good for certain foods like if I'm cutting a tomato or a pepper.

So most of it is aesthetic. That being said, as you know, looking cool is half the battle.

As far as making it, you know, if anybody who's reading this knows anything about making like laminated pastries, croissants or whatnot, it's kind of similar. So I'm taking two different kinds of steel and what I'm doing is I'm just stacking them up and then smushing them together. So if I take one steel that always stays bright and then one steel that will get really dark, that how you get the effect.

There’s this way of making a knife called San Mai I like to do stainless steel outside of carbon steel because I think that kind of gives you a little bit of the best of both worlds. You know, you get a little bit of that stain resistance where you don't have to worry about your knife staying wet or cutting a lemon or something, but you get a carbon steel edge, so you kind of get the best of both worlds. So in that case, I do think there might be a little bit of a performance boost.

San Mai, that’s like a Japanese concept?

Yep, definitely. And they did it historically because they had a small amount of really good material and lots of not so good material. So they would just put the really good stuff on the inside and then kind of the less high quality stuff on the outside. And it makes a lot of sense, so I'm a big fan of that. I don't know when it started. It's been around for a really long time.

I guess knives have been made since the beginning of time, do we even know when Damascus was a concept?

Yeah it’s been forever. I mean, there's museums all over the world that have what they might call real Damascus. But basically what we're making today is actually technically considered pattern steel.

So I know you've said you like Japanese knives for the feel and stuff like that. Do you feel like that's where some of the best knife making in the world is happening?

Yeah, I definitely think so.

You know, there's great knife makers all over the world, but you know, Japan, with a lot of those things, I think part of their culture is kind of taking a skill or a craft and just doing it until you're absolutely amazing at it, like a master.

And so there's still masters of knife making or steel making in Japan today that are kind of using the same techniques that used a long time ago

I used to start my knife making classes by saying the knife is the second oldest tool in history. The first was the hammer that they used to make a stone knife. So after two million years of making tools, you know, this is kind of what we've decided works really well. So there's a reason that these processes are relatively unchanged for at least the last thousand years. And in Japan, it's really unchanged.

They've made kind of no concessions to what other people think a knife should be. I mean they've certainly made a few but like for example a santoku is not a historical knife but people still use them all over today. But you know those knives are great for a reason so I just kind of stick with what people have been doing really well for a long time.

Are there like big folks or followed people in the knife world like there are with chefs?

When I started, the guy that I took a class with, Isaiah Schroeder, I took a class with him not only because he offered them, which not everybody does, but because I really liked his work.

And since then, I've actually taken a bunch of different classes with different people. And everybody kind of has a thing.

What are the bifurcations or silos in the knife world? Is it like Japanese versus German or…?

Yeah, even more specialized than that.

You can learn how to make really intricate Damascus patterns.

You can learn things like frame handle knives, which are a pretty traditional style of knife.

You can certainly make different types of knives.

You know, a sword is different from a knife. Not that I would ever kind of venture down that road, but I think a lot of what I'm interested in learning has to do with well different techniques in forging.

And then you know there's so many different types of handle techniques, and I'm actually pretty interested in that as well And there's a there's something called the American Bladesmith Society and they have like requirements for becoming a journeyman smith and a master smith and a lot of them have to do with not just the blade, but the handle as well.

But yeah, there's just a million different ways to go with it. I guess I don't have a specific great answer for you.

No, that's fine. Obviously I brought up a guy that I feel like if there's anybody who has gone mainstream in knives, it's probably Bob Kramer. Is he just famous because he kind of got that Anthony Bourdain nod, or is he well respected?

He’s super well respected. I'm trying to think of what an equivalent would be in the chef world. You know, you could almost say like a Thomas Keller type.

You would never go work with Thomas Keller. You might work for a guy that worked for him and he's got a small kind of family tree like that.

But Bob Kramer is not just well respected because he makes some of the most insane, crazy, badass knives, but because his business is so successful. And similar to cooking like once you get into this you know how difficult it is to make a living doing it right.

There's so much time. There's so much material cost and the fact that he has been able to do this for a couple of decades now and has a commercial line and and he's now able to make these just insane one-offs, they're selling for like 50 grand right so that's part of the respect for him as well as just like how much he's furthered the least popular, maybe one of the least popular types of knives out there. Believe it or not a chef’s knife is not that popular. If you go to a knife show, it's mostly hunting knives and folding knives and things like that. Yeah, there's all ninja knives and throwing stars and weird swords.

I know you said you weren't going to do a sword. I was actually thinking about that. Has anybody requested, like, hey, can you do a crazy sword or something?

Definitely. I get so many people who are like, hey, I'd like a custom knife. I'm like, sure, what are you thinking? They'll send me a picture of some anime knife or something like that. I'm like, uh, you know, I understand, this is cool, but it's just not my style.

Is this your full time gig now?

I'm pretty full time at this point. I still do some private cooking events and I still do classes and I'm thinking about getting more into teaching classes pretty soon here, especially now that I have a bigger space that I can do them. But there's nothing on the docket yet for that.

But yeah, I mean, I still teach classes both privately and at a couple different places around Evanston and Chicago.

People do private events and ask me to help out and I usually jump in because I love cooking still.

So I know you sometimes put some open stock stuff on the website, but I'm guessing you do a lot of custom work. Like what's that like 70/30, 50/50?

Probably 70-30 custom to spec. Yeah, and I like doing both. I like doing the spec quite a bit because that's kind of when I get to just try weird stuff that nobody would ever ask me for because they just don't know that it's an option.

The thing I saw that made me call you was the black and pink kind of three knife set.

This is the set that made me want to interview Sam.

Tell me about that. Is that a weird process or like what's going on there?

Yeah, so that particular steel I didn't actually make. It’s copper embeded in carbon steel. I bought that bar a while ago for one project but I had so much left over and it's pretty expensive so I just wanted to try something out with it.

If you just imagine, when you get the bar, it's literally just a two inch by four foot bar of steel. It doesn't look like anything, but as you kind of grind into those layers, you're exposing more of the copper and more of the core steel. And then the process of making that pop is you actually have to dunk it in what we call etchants, which is like ferric chloride. It's basically a strong salt that turns acidic when it's in contact with metal.

So that's how you get like that wavy look and you can see like the Damascus on there and then from there I actually dip it into the most disgustingly disgusting strong coffee you've ever seen in your life and you let it soak overnight and the coffee is slightly acidic and really dark and it just turns the whole thing black except for the copper.

And when you say coffee, is it literally coffee or you're just using that as a metaphor?

No, it's literally coffee. It only works with the worst coffee you can imagine so i got like a big like, uh, I forget how many, it's like a 12 ounce can of Nescafe espresso like the darkest of the dark grossest coffee that I personally wouldn't really have and I mix it. That whole can gets like a a quart of water or maybe two quarts of water so it's you know a drop of that would pretty much make you bounce off the walls but it's nasty stuff.

That's how you get it to be a nice even black?

Yeah, exactly.

So what's the custom process like? Somebody calls you and says I have an idea. Does it take months?

Yeah it used to take a really long time. I actually have started giving people less choices because I spend so much time emailing back and forth, but generally the way it starts is somebody either emails me from my website or gets in touch through Instagram and they tell me some of the things they're thinking about.

The questions I always ask are what size, what style? So a chef's knife or an akiri or a paring knife or whatever.

And then I kind of give them some options on do you like Damascus? Do you like san mai? Do you like straight carbon steel or stainless steel so they can kind of choose from those four.

And then from there we kind of talk about handle materials and that's so difficult because I have literally hundreds of different kinds of handle materials in my shop.

So I generally tell people to go through my Instagram or my website and pick out a few that catch their eye.

Yeah I see sometimes you do wood but sometimes you also do clay with the handles too right?

Yeah I do a lot of carbon fiber and I use metal brass and copper and nickel silver and this stuff that's called G10 which is similar to carbon fiber. I don't necessarily have a preference. I like a lot of different things. I'm working on a knife right now that's got I think 14 different layers of material on it that's on the handle.

Is there like a big knife collector world?

Yeah there's guys I know that have thousands of knives There's a couple guys in Chicago that have that kind of a collection. I used to get really into trying to see what I could get as far as really cool knives. I'm a little bit burnt out a bit at this point.

Honestly, if I brought home another knife, my wife would be like, are you kidding me?

I’m not an expert on knives or whatever, but I collect vinyl. I collect sports cards, little things. I love antiques. Is there, in the knife world, I mean, obviously it's been around so long, there's probably a lot of answers to this, but is there like a Rolex of knives that people collect?

So, obviously, a Bob Kramer is the biggest name.

So there's kind of two camps, there's the custom knife making collectors and there's the Japanese knife making collectors.

I've kind of forgotten quite a bit about the Japanese knives.

There's a couple of big name makers that are like master knife makers in Japan that are, you know, as soon as one comes up for sale, everybody jumps on it and they go for thousands of dollars.

And then yeah there's I wouldn't say there's like a necessarily a Rolex other than like a Bob Kramer but there are people who collect specifically master smiths because there's only about 130 master smiths in the world and so those guys come up. Any master smith is pretty collectible. There are people that collect specific types of steel.

I think when people think about sports cards, people always talk about like the the Honus Wagner or like the 1952 Mantle. I think everybody goes in their own little lanes and stuff, but it is there like a knife that people talk about historically or knives that everybody says oh god that's like the one.

There's not one that I know of that's kind of like that. I mean there’s the one Kramer did for Bourdain, that’s gotta be up there.

The collecting world can get interesting. It's just, as you can imagine

Yeah, there's probably some pretty weird people in the knife world?

For sure. And they're not always the most savory folks, so I don't really kind of keep up on that kind of stuff too much. But I would bet that there are people that collect, you know, hunting knives and Bowie knives and stuff like that that I just don't know about.

So how many knives a year are you making right now?

Oh, jeez. I would say right now I'm probably making maybe somewhere between 70 and 90, I would guess. Maybe a little bit less than that. It depends on a lot of factors, but I would say that's probably about there.

How are you thinking about where you're at and where you want to be? What's kind of the goal or the next phase for you?

Yeah, so I'm really close to the plan that I kind of laid out for myself about five years ago. So I'm actually doing pretty much what I want to be doing. I need to up my price point quite a bit.

You know, I was selling monosteel knives with pretty cool handles for the 350 to 450 range before, but with Damascus and san mais and the other materials that I'm using, I'm hoping to make that at least double in the near future.

And you know, I'd like to be somebody who's kind of collected or well known in the industry.

I actually have a guy that has joined my shop. He doesn't work for me. We work with each other. And he works in my shop now. He's extremely talented at forging and making Damascus and stuff like that. And he's got a really artistic mind for it.So it's nice to have somebody like that in the shop who can kind of inspire you in a different way. So I like making the knives even more custom, a little bit more artistic, having a little bit more off the wall ideas.

How long did it take you when you put that five year plan to say, okay I'm kind of in a place where I feel this is my full time thing. Was it two, three years?

I would say about three years into that five year plan.

That would have been like 2020?

Yeah 2019 to probably 2021 was when we were doing all that stuff and then 2021 to now is when I think I'm kind of more full-time.

Were people buying knives from you during the pandemic like they were buying everything else?

Yeah, when the pandemic hit, a lot of people were at home cooking and my demographic shifted from restaurant people that I knew to, to be honest, like a lot of, a lot of women really, for whatever reason, were at home and they kind of weren't working, so they had time. You know, to get into homes is kind of a big deal as well. So, I was pretty happy about that.

You doing any retail? Like Northwestern Cutlery or locally?

No, Northwestern Cutlery doesn't really ever carry any custom stuff. They kind of have their thing and they stick to it.

There's a couple of shops that have gone out of business since they were selling. There was a knife store in Sacramento that was pretty well known that was selling my stuff for a little while. And now, Northside Cutlery. I don't know if you've been in there yet, but it's in Lincoln Square.

I'll have to check it out.

Yeah, that's a great shop. The guy who owns it is named Kevin Silverman. And he's kind of started like to become a hub for custom knife makers in the Midwest. So a lot of guys sell through there and he sells a lot of really interesting stuff.

He's industry, he worked at Boka and a couple other places. So he kind of knows chefs pretty well, whereas Northwestern Cutlery, especially since they've moved, they don't really deal with chefs the same way, I think.

I see you're doing some collabs with chefs who are about to open. Jake Potashnick of Feld has talked about you online.

Yeah, so I'm making probably a knife for his restaurant.

Serveware or also like the kitchen staff knives?

Not the kitchen staff knives. The table knives.

I’m also doing some stuff with Dylan Trotter, Charlie Trotter’s son.

I was lucky to be a part of that Trotter's 10 year anniversary dinner event thing, which is actually where I met him.

I got him to do a couple of knives and put the Trotter logo on them. One of them is going to kind of look like that creamy red interior of Trotter’s So, it's going to be pretty cool. I like that he is not afraid of a loud knife.

How does it feel to achieve your dream?

It actually feels really good. One of the reasons I got into this was because I kind of wanted to stay restaurant adjacent.

I didn't necessarily want to be in that world, but I like to kind of come in and out of it.

And this is great for that because I can still talk to chefs. I can still get their feedback.

And then the other thing that's what I love about it is that I can be creative and cooking is so creative at times, you know, within certain parameters, but the longevity of what you've created is however long it takes for me to eat it. Whereas a knife can be passed down, as long as people take care of them, from generation to generation.

And so I just, I love what I'm doing right now. I love the ability to be creative. I love the ability to just kind of talk to both chefs and home cooks. So I'm right where I want to be.

You can find Goldbroch’s shop here. His Instagram gallery is also cool as heck.

The Hunger

Blade Runner

A conversation with Chicago's Custom Knife Maker, Sam Goldbroch

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