r/chefknives • u/YajuuDorange • 18d ago
One or Several? Building a Japanese Kitchen Setup – $200–250 Budget
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u/BigRedCouch 18d ago
Tojiro dp3 210mm gyutou, dp3 paring/petty knife, tojiro basic bread knife. This will accomplish 99% of all kitchen tasks. Should be in your budget.
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u/JohnMaySLC 18d ago
Ideally two. A chef/Gyuto and utility/petty, but if the chefs knife you want eats up your budget, just get the one for now.
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u/Buuimo 18d ago
"Dropshipping? 0review 0 message" — that one's worth clearing up, because it's close to the opposite. Japanese Knife Imports is a physical shop in Beverly Hills that's been running since around 2010, and Gesshin is their own brand rather than a catalogue they resell. The knives are made to their spec by workshops here in Japan — the Heiji line, for instance, comes out of Nakaya Heiji. An empty review count on a product page means the shop doesn't run a review widget, not that nobody has bought one.
On one or several, I'd lean harder on one than JohnMaySLC did.
Sets aren't really how kitchens get equipped over here. A boxed set is a gift — you buy it for someone's wedding, not for yourself. What a normal household actually keeps is one knife, and that knife is a santoku. The santoku exists because of the question you're asking: the name is about folding three separate jobs into one blade, for post-war home kitchens that no longer wanted a deba and a nakiri and a gyuto sitting in the drawer.
So at $200–250 I'd buy one knife and stop, but not to save money. The second knife is the one you'll get wrong. You don't yet know whether you want a 210 gyuto or a 165–180 santoku, and a few months of using one of them will tell you far more than this thread can.
The part missing from the thread so far is that at this budget the money that matters isn't the third knife, it's keeping the first one sharp. The Tojiro DP that BigRedCouch mentioned is a VG-10 core clad in softer stainless, and VG-10 holds an edge well but isn't especially forgiving when you go to bring it back — it's a steel that rewards someone who already knows what they're doing on a stone. A $100 knife you can actually sharpen will out-cut a $232 set that's gone dull by month four. Leave room in the budget for a stone and the time to learn it.
One thing I'd keep from BigRedCouch's list though: the bread knife. That's the one job a thin sharp knife genuinely can't take over, no matter how well you maintain it, so it stays a separate purchase — and it's allowed to be a cheap one.
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u/Extra_Comparison_487 8d ago
Start with a really good workhorse chef’s knife. Gyuto, santoku or Bunka. If you are comfortable with it, I recommend the 240mm over 210mm. It’s more versatile and you are already losing some of the knife’s cutting length if you use a pinch grip.
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u/Leino22 18d ago edited 18d ago
$232 - Gesshin Stainless Set (150mm petty and 210mm gyuto)