Read This Before Taking Your Knives To Williams Sonoma
Anyone who has worked in a professional kitchen will tell you: A dull knife is a dangerous knife, and using one is one of the worst knife mistakes you can make. For safety (and also for precision and ease of use), it's imperative to sharpen your knives regularly. While honing, which is the process of running your knife along a long, hand-held steel rod called a honing steel, can help keep the edge sharp on your knife between sharpening sessions, it doesn't remove any actual metal from the blade, reports Allrecipes.
So, the only option for anyone who doesn't have a whetstone or other sharpening tool at home is to take their knives to a professional. As one Reddit user learned, Williams Sonoma may not have been the best place for the job. The user described dropping off their expensive Japanese knives at Williams Sonoma, and when they returned to pick them up, the metal of the blades was "mutilated." Commenters pointed out that though the knives weren't completely ruined, they were also improperly sharpened and should be repaired by a more knowledgeable professional. How could this have happened at a large company that touts professional knife-sharpening services?
Sharpeners are not one-knife-fits-all
While Redditors did not come to a full consensus about the Williams Sonoma customer's exact type of knife, many agreed that Japanese knives can require different types of care than Western-style knives (via Reddit). Many Japanese knives have a single-edge or single-bevel blade, which means they are only sharp on one edge of the knife, per Knives From Japan. In contrast, Western-style knives usually have a more symmetrical edge with the same sharpness on both sides.
What seems to have happened to the Reddit user's knives is that they were Japanese-style with a single edge, meaning one side is ground further than the other and should be further sharpened, but Williams Sonoma sharpened the knives as if they had had a symmetrical, 50/50 edge, altering the angle of the knives and possibly compromising their quality. As Sharpen-Up reports, this can be disastrous, saying, "The most important factor to look out for when choosing a sharpener for Japanese style knives is that you have control over which side of the blade you are sharpening. If the sharpener automatically sharpens both edges of the blade, you will clearly ruin your knife." Or, as one Reddit user put it, "TLDR: Sharpen your own knives."