Photograph by Martha Williams
I’ve been a home chef since my college years, when I’d whip up something semihomemade in my beige apartment kitchen and smile at my nascent gourmet efforts. In the 15 years since, my cooking skills have vastly improved (praise Ina!), and so have the tools in my kitchen. Which is why it’s embarrassing to admit that my knives are remarkably dull—I’ve been hacking at tomatoes with the same knife I used in college, and that knife was a hand-me-down. When I found out that Michael Behn, founder of Moshi Moshi Knife Sharpening, offers knife-sharpening classes in addition to his knife-sharpening services, I quickly signed up to take one.
During the pandemic, Behn became a darling among Atlanta’s professional and home chefs, who appreciated his boutique offerings. He first learned how to sharpen knives in 2012 while working at an Athens sushi restaurant, and continued to hone his skill as he worked in kitchens around Atlanta, including Gunshow and Georgia Boy. “It was always in the back of my mind that I could start a knife-sharpening business,” says Behn. After reaching a breaking point with restaurant kitchens, he founded Moshi Moshi in August 2020. “In the first weekend of sharpening knives, I was making more money compared to my chef job in which I had 10 years of experience,” he says. “A little depressing, but also a shining light.”
Behn’s lessons are $150 for a one-on-one, two-hour crash course in all things knife sharpening. When it was time for my class, I packed three knives—Behn recommends nonserrated knives, as they’re easier to sharpen—and took them to his red cottage in East Lake (though he now works out of a shop near Decatur, which he opened in late fall). Behn’s home studio, adjacent to the kitchen, is organized chaos filled with workstations, one topped with grinding wheels, another with whetstones, and one covered in magazine pages to test-slice the knives’ sharpness.
The next two hours were part dance class, part math class, part meditation. Standing with my right hip against the table and my left leg behind my right, I leaned over a whetstone that had been soaked in water. Behn guided me as I dragged my knife’s edge across the smooth surface. It’s a matter of precision and moving the knife at an angle that will actually sharpen it. I wasn’t exactly a fast learner, and when I half-joked that surely other students must struggle, too, Behn simply replied, “Comparison is never a good thing.” Eventually it clicked, and I got into a groove, unable to think of anything else but the diagonal motion of my knife on the stone, the metal shining as dull particles were scraped away.
Behn and I chatted about knives in between sharpening them. A sharp knife makes slicing and dicing easier, which in turn makes cooking more satisfying, he says. People get used to dull knives, but once they use a sharp one, “it’s a revelatory experience,” says Behn. “There are some people that are like, ‘Oh, I’ve never cut so much.’ And then they’ll use their knife for two weeks straight, and it gets dull again.” Of course, it helps to start with a high-quality knife. Behn suggests a Kikuichi (which he sells), a Japanese brand. Wüsthof knives are a solid choice, too.
At the end of the lesson, pride filled me as I deftly sliced through an octopus ripped out of National Geographic. “You can sharpen a knife now,” Behn told me. “That’s the case for all my students. It’s like I’m losing a client forever, but I’m teaching you every single thing I know.”
This article appears in our December 2024 issue.
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