Steak Knives

Work out the covers at your busiest sitting, multiply by the number of turns the room does, then add a third. If forty steaks go out on a Saturday night across two turns, eighty is the working number and around a hundred and ten is what to own. The extra covers the ones in the wash, the ones that have gone missing and the ones that turn up bent.

Packs of twelve suit a small dining room and let you build the number up slowly. A sixty pack is the buy for a function room, a pub bistro or a caterer, and the price per knife is a lot better at that quantity. Whatever you buy, keep them all the same pattern, because a table set with two different knives is obvious to the customer.

Serrated is the practical choice for most venues. The teeth bite through a seared crust and through gristle without any pressure from the customer, and the knife keeps working for years without ever being sharpened. The cut is slightly rougher, which nobody notices on a steak.

A plain edge gives a cleaner cut and looks more considered on the table, so it belongs in fine dining. It also blunts quickly, because every cut ends on a hard plate, and it has to be sharpened to stay worth having. If nobody in the kitchen is going to sharpen forty knives on a schedule, buy serrated.

Not in any way that's worth the labour. The teeth are ground on one side and each scallop would need doing individually with a tapered rod, and a pull-through sharpener just flattens the points off and ruins the knife. Serrated table knives are treated as a consumable.

What you can do is make them last. Keep them off the floor, don't let them get scraped along a plate stack, and take the bent and blackened ones out of service rather than letting them go back on the table. Replace in whole packs so the setting stays consistent.

ABS and one-piece stainless will, indefinitely. Wood effect handles are moulded plastic and go through the machine as well, which is the whole reason that pattern is made. Real timber and rosewood handles will not last — the wash dries the timber out, water gets in around the rivets and the scales split or loosen inside a season.

Wash timber handles by hand and dry them immediately. Whatever the handle, don't leave knives soaking in a tub or sitting wet in a rack overnight. Stainless blades spot and eventually pit if they're left damp, and the marks won't polish out once they've set in.

Rounded tips are the safer choice for a general dining room. They don't spear a tablecloth or a napkin, they're less alarming on a table with children at it, and they cut a steak perfectly well because the work is done by the edge, not the point.

A pointed tip suits a steakhouse or a room where the knife is part of the presentation, and it's slightly better for picking meat off a bone or a rib. It also makes the knives more of a handling risk for staff clearing plates at speed, so give the wash-up a proper container to drop them into.

ABS is the workhorse. It's dishwasher safe, it doesn't absorb anything, it doesn't split, and a riveted ABS handle looks sharp on a black-and-white table setting. Wood effect gives the warmer look of timber with the same wash-and-forget behaviour.

Real timber and rosewood look and feel better in the hand, and they suit a room where the table setting is part of the price of the meal. They cost more to own, because they need hand washing and they get replaced sooner. They're worth it where the presentation justifies the extra labour at the wash-up.

A standard table knife handles most cuts. For a large rump, a tomahawk, a rib on the bone or a shared board, a jumbo knife with a 250mm overall length gives more blade to work with and more handle to hold, and it looks proportionate next to a big plate.

Venues that run both usually keep the jumbo knives for the larger cuts and the standard knives for everything else, which also stops the big ones disappearing into general service. If the menu is mostly big cuts, make the jumbo the standard and don't split the setting.

Only if the rest of the table setting justifies it. A matching steak fork is heavier and more substantial than the standard fork in a cutlery setting, and on a steakhouse table it looks right beside the knife. Olympia offers forks in a wood effect handle to match the knives in a twelve pack.

Plenty of good venues put a steak knife out with their standard fork and nobody thinks twice. If your existing cutlery is light or a different finish, the mismatch shows up next to a heavy knife, and that's the case for buying the pair.

Knives that cut in the kitchen before they reach the table. Chef knives covers the cooks, boning and carving knives for portioning and trimming, and a sharp carving knife on the pass makes a bigger difference to a steak than the table knife does.

Then storage and the setting. Cutlery storage covers the trays and boxes that keep knives sorted and off the bench, and crockery covers the plates and boards the steak goes out on. Buy a container for the wash-up to drop knives into, so nobody reaches into a sink and finds one.