Do You Need a Barbecue Knife?

A while back at my favorite kitchen-gear trade show, I spotted what appeared to be a trending category: barbecue knives. Their distinguishing characteristics seem to be a fairly tall blade, a shape that encourages a wokka-wokka–style rocking motion, and a target audience that skews heavily toward dudes with beards. Not all of those traits scream “great for grilling,” but I was intrigued.

One question immediately stuck in my head: What, if anything, makes a knife grill-friendly? Those I’d come across certainly had a look that blended pirate cutlasses and samurai swords, along with Japanese kitchen knives and occasionally Chinese cleavers. Ads with Guy Fieri look-alikes who were “blown away” by this “radical design” quickly began crufting up my social media feeds.

I sent a note off to my trusted knife guy, Bob Tate, at Bozeman Knife Sharpening & Supply to get his take on barbecue knives. He had just sharpened one for a client and found that it “looked like a cross between something Attila the Hun would use in battle and a zombie slayer.” This one in particular struck him as the product of celebrity chefs and knife designers who needed to justify their existences.

He clearly couldn’t see the point, preferring to steer customers considering a set toward the famous trifecta of a chef’s knife, paring knife, and bread knife.

“I tell them they’ll be able to do 90 percent of everything they need to do and be way happier doing it ’cause they’ve got a superior product,” Tate says.

Charmed Knife

Though I didn’t smell a rat, something felt just a little bit made up about this knife style, so I called a couple of them in for testing. First to arrive was the eight-inch Messermeister Avanta Kendrick BBQ Knife, with a swashbuckler vibe, a curved spine (the top of the blade), a handle that continued that arc upward, and the sides of the blade painted black. (If you need even more macho than all that, check out the video.)

The knife is a bit blade-heavy, a style that is not my jam, but it felt good to wield. Messermeister is a well-respected brand among both pro chefs and home cooks. Chad Ward, author of An Edge In The Kitchen, calls one of Messermeister’s traditional nine-inch chef’s knives “just about perfect.” This led to a bit of confusion as I got chopping, when my reaction started at “what the?” and proceeded to “ouch!”

A few things became clear as I chopped my way through piles of onions, carrots, herbs, and meat. First, the upward handle angle had peculiar effects on the knife’s behavior. Imagine the grip you’d use on a “regular” knife, which is vaguely like shaking someone’s hand. Now watch what your hand needs to do to accommodate an upward handle angle. It gets awkward kind of quickly, right?