Before I had Knife, I had Spoon, a restaurant devoted to fish. It’s appropriate then that the one personal cooking effect I always travel with—no, I don’t bother bringing my own knives on every trip—is a spoon. It comes in handy for many cooking tasks—from portioning spices and stirring sauces to skimming stocks, pan basting meats, and tasting dishes.
For me, there is one true chef’s spoon. It’s the Gray Kunz sauce spoon, and it’s become a cult tool for chefs. Gray was the founding chef of Lespinasse, one of New York’s groundbreaking fine-dining restaurants of the 1990s and a place where a number of renowned chefs of today learned their crafts. Starting in 1992, each new chef would be issued a special spoon. It had been designed by Kunz. The back of each spoon was stamped with a unique serial number and the station where the recipient worked. The numbers were recorded in a ledger, ensuring that found spoons could be returned to their owners along with heaping spoonfuls of humiliation for their carelessness. The spoons became such cult objects that Kunz began selling them to the public.
In a 2015 timeline of Lespinasse, Lucky Peach magazine had the following to say about the spoon: “Measuring exactly nine inches, it is a bridge between a larger cooking spoon and a small saucing spoon. It’s big enough to handle robust cooking tasks like basting, roasting, flipping meats, and stirring, but is still small enough and tapered at the tip, so it can be used for more delicate and precise tasks like saucing, making quenelles, and portioning.” It’s also deeper than most spoons—its bowl holds exactly 2.5 tablespoons. The sole vendor, JB Prince, still sells them for around twelve dollars each. You won’t regret owning one.