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News ..............................................3 Ad Index .......................................22 www.kitchenwarenews.com If You Can't Find It at Willey's Store, You Don't Really Need It Continued on PAGE 5 Continued on PAGE 8 Continued on PAGE 14 Continued on PAGE 20 BY MICAH CHEEK Jill Foucré, Owner of Marcel's Culinary Experience, has a tried- and-true strategy for last-minute gift sales. She has arranged the front of her store to be accessible to customers running in for a quick hostess gift or holiday item. "We do a ton of walking in and not knowing what [they're] looking for," says Foucré. "We have an array of products that cover an array of price points. If you come in and say, 'I want to do something super special,' we can cover that too." Marcel's specializes in arranging little collections of two or three items arranged by theme. A food Vita Craft, Kansas City's Cookware Secret product like artisan dried pasta or a spice blend can make a nice centerpiece for some small items. "I love really great quality food products, [like] a really nice olive oil. Not so much a bottle of wine, but something I would cook with. Something you wouldn't buy for yourself," says Foucré. "We also have things like salt boxes – we'll do that with a nice salt, or a mill. We have a lot of cocktail accessories, and we've got some really fantastic bitters that we can build into a cocktail thing." For folks who don't know what they are looking for, Foucre recommends having some go-to items to recommend. "One of the things we always tell our staff is, BY MICAH CHEEK There's a lot of mystique around the chef 's knife. The all-purpose blade is one of the great kitchen essentials, giving it the kind of notoriety that gets it tattooed on the arms of culinar y school students en masse. W ith this kind of mystique, it 's no wonder that kitchen knives are starting to blur the lines between tools and works of art. Chefs and home cooks alike are looking for knives that are as beautiful as they are sharp. Zack Worrell, Founder and Owner of Monolith Knives, is part of a community of creators of artfully crafted knives. "The [artisan] culinar y knife movement is only about 12 years old. The true leader of it is Bob Kramer. He went out and started doing this in the 1990s. He had worked in restaurants all his life, and he wanted a knife that was better than anything he could find," says Worrell. "I think the industr y is definitely on fire, GENERAL NEWS n Meyer 5 SMALL ELECTRICS n Blenders 21 PRODUCT REVIEW n Midea 13 THE KNIFE RACK n Wüsthof 20 BUYER'S GUIDE n Serveware 17 FOODIES FOCUS n Glodal Influences 15 TRADESHOW CALENDAR n Upcoming Shows 22 H o u s e w a r e s R e v i e w KITCHENWARE NEWS Bringing Beautiful, Functional Knives Into The Kitchen Assembling Quick Kitchen Gifts BY LORRIE BAUMANN The Willey's Store is as much a social and cultural hub for the small town of Greensboro, Vermont, as it is a countr y mercantile that stocks hardware and clothing as well as grocery staples and a selection of specialty foods that includes what Cheesemaker Mateo Kehler acknowledges as the best display of Jasper Hill cheeses in the countr y. The clothing, the hardware and the grocery staples appeal primarily to the community's 600-700 full-time residents, while the fancier food adds to the joy of a summer house on the lake for the thousands of vacationers who flood into Greensboro every year between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Rob W. Hurst is the fifth- generation storekeeper at the Willey's Store. "My grandmother was born in a room right above the cash registers," he says. His title has been President and Chairman of the Board since VOLUME 23, NUMBER 11 NOVEMBER 2017 n $7.00 BY ROBIN MATHER The seed of an idea hatched over a round of golf in 1939 has grown into a cookware manufacturing business that flourishes today in Kansas City, Kansas. Glen Slough, Eddie Durwachter and Win Cook, all direct cookware salesmen, weren't happy with their company 's opportunities. The trio decided to manufacture a superior product with better design, and Vita Craft was born. The budding company flourished with direct sales only, but in 1943 the company closed briefly because the war effort diverted the materials need to manufacture the cookware. When the War Production Board granted Vita Craft a license to resume making its products in 1945, the company was back in business and hasn't looked back since. From its beginnings as a direct-sale company, Vita Craft is now moving into the retail market with its own THE PANTRY: FRONTIER SOUPS SEE PAGE 19 GADGET OF THE MONTH: KÜCHENPROFI SEE PAGE 22 SMALL ELECTRICS: BLACK+DECKER SEE PAGE 21

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