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Ostap Hel Whips up Chef Knife for Xin Cutlery

December 28, 2021

Bestech has tapped their frequent collaborator Ostap Hel for the XinCore Chef Knife, an affordable, but enthusiast-friendly kitchen knife from their subsidiary brand Xin Cutlery. Hel brought his love of clean visuals to the project and says that kitchen knives will be an ongoing part of his design work for the foreseeable future.

Hel is a prolific designer, but he tells us that when he started this project for Xin, it required some serious homework. “Designing a kitchen knife is a challenging process. I’m not a professional cook, so I had to carefully examine dozens of the most popular kitchen knives on the market before I started to draw my own,” he says. Once Hel put pen to paper, he created something that would appeal to a user very much like himself – an enthusiast who loves to use quality cutting implements. “I think it’s designed for every knife and EDC gear enthusiast. It’s meant for someone who likes doing their everyday cutting tasks in the kitchen with not just a well-performing, but also with a good looking tool.”

“When I finally figured out main utility requirements, bringing my distinct style and esthetic features to the design wasn’t that hard,” Hel continues. He found most of his room for expression on the G-10 handle scales, which are 3D-sculpted with hard, triangular facets that recall his folding knife work. Underneath Hel’s personal stamp, the Chef Knife’s bones are tried and true. Its 8.5-inch blade has the generous belly and center-aligned tip of the traditional Western kitchen knife, so most food prep chores are on the (figurative and literal) table here. 14C28N steel (in the standard model) provides the stain resistance you want in a kitchen knife; it also holds an edge reasonably well and touches up quickly with any sharpening set up.

Hel says that he wants to keep working in the kitchen knife field, and has more projects lined up. “All I can say for now is that other well-known knife manufacturers also placed their design orders for kitchen knife collaborations.” He also approves of the expanding interest, in the EDC enthusiast world, in quality kitchen cutlery. “If you think about it carefully, many EDC knife users do much more cutting work preparing their meals in their own kitchens with their actual kitchen knife then outside, cutting stuff with their favorite EDC folding blade.”

The XinCore Chef Knife comes in four flavors. You can get it with 14C28N, either with black scales and a satin blade, or with white scales and a black DLC blade. There are also two more models with Damascus-clad VG-10 blades – neither of these are coated, of course, but you can choose between white or black handle scales.

Knife in Featured Image: Xin Cutlery XinCore Chef Knife

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