The Knife Chef
Story by Quincy gray mcMichael | Photos by Mary Baldwin
Product Photography Courtesy of Jean-François Suteau
Imagine that perfect West Virginia summer evening: dusk rises, cutting loose the day’s last muggy gusts as lightning bugs flare up from the grass. The Greenbrier River wanders by in muted stillness. Near the backyard apple tree, a family of five gathers around a firepit, urging the coals to catch, the flames to reach.
Both a mile down the road and far across the Atlantic Ocean, in the Loire Valley—where Jean-François Suteau was born—the Covid-19 wildfire rages. But here, in this one backyard, around a homemade stacked-block firepit, a flicker of inspiration is about to ignite. Jean-François, also known as Executive Pastry Chef Suteau of The Greenbrier Resort, is minutes away from the type of epiphany that, perhaps, can only be born from the silent stirring of solitude, of sustained family time, of isolated months at home.
Maybe dinner was ribeye steaks on the grill. Maybe John Denver ‘s unforgettable tenor floats in the background. Maybe Jean-François’s wife, Magaly, points up at the night sky, urging all three children to gaze at the Milky Way. Maybe the fresh scent of grass hangs in the air alongside the fireflies. Maybe Jean-François replaced the blade on his lawnmower that afternoon and the old blade still sits near the firepit. Maybe, as they crowd around the fire, one of his sons lifts the blade and slides it into the growing pile of coals.
And this is when the idea first begins to burn. Someone grabs a blower to further enliven the fire; someone else finds a hammer. Once the old lawnmower blade glows orange, Jean-François and his son Jean-Marc begin to hammer the metal. Sparks shower and singe. Someone runs to get gloves and safety glasses. Even in its red-hot state, the steel blade yields little as father and son pummel its flank.
On that night, a new flavor of artistry began to kindle inside Jean-François. Perhaps his mind went back a decade, to the soaring chocolate sculpture that won him the title of 2013 U.S. Chocolate Master, topped with a fanciful, curved Laguiole blade. Perhaps Jean-François recalled the kinship he felt with the folding Opinel knife he carried in his pocket as a boy. Nonetheless, between turns with the hammer, as the stars blazed above and the sparks flared below, he caught a hint of that old-world craftsman feeling, “like we went back in time thousands of years.” Perhaps Jean-François even envisioned himself standing at some primeval forge—but, he laughs, he was still “very far away from making a knife.”
When I first meet Jean-François, I see a perfect, pleated chef’s hat, a white-starched jacket with his name embroidered on the lapel—exactly what anyone would expect of the man who’s helmed The Greenbrier’s pastry kitchen since 2011.
But, behind the wide, round lenses of his black and gold glasses, I see something else that I’d hoped—if not expected—to see: a pair of lively eyes. Artist’s eyes. The eyes of a man driven by curiosity. The eyes of a man who doesn’t chide his son for shoving an old steel blade into the fire but joins him in the dangerous play of making something new. The eyes of a man who, just a couple years after that evening at the firepit, will stay up well past midnight, locked in ‘the zone,’ obsessing over the finish of another stunning knife.
Whatever Chef Jean François creates, be it cake or a chocolate masterpiece, the work bears his signature, the stylistic mark of his artistry. He matches flavor with color and texture, leaning on the intuitive sense that’s become habit after thirty-seven years in a pastry kitchen. “I don’t use too many colors; I like to do a fade,” he says, explaining the process of creating a plated dessert. “Let’s say if it’s raspberry, I’m going to make a mousse—it’s going to be pinkish; the coulis is going to be more red, and so on. And with the knife, it works too.”
For Jean François the knifemaker, then, this same combination of instinct and decades of artistic practice inspires him to combine the rich purple-red hue of rosewood with a diagonal stripe of bright pink to create a carving knife that’s the perfect blend of traditional and radical. But, as Jean-François reiterates, “I’m just starting, I’m brand new. . . it’s just still a hobby.” At fifty-two, this gifted knifemaker is only getting started.
Think about where you keep your kitchen knives—in a knife block, on a magnetic rack, maybe loose in a drawer with a rat’s nest of whisks and ladles? What do your knives look like—are they stainless-steel shiny (probably), of high quality (maybe), as sharp as they should be (doubtful)?
Most of us squeak by without paying much attention to whether our knives are happy. We just chop and slice and toss them into the sink or dishwasher, same as salad tongs or measuring cups. But we are doing a disservice to our knives, our cooking, and ourselves.
On the second day of January, before I left my house to speak with Jean-François, I felt my knives calling to me. I keep a collection that spans well over a century, from ancient carbon steel given to me by my father, to turn-of-the-21st-century Wusthof from culinary school, to all the pieces I’ve collected in the intervening years—a French turning knife with a faded green handle; the little serrated Henckels I struggle with in lieu of a grapefruit knife.
That morning, I looked at each of my knives, picked some of them up to examine dull edges and memorable dings, and hefted heavy cleavers in my hand. When I walked out of my kitchen that day, I left a trio of old carbon steel knives on the counter. I haven’t used another knife since—and, now that I’ve met Jean-François, I may soon add a new one.
The knife is not a tool people associate with sweet preparations like crème patisserie or pâte sucrée—though you will want a knife for scraping your vanilla bean and trimming the edges of your tart shell before blind baking it. In our collective imagination, the chef de cuisine appears with knife in hand, ever-chopping, but we don’t think much about pastry chefs wielding knives. So how does a longtime pastry chef find a new calling as a knifemaker?
When I ask Jean-François what he thinks about this odd coupling, he laughs as he explains: “The irony of this is: pastry chefs are well known for having the worst knives ever.
None of their knives cut—except for mine, now. If Chef comes and tries to use our knives, [he’ll say] ‘what are you cutting with that? It’s not possible!’”
After that original adventure with the lawnmower blade, Jean-François kept experimenting. First, he forged enough steel to learn that he isn’t a metalsmith at heart, and that his shoulder is happier when he starts with a high-quality steel bar that he can cut to shape, bevel, and forge to temper. His artistic focus shifted to the wood—hardiness, grain pattern, beauty. He began looking for fallen branches along the Greenbrier River Trail, dragging them home to peel, split, and sand. When a plum tree in his yard began to fail, Jean-François tried his best to save it but now he’s making good use of the fallen wood.
Instagram serves as his showroom, a gallery where Jean-François displays not only his artistic arsenal but where he reveals the timeline of his creative endeavors. His earliest photos show raw, in-process steel and blades polished until they’ve become mirrors. Look for a thick Bowie-style knife with a handle of curly maple, along with four knives tailor-made for his family—chef’s knives for his wife and daughter, a pair of hunting knives for his boys.
Jean-François makes knives for the kitchen; he makes utility knives. He makes chef’s knives and boning knives and skinning knives and paring knives and slicers. He makes knives with handles of blue and red and green—the blonde maple and sycamore wood stabilized with rainbow resin. “I like the artistic part of it, I relate it to my job [as a pastry chef]. That’s what I really enjoy doing: different types of wood and so many possibilities. . . it’s a beautiful craft,” Jean-François says. His online gallery emphasizes his artistic eye, how he notices detail—and uses it. How he visualizes the way woodgrain will swim up a handle, or ribbon across a knife-butt in waves.
After work, Jean-François shines and sands for long hours in his garage and basement; he knows that artistic development takes time and dedication. “I used to spend all day in a kitchen playing with stuff, because that’s how you learn. Our craft is so complex; if you just do your eight hours it’s going to take you forty years—maybe.” And his dogged application of the lifelong skills he learned in pastry—the willingness to test and taste and try again—translates to an astounding level of mastery after not even three years as a knifemaker.
At first, Jean-François dedicated untold hours of work to shine each carbon steel blade mirror-clear—only to accept that “you use it once, cut a lemon with it, and that’s it—[the finish is] gone.” In response, he’s embraced the practice of pre-oxidization to burnish the blades of his knives, imitating the protective patina that forms after decades of use. “After I create the patina, you can cut a lemon and you won’t have a mark. You know, a little cloud but it’s protected,” he explains. These days, Jean-François also polishes the blades before he quenches to temper: as he perfects his craft, the steel is getting harder—and thus more difficult to bring to a shine post-quench.
Of course a pastry chef—who well understands the intricacies of chemical reactions between acid and base, wet and dry, fat and water—would gravitate toward a scientific remedy. Of course this same man would seal a knife with the tenderness he uses to peel leaves of white chocolate from parchment, feeling for shape as well as texture. Of course, when he wants to stabilize a sycamore handle with colored resin, his mind wanders to the small, unutilized Cryovac machine in his home kitchen, which proves a perfect solution. Of course Jean-François understands the power of temperature and time, how to forge steel to the perfect hardness by harnessing heat and cold—much the same way a chef tempers chocolate.
Can’t the pastry chef who peruses blueberries, lychees, honeydew melons before selecting the sweet hue of the moment be the same man as the knifemaker who wanders the River Trail after work, artist eye ever-keen for that just-fallen branch of curly maple, oak, wild cherry? When he plucks the broken wood from the ground, peels its back bark, doesn’t he use the same incisive, intuitive touch that he did that morning, standing over the day’s delivery of peaches, examining their heft and plump?
Like folding a croissant from scratch, or playing architect to a tower of chocolate, these knives are slow—by design. Every JF Knife is bespoke, handcrafted—a tool with a soul. Jean-François spends twenty hours crafting each knife before it is ready to find a home, and he keeps a list of eager customers.
But not everyone wants a knife that they need to care for, says Jean-François. “Carbon [steel] is kind of like driving a Ferrari. . . you’ll drive two hundred miles and then it’s going to the mechanic to check everything out. The carbon knife is exactly the same thing; as soon as you’re done with it you gotta dry it, put a little bit of oil [on it] once in a while.”
This ain’t wash ‘n’ wear polyester. It’s fine Irish linen, high-momme silk, virgin wool. You can’t throw this baby in the dishwasher—but you also may not want to. This knife can change your kitchen habits. This knife will beautify your cooking, both because of the precise slice of the high-carbon steel and the jewel-like geometry of Jean-François’s artistry. Just examine the decorative jimping along the spine. A knife like this can slow you down in all the right ways, make you more mindful as you chop. Who knows, the urgent intimacy of rinsing your knife clean and toweling it dry—right away, every time—of really caring for a possession, could change your life.
Imagine the end of an evening in The Greenbrier’s Main Dining Room. The lights are low against a background soundtrack of hushed conversation and tinkling cutlery. Only one course remains. When dessert arrives—whether a refined poire Belle Helene, fig cheesecake, or a sweet, fresh take on PB&J—its loveliness is immersive, but fleeting. The pleasure cannot be squirreled away, nibbled on for weeks or even days. Crème Chantilly will droop, sandy pastry crust will soften, that quenelle of sorbet will pool, a white bloom will spread across the surface of dark chocolate. The only way to preserve dessert is to savor, bite by bite.
Throughout his career as a pastry chef, Jean-François Suteau has dedicated himself to perfecting the art of ethereal, edible beauty. So, at the threshold of fifty, on that summer night around the firepit with his family, perhaps a creative shift was inevitable.
For decades, offering momentary satisfaction—a subtle pause with that first bite, the half-closed eyelid flutter as flavors urge tastebuds alive—had been enough. But crossing the half-century mark, Jean-François says, “made me want to leave something different than memories for my family and friends. . . something material.” A JF Knife is nothing if not tangible—a functional piece of art, meant to be held in the hand, to be used. A knife is a legacy that will last generations—”if they take care of it, keep it dry,” Jean-François reminds, with the smile of a man who understands impermanence.
Find JF Knife
Instagram: @jfknife
Facebook: Jean-François Suteau
Robert’s Antiques | downtown Lewisburg, WV
American Artisan | The Greenbrier
