Kitchen knives are simple tools, right? Just a blade with a handle. For bladesmith Dereyk Patterson, it’s not so straightforward.
Where normal mortals see a tool for turning bok choy and scallions into a stir-fry, Patterson sees a sculpture whose beauty is in service of its function. The knives he makes feel good in the hand, so precisely weighted they balance on a finger. They are sharp, with a tendency to stay that way. When you cut a tomato with one of his ever-so-slightly concave knives, the slices magically fall from the knife to your cutting board, never sticking to the blade.
The price for this artisanship is high, but it makes using Patterson’s handcrafted tools a better experience than the knives you are using now — and gives them a higher purpose.
The kid who took his toys apart
Patterson’s obsessions started early. “When I was a kid, I would get a present like a walkie-talkie and within a week, I was tearing it apart to see how it worked,” he recalls.
He grew up in Venezuela in a wealthy and complicated family. “We were the 1%. We had a helicopter, we were on yachts,” he says. “My mom was a model, she married an advertising executive, remarried, and moved to Venezuela… I was seven years old.”
With no American schools nearby, Patterson went to a Spanish-speaking private boys’ school and Spanish became his first language. In the middle of his senior year of high school, he moved to Garrison, N.Y., a culture shock that he still feels five decades later.
“I still see the U.S. as a different culture,” he says.
Patterson joined the United States Army in 1984, hoping to become a helicopter pilot like his stepfather, who owned the helicopter company Heliflight. But flight school didn’t work out, so he left the Army after his two-year service was up and tried college for a semester.
He moved to Massachusetts in 1999, listening to his inner urge to work with his hands, and became a member of the Water Street Furniture Studio, a co-op. Self-taught, he become a skilled and sought-after cabinetmaker. In 2006, he moved to the East End of Long Island and started a business doing high-end cabinetry for wealthy clients.
One of Patterson’s first cabinetry jobs in East Hampton was doing a kitchen for a client who then hired him to finish the entire house inside and out. “I knew nothing about landscaping, so I went to The Bayberry in Amagansett in search of $200,000 of plants,” he says.
It was there that he met landscape designer Paige St. John and fell in love. A year later, he opened his cabinetry shop in East Hampton during a recession.
“It was kind of scary,” Patterson says. “Finding space was very hard, but I made it.”
Patterson and St. John married in 2008 and live in East Hampton with their two dachshunds, Hamilton and Pablo, and have a garden that has been described as something out of “Alice in Wonderland.” They came into possession of a 19th-century whaling captain’s house in Sag Harbor, have spent the last two-and-a-half years restoring it with near-maniacal attention to historical accuracy and architectural detail, and plan to move in when it’s finished.
The nine-fingered lunatic deconstructs the knife
“How do you properly sharpen a knife? That’s the way it started,” Patterson says. “I was never able to get a knife properly sharpened, so I bought a sharpening system and I fell down the rabbit hole. I’m a craftsman, I have that brain.”
In 2016, Patterson made his first knife and took it to Almond, the Bridgehampton restaurant where he and St. John-Patterson were regulars. Jeremy Blutstein, now executive chef at Mavericks in Montauk, was chef de cuisine at the time.
Blutstein remembers a man with nine fingers (as it turned out, from a carpentry accident, not a knife) walked into the kitchen unannounced, holding a kitchen knife, and said, “Are you the asshole who made the food great here?”
Blutstein said he was.
“Cool. I’m an asshole too. I made this knife, and I want you to tell me what you think of it.”
Blutstein agreed. He used Patterson’s knife for about a week, but the handle came loose and it wouldn’t hold a sharp edge. When Patterson returned, Blutstein told him the knife was garbage. His feedback: the edge rolled and it wasn’t tempered correctly. Patterson told Blutstein to screw himself. Blutstein returned the compliment, and a week later Patterson returned with a new knife.
“He’s a Renaissance man, a self-taught genius,” says Blutstein. “The knife was perfect.”
A cut above
There was a time when high-carbon steel was considered the best material for knives, but advances in materials science have produced stainless steel that holds an edge, resists staining and is flexible enough for the finest knives.
Patterson makes knives from stainless steel and high-carbon steel, but he has greatest affection for stainless steel layered with copper, or forge-welded with a stainless-steel jacket. “We have to heat-treat the stainless steel,” he says. “It has a soft jacket. That’s what the Japanese did with their swords. Hard steel around soft steel.”
He works with Damascus steel, a high-carbon steel that is especially strong, can be honed to a razor-like edge and shows beautiful wavy and mottled patterns as the knife is ground. He often sculpts a rounded edge on the spine of the knife, which makes it more pleasurable to use, and tapers the handles to reduce weight, improve the balance and produce a sensuous, curvy thing that’s fun to hold.
The precision and artistry that Patterson puts into the design of his knives results in a beauty that is deeper because it is in the service of function. His knives are not just pleasing to look at; their utilitarian beauty is something you feel with every onion you slice.
Getting a handle on it
Because a sharp blade must have an equally sharp handle, Patterson sources a variety of materials, from Bakelite (one of the first plastics, developed in the early 20th century) to very hard or rare woods such as Ironwood, Honduras Rosewood burl and New Zealand Huon pine.
Fallen wood, found by the side of an East End road, is also fair game.
“Look at the grain on this maple that fell,” he says, showing off his collection of handle materials. If he fancies a piece of wood that’s too soft for a knife handle, he sends it out to be stabilized using a heating and compression process. Whatever material he chooses he attaches to the tang, the extension of the blade that is the base of the handle.
When Patterson designs the bolsters (the part of the knife between the handle and the knife blade) and rivets (which connect the two sides of the handle to the tang), he might use an antique poker chip, a piece of something pearly, multiple layers of compressed paper or mosaic steel rivets. Blocks of tiger-eye maple and horn are scattered across the worktables of Patterson’s fabrication shop in East Hampton like precious stones in a Diamond District jewelry shop; the makings of his ornamented, gemlike handles.
“If you are going to swim the channel, don’t stop halfway.”
The only way Patterson knows to make a knife is the hard way. Not a man to cut corners or compromise, he says his family’s motto is, “If you are going to swim the channel, don’t stop halfway.”
With a maximum output of about two knives a day, there are only a few lucky chefs and private clients who have purchased Patterson’s knives. Prices start at about $1,200 for a chef’s knife and quickly climb depending on materials.
He loves to make knives for his friends, and Reed Karen, a building inspector on Shelter Island and master cabinet maker, is one such friend.
“We met because we were both loudmouth woodworkers,” Karen says. “I went the traditional apprentice route; Dereyk taught himself woodwork.”
The knife Patterson made for him has a redwood burl handle and a differentially heat-treated blade that undulates as Karen angles it in the light. He won’t use it for everyday cooking, he confesses, for fear of spoiling it.
Blutstein says his Patterson knives are in regular rotation in the kitchen at Mavericks.
“The best thing about getting a knife from Dereyk is that Dereyk becomes a friend,” he says.
A friend who’s honed a talent that’s taken on a storied status for the simultaneous beauty and functionality of his one-of-a-kind kitchen treasures. His craft, Patterson says, embodies the Italian notion of sprezzatura — a way of making something appear simple and natural, almost effortless, when it is really very complicated.
“Steel is organic, it comes out of the ground. I like to make things that are simple,” Patterson says, adding with a smirk: “I like people to take something of mine and say, how did he do that?”
