The trunk weighed nine tonnes. Westminster Council donated the lot to Fallen and Felled, a small London mill that gives the city’s salvaged timber a second life rather than feeding it to the firewood pile. The boards have been drying with them ever since.
Four years later, that tree is the handle material on a set of four knives we have made to mark the hundredth birthday of Quo Vadis. Jeremy Lee MBE, the restaurant’s Chef Proprietor, worked with us to create his ideal set of workhorses.
Quo Vadis at one hundred
Quo Vadis sits at 26-29 Dean Street, in Soho. It has been there since 1926. Formerly a brothel, briefly the home of Karl Marx, now a restaurant and members’ club run by Sam Hart with Jeremy Lee in the kitchen. The grande dame of Dean Street, by their own description, and one of the great London restaurants by anyone else’s.
I have known Sam Hart for over thirty years and have followed his exploits in London’s culinary world ever since. To be asked to join the centenary frolics with a set of knives was a signal honour.
Jeremy Lee
Sam’s Chef Patron at Quo Vadis is Jeremy Lee MBE: tall, Scottish, encyclopaedic about ingredients, and one of those rare phenomena in the London food world – a chap everyone agrees is a good thing. His menus change daily and lean hard on regional British ingredients, which is the sort of cooking that requires knives that work properly.
Jeremy drew the initial sketches. We turned them into mock-ups, then prototypes, then refined the geometry to his hand. The set went through Jeremy’s kitchen before it went into anyone else’s. He wrote to us afterwards:
“Having long admired Savernake knives, it has been an honour and a pleasure to be part of a great adventure to design these four knives for the centenary of Quo Vadis. With handles made from a London Plane felled in Soho Square itself – but a hop, skip and a jump from Quo Vadis – Savernake have made something truly exceptional. The knives themselves are based on the workhorses used daily in the kitchen for all manner of preparations, as pleasing in the hand as they are to the eye. Effortlessly chopping and slicing all placed before them on a board. We’re chuffed to bits.”
The four knives
A 10cm paring knife, an 18cm nakiri, a 24cm carver, and a 27cm chef’s. The blades Jeremy reaches for most.
They are made in the traditional style – hand-thinned, immaculately finished, balanced for long service in a working kitchen. We couldn’t help ourselves and have given each one our concave grind, which sounds like a small thing but isn’t: it reduces drag through the cut and keeps the edge stable for longer. CATRA, the global authority on cutlery performance, rank our knives in the top 2.5% of all blades ever assessed for sharpness and edge retention.
The 27cm chef’s is the largest knife we have made in a long time. If you’re in the market for serious kit, it is the one to pick up first.
The wood
This is the bit that beggars belief somewhat. London Plane is the most common street tree in the city – the one with the camouflage bark, dropping leaves on the pavement every November. It is also, when stabilised properly, an exceptional handle material: lacewood figure, dense, takes a finish beautifully.
We sent the boards from Fallen and Felled up to our pal Henry in County Durham, who stabilises wood for a living. Stabilising means impregnating the cellular structure with resin under vacuum, which closes the grain, hardens the timber, and turns a relatively soft hardwood into something that will see out a working life in a kitchen. The result is a handle that is incredible to look at, comforting in the hand, and ultra-tough with it.
This set takes the very last of that tree’s milled boards. There won’t be more of these.
Each knife is engraved QV100 on the blade.
Available now
The set is available as a four, with or without a stand, or any of the knives individually. As ever, made to order in our workshop in Wiltshire, with a lifetime guarantee.
A hundred years of Quo Vadis. A hundred more, please.