OK, we covered the very (very) basics of knives in our first post. But professional chefs take knives to a whole ‘nother level. Here’s a New Yorker piece about a chef who got a custom-made knife case from Louis Vuitton. (On a side note, who knew there was such a thing as a trunk that unfolds into a shower?? Very French indeed.)

How Top Chefs Fly with Their Knives

Here’s a travel story that will send you back: Some years ago, Eric Ripert, the executive chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, was returning to New York from Washington, D.C., where he’d cooked for a charity event. He put his carry-on bag through the airport security scanner, and an alarm started beeping. “Oh,” Ripert recalled thinking. “My knives.” In his bag was a collection of knives that he’d used at the benefit—paring knives, and long fish knives that resemble machetes. Ripert tried to explain; the guards looked at him suspiciously. Fortunately, he was travelling with another chef, Jean-Louis Palladin, who produced a copy of the Washington Post with a photograph of the chefs at the benefit. “We all laughed, and that was it,” he said.

This was, obviously, before September 11, 2001. Now, Ripert said, he wouldn’t dare bring his knives in his carry-on. But he still has to travel. “Chefs don’t share their knives,” he said. “It’s part of the ABC of being a chef.” He usually folds them between layers of clothes and packs them in his suitcase. Ripert explained all this one day last fall in the Louis Vuitton store on East Fifty-seventh Street, where he’d come to work out the details for a custom-made knife suitcase. Louis Vuitton has a history of making special-order trunks: there was a trunk that transforms into a shower, and an iPod trunk commissioned by Karl Lagerfeld; a British lord had a trunk made for his special rubber ducky. Not long ago, Ripert said, he’d been summoned to the Vuitton store for a birthday party that Alicia Keys was throwing for her future husband, the hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz. She’d bought him a “fantastically magical” trunk that unfolds into a bed. Ripert cooked dinner for the guests in the store, on a rented stove, and then Ferraris ferried everyone to an after-party at the Guggenheim.