People

RAW Portraits: Tomer Botner and Florentine Kitchen Knives

Mastering the ancient art of tool making

Photography by Nuria Val
Tomer Botner founded Florentine Kitchen Knives in 2012 in Tel Aviv. He had just graduated in industrial design and wanted to work on something that combined his passion for materials, shapes and object making with his love for cooking. Now based in Barcelona, he crafts unique high-quality kitchen knives that will change your life for the better, elevating your cooking abilities and motivating you to feed your loved ones.
RAW Portraits: Tomer Botner and Florentine Kitchen Knives
People

RAW Portraits: Tomer Botner and Florentine Kitchen Knives

Mastering the ancient art of tool making

Photography by Nuria Val
RAW Portraits: Tomer Botner and Florentine Kitchen Knives
Tomer Botner founded Florentine Kitchen Knives in 2012 in Tel Aviv. He had just graduated in industrial design and wanted to work on something that combined his passion for materials, shapes and object making with his love for cooking. Now based in Barcelona, he crafts unique high-quality kitchen knives that will change your life for the better, elevating your cooking abilities and motivating you to feed your loved ones.
ROWSE

1. Hi Tomer, could you tell us a bit about yourself? How did you first learn to make knives?

TOMER
I was born in Tel Aviv in 1981. I was always quite an artistic kid and loved to paint and make things and I come from a family that’s crazy about food. There was a lot of home cooking and taking pride in it and a lot of going to restaurants. As I got older, I got into the restaurant scene. Eventually, I decided to study product design. It was not a smooth ride, and it took me five years to graduate, but during my final year of school I decided to join my love of tools and cooking and make my final project about locally made culinary knives.

ROWSE

2. Why did you choose knives? What do you love the most about them?

TOMER
I was very cerebral about my choice, I did not expect anyone to hire me, so I decided that this project would be my life’s work. I chose knives for the love of cooking and the joy you feel when working with a well-made tool. In addition I took on the challenge of finding something that I could improve or innovate about a tool that’s existed for about 2 million years. I’m not 100% sure, but I think I managed to do that… At least my mother thinks so.

ROWSE

3. Florentine Kitchen Knives was born in Tel Aviv, how did you end up in Barcelona?

TOMER
My partner in life and business, Noam Blumenthal, and I got married in 2015 and thought that it was probably our last chance to try and live somewhere else for a long time, as we were planning on having kids. Also for my business, being in Israel was costly and difficult in terms of logistics, nothing I needed was made there and materials were hard to source. Noam lived here for a few months when she was younger and since I had never been to Barcelona before, I took her word for it and we just moved here and tried to figure it out. That was 8 years ago and we now have a family here and we feel at home.

ROWSE

4. FKK is actually a family business. How do you balance work, family and free time?

TOMER
Since both of us work at FKK there is no real balance but since we had our second child we have been more disciplined about at least sticking to a 9 to 5 routine. That’s not to say that we don’t work from home sometimes, emailing from one hand while trying to put a baby to sleep on the other hand but the weekends are just family time (except for when we have knife making workshops).

ROWSE

5. You describe your knives as a fusion between East and West, heavily inspired by your own heritage. Could you explain further?

TOMER
In terms of my personal cultural history, I’m middle eastern, and raised in Israel. My heritage is Egyptian on my mother’s side and Polish on my father’s side, one Arabic but also quite influenced by French colonialism and the other from the eastern European block. I grew up mostly in the Arabic/French/Jewish culture, which is an east and west mix in itself. When I began to explore knifemaking, I learned a lot from the Japanese way of doing things, but I also studied the history of knife and tool making in the Middle East and the cultures around. My hope is that our products end up reflecting where we are now but still reflect where we came from.

ROWSE

6. You have the words ‘hand’ and ‘made’ tattooed on your knuckles.

TOMER
To me it’s a reminder that there is value in doing things with your hands first. We do have plenty of help from technology these days but it’s important to not design and produce only on the screen or with machines and feel the product through your hands and go through trial and error with it. I see a lot of young designers today who miss this part because technology makes many things fast and easy that it’s hard to say no to it but there are some places that the screen or the printer could never take you, you’ll only end up there by using your hands and breaking some sweat.

ROWSE

7. Craftsmanship is also the result of a creative vision. What makes your knives different from all other knives?

TOMER
With all the modesty but with honesty, they are simply different, there are none like them. If you see them once, you know who’s knives they are and I got lucky to think of the idea and system of making them when I did. Over the years and through a lot of hard work, we developed a system to make them well and in larger quantities but increase our quality. I do believe that every day we make a better knife than the last day, we get better with experience. Our biggest differentiator is our design and the fact that we allow our customers expression of their personality and creativity and our knives reflect and enhance their joy of cooking.

ROWSE

8. FKK’s workshop is open to viewers. Do you think it is important to show how things are being made?

TOMER
These days it’s important to be able to create content so a workshop should be nice and inviting but with a product like the one we make, which is super tactile and often an emotional purchase it’s very important for some people to come and feel the knives and see them in person. Also we have nothing to hide and we gladly share our process for others to learn from but we have learned that you get what you give so being open with others results in us learning a lot in return.

ROWSE

9. As contemporary makers, what’s your role in preserving traditional techniques?

TOMER
I'm not sure that I have a decisive answer for it. I believe that we need to learn how to make everything ourselves so that we know which parts are important and which are not so we can translate it better to any production we choose. Even with the technological advances we are experiencing these days, there are still some things that cannot be done by an automated machine yet and can only be made by a skilled hand, but probably by the time I retire, it will be possible to make everything with technology. I see our roles as the ones who can say why we make things the way we do and which part of the process is important to achieve in which way. Our generation is probably the one that will be translating what can sometimes only be felt to an artificial intelligence that might replace us.

ROWSE

10. How can a knife make our life better?

TOMER
A good knife, that’s well taken care of, can completely change your cooking. It can elevate your abilities and motivate you to feed your loved ones - in the end, it can change your home life, your health, your creativity and of the ones around you.

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