NAGOMI Professional
NAGOMI Professional
Left-handed kitchen knives, hand-finished in Seki. Only 30 made each month.
A four-knife collection from Mitsuboshi Cutlery, founded in 1873. Built from the start to do their best work in a left hand — not adapted from a right-handed design.
Why left-handed grinding actually matters.
Most "double-bevel" Japanese knives aren't actually fifty-fifty. The grind sits closer to sixty-forty or seventy-thirty, biased toward the right hand. It's the industry standard, and most makers don't talk about it.
If you're left-handed, you've probably felt it without naming it — slices sticking to the blade, food that won't release cleanly, the small daily friction of working around a tool that wasn't set up for you.
NAGOMI Professional knives are ground the other way. Built from the start to do their best work in a left hand. The Honesuki goes further still: a single-bevel blade, ground for the left hand only.
A left-handed cook shouldn't have to compensate for tools that weren't built for them. These knives are the version of that idea we're proudest of.
Made in Seki, by Mitsuboshi Cutlery since 1873.
Seki is a small city in Gifu prefecture, about an hour north of Nagoya. Blades have been made here for more than 800 years — first samurai swords, then, after the sword industry declined in the late nineteenth century, kitchen knives, scissors, and razors. The trade stayed in the city. It still does.
Mitsuboshi Cutlery was founded in Seki in 1873, more than 150 years ago, and has been making kitchen knives in this city ever since. NAGOMI Professional is the highest line they make: the knives they put their name on for cooks who want to cook seriously, day after day.
Each knife is hand-finished at the Mitsuboshi workshop by a small group of senior craftsmen. Hand-finished, in this case, isn't a marketing word. From the initial press to the final sharpening, every stage of the work — checking the bevel, adjusting the edge, refining the grind, examining the finish — is done by a craftsman's eye and hand, never left to a machine alone.
This is also why the line is small. Only thirty knives are made each month, across all four shapes combined. The number isn't a marketing decision — it's the workshop's actual monthly capacity when each blade is finished by hand to the standard the line is held to.
A hundred and fifty years of making knives in Seki, distilled into one line, finished one blade at a time, for the left hand.
CATRA Excellent — sharpness, verified.
There's a trade-off most kitchen knives can't escape. The sharpest blades — the ones that cut cleanly with no pressure — are usually the hardest to look after. They lose their edge in different ways: some need frequent honing, some are difficult to sharpen back, some give a brilliant edge that doesn't last. Choose a knife by sharpness alone, and you usually pay for it in maintenance.
NAGOMI Professional uses a special stainless steel selected by Mitsuboshi for this line, chosen to hold its edge longer without adding to the maintenance burden, and still sharpenable at home on a standard whetstone.
The cutting performance has been measured by CATRA, the British testing institute that sets the international ISO standard for blade sharpness. Their test runs a blade through a calibrated medium and records how cleanly it cuts, and how long it holds that edge. NAGOMI Professional received CATRA's highest rating: Excellent.
The chart below shows where NAGOMI Professional sits against the other two NAGOMI lines (Regular and Damascus) across six dimensions — sharpness, edge retention, cutting effort, sharpening frequency, and ease of sharpening. The professional line outperforms both across the board.
A laboratory rating doesn't tell you what a knife feels like in your hand. It does mean the sharpness isn't only the maker's claim — an independent institute, using the standard the rest of the industry uses, ran the test and put the result on paper.
The four knives in the collection.
Four shapes, each ground for the left hand. Three of them double-bevel — santoku, gyuto, petty — meant to do most of the work in a typical kitchen. The fourth, the honesuki, is single-bevel: a specialist's knife, only usable in the left hand. Pick the one that fits how you cook.
NAGOMI Professional
1. Santoku — The all-purpose knife
The santoku is the knife most Japanese home cooks reach for first, and the one we recommend if you're choosing a single main knife to live with. Meat, vegetables, fish — it handles all of them well, without needing a different blade for each. The blade is wider than a Western chef's knife and slightly shorter, which makes it stable on the board and quick on the slice. If you've never owned a Japanese kitchen knife, this is where the line starts.
2. Gyuto — The chef's knife
The gyuto is the Japanese take on a Western chef's knife, and ours runs 240 millimetres — long enough to cut a whole cabbage in a single stroke, deep enough to carve down through a block of meat without sawing. The length sounds intimidating until you use it. With a long blade, you cut on the pull rather than pressing down, and the work gets easier rather than harder. The tip is fine enough for delicate work — slicing herbs, scoring fish, breaking down shallots — so the same knife covers both ends of the kitchen.
If you cook in volume, or your hands are used to a chef's knife from a Western tradition, the gyuto is the natural choice from this collection.
3. Honesuki — Designed with Chef George
The honesuki is the knife you reach for when the work gets specific. It's a small, stout blade designed to separate meat from bone — chicken legs, pork shoulders, joints that a longer knife can't get into. With practice it also works as a substitute for a deba when breaking down a whole fish.
This one was developed in collaboration with George, executive chef at the Michelin-recommended CIRPAS in Tokyo and host of one of Japan's most-watched chef channels on YouTube. He worked with Mitsuboshi on the geometry of the blade and the angle of the spine, until it sat correctly in a left hand for the kind of detailed work an honesuki is meant to do.
It's a single-bevel blade, ground for the left hand only. That makes it sharper and more precise than a double-bevel knife of the same size, but it also means a right-handed cook can't use it. This isn't a first knife — it's a second or third, picked up when the work calls for it.
4. Petty — The everyday knife
At 120 millimetres, the petty is the shortest knife in the collection, and the one most cooks end up using more often than they expected. Peeling a peach, trimming garlic, cutting a sandwich on a board, finishing a dish at the plate — small jobs, done many times a day, that a chef's knife is too big for. A petty isn't replacing your main knife; it's saving it for the work that actually needs it.
If the santoku or gyuto is the headline knife, the petty is often the one in your hand for the small finishing work that fills out the day.
Boxed, ready to give.
All four knives ship in the same packaging: a matte black box with the NAGOMI logo foil-stamped on the lid, closed with a magnet. The box is solid enough to hand over as it is, with no extra wrapping. If you're sending one of these to a left-handed cook in your life, no extra wrapping is needed.
Common questions.
Most "double-bevel" Japanese knives are actually ground around 70/30, biased toward the right hand. NAGOMI Professional knives are ground the other way — set up from the start to do their best work in a left hand. The difference shows up in food release, in clean thin slices, and in the way the blade tracks straight when you push down. (More on this in the section above.)
The Honesuki is a specialist's tool, not a first knife. Its single-bevel grind gives it a precision that a double-bevel knife can't match for separating meat from bone, but it isn't built for everyday vegetable prep or general kitchen work. We'd recommend the Santoku or Gyuto as a main knife, and the Honesuki as a second or third — picked up when the work calls for it.
A high-quality knife rewards regular maintenance — honing during the week, sharpening every few months on a standard Japanese whetstone. The steel used for NAGOMI Professional is sharpenable at home.
All four are made in Seki, Gifu prefecture, Japan, by Mitsuboshi Cutlery — a knife maker founded in Seki in 1873 that has been producing kitchen knives in the same city ever since. Each blade is hand-finished by a small group of senior craftsmen at the Mitsuboshi workshop.
Yes. We ship from Japan to most countries. Standard delivery to North America and Europe takes around two weeks from the time the order leaves us, depending on region and shipping method. You'll receive a tracking number when the package is dispatched. Import duties and local taxes, where they apply, are the responsibility of the receiving customer.
