The Best Chef’s Knife, Tested and Reviewed(2026)

This knife’s beauty outshines its performance. We loved the mirror-polished exterior steel layer that houses a VG-Max core, but ultimately its shape made the 10,000 series from Seki Magoroku harder to use than the competition’s. Both the spine and handle curve upward from the bolster, creating a mild V-shape, which made it difficult to tell exactly where the cutting edge was. The handle was also fairly short, which will force you to choke up into a pinch grip without many other grip options. It did cut well in most tests, but we think there are other knives in this price point that are more versatile.

This knife’s blade was well-designed for delicate slicing, but it struggled to cut harder vegetables. Even at its extremely approachable price point, the construction felt cheap overall, and the handle wasn’t very balanced. This made it hard to control and affected the knife’s overall comfort level when using it for prolonged periods.

Sharp, sturdy, and with a comfortable (if blocky) handle, we generally liked the performance of J.A. Henckels’ Classic chef’s knife. But it struggled some against tougher vegetables and our favorite knives outperformed it in most tests.

Materials’ entry into the chef knife game is impressive on the page—san mai construction with a high-carbon core, hybrid-style blade shape, and comfortable handle. Unfortunately, this knife snagged and tore during the paper test and required more force to cut through the squash. It’s also priced similarly to knives that tested better.

Wüsthof’s Gourmet Knife (a step down from the Classic) struggled to perform up to the legendary knife brand’s reputation. Instead of being forged, like Wüsthof’s Classic Series, the Gourmet series is stamped. This means it lacks the same edge geometry that’s forged into the Classic series, affecting the knife’s ability to hold as sharp of an edge. It also lacked a bolster, and the handle scales were clunky. Finally, this knife struggled against pepper skin and tore the paper instead of slicing cleanly through it, leading to poor performance scores all around.

Zwilling’s Professional chef’s knife was well-balanced and easily sliced through paper with a sharp edge, but the German design means a thicker blade that required more force to cut through an onion. In general, it landed in the middle of the pack for its performance, but its higher price point kept it from being a knife we’d recommend.

Though we found it quite beautiful, Messermeister’s Oliva Elite’s wood handle was extra long, making it unwieldy and harder to control. It was moderately sharp in our tests, but the handle was a dealbreaker.

Made In’s knife struggled to hold its edge after repeated use, though it was sharp enough out of the box to easily cut through squash in our testing. Because it dulled easily, this knife couldn’t handle delicate tasks like slicing tomatoes as well as the competition.

This knife is hefty. Its blade has one of the largest bellies of any of the knives we’ve tested, its handle is quite long and bulky, and it is notably heavy. That said, there is some merit to having a knife like this, particularly for tasks like cutting meat, winter squash, or bones, and we found this knife to be pretty sharp out of the box. However, you could always get an affordable cleaver for these tasks.

This knife is also much heavier than most of our top picks, but it is nicely balanced and performed relatively well in our tests. However, for nearly $100, we think you’re better off spending just a bit more and going with the Tojiro or the Shun, or saving your money and picking up the Mercer or the Victorinox for half the price.

This knife from Bulat was one of the dullest knives we tested out of the box. It snagged on the paper slice and its overall bulk made it prone to crushing tomatoes instead of slicing through their skin. It also struggled to cleanly slice through onion skin.

While the price point might be tempting, Brandless’s chef’s knife isn’t worth your time. Dull, slippery, and clumsy, it performed the worst out of any knife we tested—right in line with what you might expect from its bottom-shelf sticker price.

This even more budget-friendly model from the makers of our current budget pick proved that there is a limit to how low you should go when investing in a chef’s knife. Can you cut things with this knife? Yes. But it was duller than most other knives we tested even straight out of the box, and its plastic handle was bulky to hold. Take our advice and spend a bit more on a knife that’ll serve you infinitely better.

This knife from Wüsthof’s Ikon line felt well-constructed and was sharp out of the box, but its heavy feel and long and slightly bulky handle kept it out of the running. It also snagged a bit on the paper we cut after running it through all of our tests—a sign that you’d need to sharpen this knife more often. Though if you prefer a German-style knife with a decent amount of heft to it and have large hands, you may like this one.

We loved a lot of things about this knife from New West—like how comfortable it was to grip, the finish of the steel, the shape of the blade, and the fact that at $225, it’s the most affordable chef’s knife the brand makes. Unfortunately, this knife failed to hold its edge. After just a few uses, it was noticeably blunt. We encountered quite a bit of resistance even when slicing through something as soft as an onion, and it was wholly unable to pass the paper test.

This knife was relatively sharp out of the box, but it felt almost too lightweight to effectively push through food, requiring more force from its user than something a bit heftier that can let gravity do some of the work. We also didn’t find the seamless construction and shape of the handle to be all that comfortable to hold.

Shun makes excellent knives across the board, but this is one of our least favorites we’ve tried from the brand. In testing, we found the handle a bit uncomfortable to hold and noted that this was the least sharp Shun out of the box.

This knife from Shun is beautiful, with its shiny Damascus steel blade and dark tagayasan wood handle. But while it was super sharp, we felt this knife was too big to be suitable for most people—we even joked that this knife could win “Best Chef’s Knife for Giants.” Both the blade and handle feel oversized, and it’s quite heavy at 9.5 ounces—and at $460, we just couldn’t justify the price. That said, if you have particularly large hands or want a knife that feels like an actual sword, you may like this one.

This German-style chef’s knife from Quince failed to impress us in testing. It wasn’t as sharp as we’d have liked, unable to effortlessly sink through the tomato in the same way as some of the other knives we tested.

This bunka-style knife hails from content creator Notorious Foodie’s cookware line. It features a handsome 67-layer Damascus steel blade with a Japanese VG-10 core and a handle fashioned from ebony wood, all of which amounts to a very pretty knife. It performed decently well in our tests, but we ultimately chose not to recommend it due to some concerns with the build quality. The metal ring around the handle is not flush with the wood, making it rough against the hand and liable to snag on things.