Picard and Wielpütz Table Cutlery Ticino

We were looking for a cutlery set with an ageless design and found one in a recent in-house draft: the "Ticino". With its harmonious, reduced design language and its functional silhouettes, it is suited for everyday use and cuts a fine figure when accompanying precious porcelain for a table setting on formal occasions. This set of cutlery stands out for its excellent workmanship and high level of reliability. For example, the spaces between fork tines are polished, a mark of quality cutlery for the hotel and catering industry which has to stand up to repeated daily use. And we have the dinner knife made with a hollow handle, instead of the usual solid metal, an expensive extra working step for the cutler but it assures the perfect balance of the knife. By means of glass bead blasting the cutlery gets its final polish.

Picard & Wielpütz was founded in the mid-1920s. Their first cutlery entered the market under the brand name "Briefanker" in 1927. Over the years a small workshop developed into a mid-sized family business which today is known as a manufacturer of high-quality cutlery for professional uses. Before even European airlines like Deutsche Lufthansa fell into line with the throw-away mentality, they were registered customers of Picard & Wielpütz. Every part of the cutlery is still assembled in Solingen, the city in North Rhine-Westphalia which has long been renowned for the manufacturing of fine swords, knives, and scissors. Picard & Wielpütz does every manufacturing step on site, from producing the embossing dies to the grinding, polishing and matting.

In 2010 a study suggested hominins in Ethiopia ate meat with stone implements, this finding pushes back the earliest known use of stone tools among hominins to about 3.4 million years ago. Knife, fork and spoon are the quintessential expressions as tools of a centuries’ long evolution of table manners – and therefore they should be tools or implements in the truest sense of the term. High-class cutlery with a functional design will convince even highly sceptical people with the perfect balance between handles and blades respectively fork tines or spoon bowls. For instance, the distribution of weight over the length of a spoon is the result of a very long series of tests. With proper cutlery, the cross-sections vary over the entire length on the basis of an optimal distribution of weight. Another quality feature of cutler workmanship is that the blades are not rigidly constructed but forged to demonstrate elasticity and flexibility.

Knives of higher quality cutlery are always assembled from a handle and a blade and don’t come in one piece (monobloc). If the objective is to have a balanced piece of cutlery which sits comfortably in the hand, the knife should not be too heavy. With hollow-handled knives, it is possible to reduce the weight sufficiently enough for a median weighing, balanced table knife.

Picard & Wielpütz was founded in the mid-20s of the last century. The first cutlery came, still under the name "Briefanker", 1927 on the market. Over the decades, what was once a small manufactory has grown into a medium-sized family business that is known today primarily as a manufacturer of high-quality cutlery for the catering trade - before the general throwaway mentality took hold in the airplane cabins of this world, Lufthansa, for example, was one of Picard & Wielpütz's customers. No part of the production there has been banished from Solingen until now, from the making of the embossing dies to the grinding, polishing and matting.

A timeless shape that comes from a recent factory design is the Ticino: It is of simple shape and can exist with everyday tableware as well as with Sunday china. Instead of the usual solid handle, we have made the menu knife with a hollow handle; although this is a lot more complicated, it results in a better balance of the knife in the hand. The forks are cleanly ground, even in the spaces between them - this is how you can tell the quality of a piece of gastronomy cutlery, which should not have any weak points when used and cleaned several times a day. The surfaces are glass bead matted.