Dull knives? This mobile sharpening business cuts to the chase.
For a long time, Franz Dessombes wanted to have his own restaurant. “But that dream changed,” says the former executive chef of Pizzeria Prima Strada. “Now I get to play with knives.”
Last September he left the restaurant and started his own business, Wooly Buggers Sharpening, a mobile service that comes to your home or business and, well, sharpens things. (The name is a reference to a type of artificial fishing fly, “plus I’m a wooly bugger,” he says.)
Most of his clients are chefs at restaurants like Cafe Brio or The Courtney Room. “I get to go into people’s kitchens all over the city and I don’t have to worry about staffing,” he says happily. It’s a good sign that chefs are willing to trust him with their precious knives, “especially if they have been traumatized by previous experiences.”
He offers two types of service: In the first, he pulls up to your place and uses a belt sander with four different grits of paper, ranging from 200 to 2,000 grit, to sharpen your knives to near-whetstone quality; this only takes an hour or so and is all most of us need.
The second is more bespoke and involves taking your knives away for 48 to 72 hours while he uses a whetstone to sharpen them by hand.
He also does some work sharpening garden tools, and his goal is to open a storefront where he can sell high-quality knives like the ones by F. Dick, a German brand he describes as “an incredible mid-priced line.” Basically, Dessombes says, “I’m wherever I need to go.”
He’s working on a website, especially for knife sales, but in the meantime can be contacted through Instagram @woolybuggerssharpening or by email at: woolybuggersharp@gmail.com.