It is hard to understand why chef Michael Tusk was willing to entrust a 22-year-old to hand-craft two dozen steak knives for the 2023 redesign of his three-Michelin-starred restaurant Quince.

That is, until you hear the knife maker, Everett Noel, speak about knives.

Sitting outside his new shop, located in a spare, shared space in a ramshackle Novato business park, Noel, now 24, tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. His stubbly face is rosy from the 90-degree heat. He uses his hands to search for words before they emerge from his mouth. 

“Instead of knives that can, like, cut a million potatoes in a second, I want my knives to be something you use to slowly cut a single potato,” he says. “I want you to feel it gliding through — to be able to create a little moment, slow down, and experience something like that.”

Soft-spoken and deliberate, Noel is so earnest that I find myself nodding deeply. I, too, want to be present with a potato. I need to invest in a knife like that.

Noel — who is largely self-taught, barring some YouTube videos and an apprenticeship with a blacksmith — has been making knives since he was a kid growing up in the woods outside of Nevada City, California. His first sale was to his grandmother, when he was 12. His dad, a contractor, built the cabin where he was born. He was homeschooled by his mom, a teacher. “We would go to West Coast Craft in San Francisco for different things, and my mom would be like, ‘You could make these things, too,” he says.

As a teenager, he started selling his knives at a Nevada City boutique called Kitkitdizzi, which is currently the only store that has a couple of his pieces available (the rest are on order). But his work entered another stratosphere when, at 21, he took the initiative to pen a note to Mariah Nielson, daughter of the famed midcentury West Marin artist J.B. Blunk.

Nielsen recalls the letter, which expressed Noel’s respect for her father’s work. “It was handwritten and so elegant that I imagined this man to be like 82 years old,” she laughs. “So I called, and a young man answered the phone. My mind was blown. Then I met him, and he’s such a beautiful, charismatic person, so we started working together.”

When Nielson in 2022 turned the Point Reyes house her father had built into a gallery and art space called Blunk Space, she invited Noel to spend a week there while he made about 30 knives for an exhibition. “It was exquisite,” she recalls. “Every knife he makes is imbued with thoughtfulness and material provenance. He cares where the metal and the wood comes from.”

In attendance at the exhibit was a world-renowned chef who happens to have a farm just around the bend in Bolinas: Tusk. 

He was intent on bringing local artists into the redesign of Quince and bought a couple of knives from the show. Even at his young age, “Everett was already ahead of the curve,” says Tusk, citing “his designs, his shapes, his handles, the quality of the seal, the weight of the design elements.” He followed up with a commission for Noel to do more for Quince’s table service.

The steak knives for Quince have stainless steel blades and brass handles with an oval window meant to reflect the shape of an oak tree near the cabin Noel lived in as a child. “I was always looking at that tree, plus I was inspired by the warm colors that Quince had,” he said. The knives took him about four months to make. 

New versions of these knives are available on Quince’s lifestyle website, Quince & Co., where Tusk and his wife and co-owner Lindsay hawk rare and expensive items that suit their refined tastes — everything from glassware made by an artisan working out of an 18th century barn on a Swedish island to handmade ceramic plates made by a couple in Kyoto. Not surprisingly, Noel’s knives aren’t cheap: $500 apiece, with a three-month lead time. 

There’s an irony in the contrast between the prestigious circles Noel’s work inhabits and his actual life — or perhaps it’s just the age-old story of all up-and-coming artists. Noel, who had long dreamed of living in San Francisco, moved to the Mission in the spring. His truck is dead, but he is fine with the two-hour ride on Muni to meet me at his shop. Considering his lo-fi lifestyle, it tracks that he’s into public transportation.

He shows up wearing a T-shirt that’s peppered with patched-over holes from the sparks that fly during the knife-making process. He likes that his bladesmithing is evident in his clothes, just like you can see the life lived in his knives. “One of my favorite parts about my knives is how they change over time,” he says. “The steel gets a patina as you use it — the object becomes something like a friend.”

His studio is a relatively barren space the size of a walk-in closet. There are drawers with scratchy labels reading “chisels,” “drills,” and “glue gun.” A sander with a series of belts in various grits hangs on the wall. There is a drill press and a tiny kiln. Cardboard filing boxes labeled “blunk wood stub” and “unfinished knives” serve as a makeshift base for a little desk where Noel has a sketchbook of drawings and cutouts he uses as prototypes.

The beginnings of the knives he’s working on for Quince are laid out. While he used to cut the metal by hand, he now sends his designs to a water-jet cutting facility in New Jersey that specializes in knives. From each raw, one-dimensional form, Noel bevels the blade and tapers the tang. He sculpts the handle with a flex shaft grinder, files it, sands it, then peens it to the blade with brass pins. 

The knife that first caught my eye was not a steak knife, however; it was Noel’s $700 “bearded” chef’s knife for a series called “The Woods,” inspired by the forest near his aunt’s house. It was lethally beautiful, the handle-end of the blade curving like a wave.

His next commission is a set of squat spreading knives with redwood handles, which Nielson is having him make for Blunk Space. Those will also sell for $500, and Nielson expects them to be snatched right up. As part of this release, Noel will exhibit more of his work for an October show called “The Ridge,” inspired by another stay at the Blunk house.

His work is not making him rich, Noel says. But he’s doing better than a lot of young, untrained artisans he knows. “I thought I’d be making about $6,000 a year about now,” he says, laughing. 

What’s next, I ask. Well, he’s got a lot of knives to finish for Quince. “They’re taking longer than I remembered.” But first things first: “Right now, making rent is happening.”

For more information on Everett Noel Knives, go to Quince & Co. or Blunk Space.