About Steel & Oak
We were looking for a meat dry-aging cabinet. Not for a restaurant, just for home use, to dry-age our own sirloins and ribeyes for a few weeks, just like we knew from good steakhouses. What followed was weeks of searching between two extremes: cheap imports that broke after a few months, or professional catering equipment at five times the price, with delivery times of months and a salesperson who didn't really know what they were selling. For the serious home cook, or for a small catering business without the purchasing power of a large chain, there seemed to be little decent to be found. That's how Steel & Oak began: out of frustration over something that should simply exist, and didn't.
We love wine, good food, and all the fuss surrounding it — shopping, preparing, sitting down to eat with people we love. Our ideal weekend isn't a day out. It's a Saturday in the kitchen with the kids, music in the background, something simmering for hours, and a bottle of wine that pairs with what will soon be on the table. That's how we were raised, and we hope to pass that on to our own children in the same way. Steel & Oak stems directly from that. We also run it that way: with attention, and without haste where haste isn't necessary.
We select what we sell in the same way we shop for our own home. Everything in the shop has been used, tested, or thoroughly tested by people we trust, before it becomes part of the Steel & Oak assortment. If a knife doesn't feel good in the hand, we won't sell it, even if it looks fantastic in a picture. We prefer a smaller collection that we can wholeheartedly endorse, rather than a huge catalog full of items we've never cooked with ourselves. That takes time. Sometimes it takes months before we dare to add a new product. But we prefer it that way.
The customers for whom we do this are not easily pigeonholed, and we actually like that. It could be the home cook who prepares an elaborate menu for friends every weekend and enjoys it as much as eating it. It could also be the owner of a small restaurant or bistro, someone who doesn't have the scale to buy from large catering wholesalers but strives for the same quality as the big chains. Both groups really had no logical place to go. They were either relegated to products that don't last long, or referred to catering wholesalers where they, as small players, are barely taken seriously. Steel & Oak exists for those people.
Our goal is bigger than selling individual products. We want to eventually be able to supply everything needed for the perfect meal, from start to finish. We are still a long way from that, and perhaps we may never fully get there, but it is the question we ask ourselves with every new product: does this truly help someone prepare a better meal, from preparation to the last bite?
If you visit Steel & Oak, we hope you'll see that reflected in what we offer. No unnecessary frills, no products that just look good in a photo. Just items we cook with ourselves, that we would recommend to our own friends without a second thought. That search for the meat dry-aging cabinet has long since ended, by the way, even though we continue to look for the next improvement. That kind of searching never really stops for us, and that's precisely why we still enjoy this work as much as on the first day.
