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2017 Gift Guide: For the Chef

Is there any season more synonomous with good food shared with the best of friends and most beloved of family? Tis truly the season for all who love to cook (and eat). Here’s a selection of our favorite beautifully designed tools, accessories, and ingredients to serve those who aspire to drink, eat, and be merry throughout the year.

HAY FIELD Chopping Board \\\ $58.50
Designer Shane Schneck’s three beech cutting board designs are like a Bridget Riley painting captured in wood, the Op-Art grooves ideal for capturing errant bread crumbs or the juice from a steak with indelible style. Groove is in the heart, or something like that.

Tom Dixon Brew V60 Giftset \\\ $120
Making a cup of pour-over coffee has never been quite as sexy as imagined by Tom Dixon. The mirror black, all-metal espresso sized cups and dripper cone imply drinking something dark, rich, and unadulterated.

Gaea Black and White Gift Set \\\ $30
Olive oil and balsamic vinegar presented in a stark monochromatic set. Give it to the aesthete gourmand who openly admits, “I bought it because I liked the packaging!”

Miele CM6150 Coffee Maker \\\ $1499
I love, love, love my Miele vacuum cleaner. But I also aspire to one day own one of their one-touch automatic coffee machines after trying a cup (or two) expertly produced at their showroom. Precise German engineering, austere-minimalist design, and a compact footprint = want.

Click & Grow Indoor Smart Fresh Herb Garden Kit \\\ $60
The days are getting shorter, the light noticeably dimmer – a bane for gardeners who grow their own sprigs of herbs for cooking outside. A growing device like the Click & Grow – a system inspired by NASA – brings the gardens indoors, and also takes responsibility for watering and producing enough light for seeds to sprout into your future meal.

Nambu Tekki Cast Iron Skillet \\\ $180
Nobuho Miya’s lineage related to nambu testu ironware (traditional Japanese cast iron) spans back to the Meiji era, but his style is distinctly contemporary. At less than half the weight of a typical cast iron skillet, the Nambu Tekki Cast Iron skillet is truly manageable with one hand, unlike its heavy metal counterparts.

Uuni 3 Wood Fired Oven \\\ $299
Producing temperatures well past 900 degrees – twice as hot as the typical kitchen oven – the Uuni 3 is probably as close as one can get to having a pizza oven without building something hulking and hot. Besides the fast cooking times, what a wood-fired oven offers is that delicious char along the edges of pizza, fish, meats, vegetables, and bread. Whoever you give this to owes you a lifetime of pizzas.

Atlas Coffee Club + Yield Glass Pour Over \\\ starting at $60  \\\ $32
What coffee loving addict wouldn’t want a 3, 6, or 12 month subscription of coffee customized to their preference in region, roast, and amount? And the packaging truly does communicate something gift-worthy. Toss in one of these heatproof borosilicate glass cones to make sure they enjoy their beans in a ritualistic manner deserving of sipping rather than gulping.

Illusion Dinner Plate Set of 4 by Zaha Hadid \\\ $290
The ideal recipient of this set of dinner plates would be the astrophysicist and cosmologist who dreams of wormholes while pushing their food across the plate every night. Actually…

Toools Banchan Sets \\\ Starting at $140
Los Angeles designers Caroline Hwang and Joel Speasmaker turn the Korean tradition of filling the dinner table with a wide assortment of small plates into a towering act of balance. Each handmade ceramic set is distinct in shape and pattern, so once it’s yours, it’s uniquely so.

Ubikubi Cactus Juicer \\\ $29
Cactus and succulents are immensely popular these days. So is juicing. Thus, consider this the manifestation of a Venn diagram of trends benefitting your next fresh squeezed plans.

Woo Collective Curve Chopstick Rack \\\ $70
Taiwanese design studio Woo Collective cites their “Curve” chopstick rack found inspiration in the engineering of steel building structures, but from the side, they look how we’d imagine Charley Harper might abstract birds flying into the sunset.

Gregory Han is a Senior Editor at Design Milk. A Los Angeles native with a profound love and curiosity for design, hiking, tide pools, and road trips, a selection of his adventures and musings can be found at gregoryhan.com.