The nakiri’s flat, unrockered profile is built for a push cut straight down through the board rather than the rocking motion a chef’s knife uses, so we grind it thinner behind the edge than our 8in Chef’s Knife — the same Ladder Damascus billet, but taken down closer to 0.012″ behind the apex before the final bevel, versus roughly 0.018″ on the chef’s knife.
At 60–61 HRC that thinner geometry holds up fine for vegetable work, where lateral stress is minimal and the knife rarely contacts bone or connective tissue. Handle matches the chef’s knife in construction — stabilized curly maple, hidden tang, mosaic pins — so the two read as a matched pair on a magnetic strip rather than two unrelated knives.
