Refractometer
Pastry chefs use refractometers to measure sugar density and to ensure the desired level of sweetness and texture in desserts such as sorbets and jams. “It looks like a little telescope, so I feel like a pirate when I use it,” says Rochelle Cooper, pastry chef at Capitol Hill’s Duck and the Peach and La Collina, where she churns out ever-changing pints through her Ice Cream Shoppe-Up venture.
Hermès Spoon
In his collection of hundreds of tasting spoons, Katsuya Fukushima’s favorite is the Hermès Attelage that his wife, Karen Park, gave him. Fukushima, chef at the Chinatown Japanese restaurants Tonari and Daikaya, loves the stainless-steel utensil with a stirrup-shaped base because of its attractive design, heft, and durability: “It’s the difference between driving a Honda and driving a Porsche.”
Tweezers
Nearly 15 years ago when Sébastien Giannini was training to compete in France’s Bocuse d’Or competition, his mentor, Philippe Joannès, gave him a pair of tweezers for deboning fish, plating, and handling micro-herbs. The chef at Georgetown’s L’Avant-Garde says he still keeps them in his pocket to remind him of his competitions as a young chef.
Tiny Scissors
A pair of dainty hot-pink handles peek out of Anthony Jones’s apron. They’re connected to miniature scissors, a workhorse implement for the executive chef of Marcus DC, a seafood-forward brasserie in NoMa. Jones deploys them to snip twine for trussing chickens and to trim herbs. “I’m using them all the time,” he says. “They’re indispensable.”
Mini Ruler
Everything at Minibar, José Andrés’s Penn Quarter tasting room, is done with precision. Leaves of Emerald Crystal lettuce for a salad must be just under an inch. Any bigger, they look clunky; any smaller, they don’t fill the plate. That’s why executive sous chef Nathan Lumley always carries a six-inch ruler. “I feel naked if I don’t have it,” says Lumley, who also uses it to measure the thickness of shortbreads and the width of tiny pickles.
Mini Mandoline
Nicholas Sharpe found his first mini mandoline in the self-care aisle of an Asian market, where it was sold for slicing cucumbers to put on your eyes. “I ended up stocking up because friends would always ask for them,” says the chef of downtown DC’s La Bise. He’s constantly taking it out to shave garlic and to cut radishes and carrots thinly for garnishes.
Refillable Marker
At Edward Lee’s Union Market Korean restaurant, Shia, one of the goals is to eliminate plastic. With that in mind, often-lost Sharpies used by chefs are replaced with pricier refillable Zebra markers. Each cook gets only two. “People don’t treat them as a throwaway thing anymore–they’re suddenly a valuable tool,” says Lee. “That shift in mentality is important.”
This article appears in the October 2025 issue of Washingtonian.
Nevin Martell is a food, travel, and foraging writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, USA Today, Men’s Journal, Fortune, Travel + Leisure, The Daily Beast, BBC, and many other publications. He is author of eight books, including Red Truck Bakery Cookbook: Gold-Standard Recipes from America’s Favorite Rural Bakery, Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip, and The Founding Farmers Cookbook: 100 Recipes From the Restaurant Owned by American Family Farmers. When he isn’t working, he loves spending time with his son, foraging for wild foods, and traveling.
