It's not enough for your pots and pans to simply cook well. They need to look the part, too. And nowadays, there's one extra box to tick before you check out — is it good enough to go from hob, oven, ...

“What’s this?” I ask the proprietor of Hitachiya, a Japanese cookware store in Torrance. I couldn’t imagine how such a crude metal spike could possibly be used in the kitchen. “For nailing an eel to a ...