Some of my fancy sticks.
My favorites out of all of them are probably also the most expensive. And boy are they expensive! They're TiStix anodized titanium chopsticks by knifemaker Alan Folts, and you can find them for sale at EatingTools.com. Please nobody ever visit that site. You'll find yourself wanting stupid, lovely, expensive things that you can't forget about for years. Like a ****ing $85 pair chopsticks. Look folks, I know that's a crazy thing to buy. But I had these on my public birthday/Christmas wishlist for half a decade. And while I think that $85 is a reasonable budget for a special gift, nobody wanted to buy such an incredible extravagance. Nobody understood. For years and years and years. So after much frustration, I treated myself to a pair. As it turned out, the maker stopped producing the color scheme that I wanted (The Midnight Edition in "Dew") because it was apparently difficult to get the anodization/color consistent with that particular color combination. So I ended up with a pair of "factory seconds" for a light discount. In the photo below, the top one is more or less perfect, but the middle one has some purple tinges to the middle section instead of the sort of turquoise it was supposed to be. But I like the "wabi sabi" imperfection of it all.
In terms of shape and size, they're like elegant tapered Japanese chopsticks with a bit of texture to the tip section. Korean metal chopsticks tend to be slightly wider and with less taper than Japanese chopsticks. They're also made of stainless steel, which conducts heat much better than titanium. The thin tip (low thermal mass) and relatively poor thermal conductivity (25% of iron) makes it a great pair to eat hot noodle soups with. And, dear readers, I eat a lot of noodle soup. The sticks don't get hot and the light bead-blasted-y finish on the tips makes them just grippy enough to handle slippery broth-coated noodles. The build quality and machining of the chopsticks is phenomenal. I do feel as though I could probably kill a person with them, as they are quite pointy, and quite rigid, and quite likely to be an heirloom that my children fight over. Or else they'll look at them with the same bewildered indifference that everyone else does when they contemplate my extravagant TiStix. I wish I had another pair.
My second most favorite pair is a mystery to me. It's a pair of lacquered cherry bark chopsticks produced in Japan, but I have no idea where I got them or who made them. I went through all my chopsticks orders and emails and found nothing -- NOTHING! -- about where they came from. They're the pair to the immediate left of the titanium chopsticks in the first picture I posted. Japanese chopsticks are typically small compared to Chinese chopsticks, but the "serving" chopsticks are slightly larger than ordinary Japanese chopsticks and therefore better at shoving food into my giant American gullet. Anyway, I did some sleuthing recently and found a similar looking pair on Bezos.com. (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) They arrived a couple days ago and appear to be the "individual size" version. They're like six bucks and they handle *really* well, so I ordered another pair as a backup. The shape of both small and large is basically a tapered rectangular prism, and the tapered squared off tips make them great for grabbing noodles. Look, I eat a lot of noodles, okay?! Anyway, here's my old favorite along with the new pair from Amazon. Y'all go nuts and buy the rest of them, but someone find out who makes them so I can order a backup pair of the serving chopsticks!
My other favorite pair are also Japanese serving chopsticks. They were also the second most expensive chopsticks. I think there are some trends forming here. Anyway, they're Kohchosai Kosuga Nedake bamboo root chopsticks I got from Toiro Kitchen. Again, wallets beware! These sticks feel elemental or magical or something. My wife thinks of them as the Elderwand from Harry Potter, though we know that's not "really" what the Elderwand looks like. They're her favorite. She liked them so much but was afraid to ever use them, so I gave them to her to use with reckless abandon. Reckless abandon:
My overall preferences seem to be for the longer length of Chinese chopsticks but with the tapered tip and precision of the Japanese style of chopstick. And I also prefer for it to be made from a very nice substrate.
The unreasonable pair of chopsticks I want for Christmas this year but nobody will get me is another bamboo Japanese serving style from Toiro, this time with a wisteria vine wrap at the top. I could totally eat some noodles with those...
