Zur rice noodle soup, Linh provides two pieces of wisdom for free. She guided her group, tourists on a street food tour, to an alley in Hanoi’s old town. You sit on little blue plastic humps, your knees almost stick under your chin, steam comes from bowls, and there are around 100 wooden sticks in a tin pot.
But, and here comes wisdom number one, only beginners blindly pull out the first pair of cutlery that often only comes through moderately. Linh says, “Only use chopsticks with the tips pointing up.” Who knows what’s accumulated on the bottom of the tin pot. Then she looks around. Her Europeans look a little embarrassed about being asked to use the chopsticks under their professional eyes, prompting advice number two: “Don’t worry,” says the young Vietnamese, “as long as the food is in your mouth.” you’re holding your chopsticks correctly.”
Such a pragmatic approach suits the filigree cutlery well. Because in other respects it is more complex than its simple form suggests. Chopsticks are not just chopsticks, certain regions have their own preferences, traditions, labels. And once you’ve learned how to handcraft a pale wooden stick into a flawless pair of chopsticks, you can only feel humbled.
chopsticks instead of furniture
In order to understand this, it goes from bustling Hanoi to tranquil Hofheim am Taunus. Just outside Frankfurt, a small carpentry workshop has been making chopsticks since Clemens Müller, master carpenter, designed a pair for his sushi-loving wife, master carpenter, for her birthday. A few years earlier, the Müllers had already started putting furniture production on hold in favor of kitchen boards made of precious woods. Chopsticks fit into the repertoire.
Chop Value recycles used chopsticks.
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Image: ChopValue
There can’t be enough of that at the moment. “The chopsticks are more in demand than we can produce,” says Clemens Müller. The online shop for her cutting wood brand was still empty at the beginning of March, even though there was already a box of blanks ready in the workshop. In order to be able to show what a manufactory chopstick looks like and, above all, how it feels, Müller has cleared out the private kitchen drawer.
He spread out the chopsticks on a workbench, square or octagonal models based on the Japanese model, about 25 centimeters long and with a thin, round tip. A special feature is the handle, into which a fine Allen screw is screwed. A magnet is hidden in the shelf belonging to each pair, so that the chopsticks can float cleanly above the tabletop.
They are made of beech, walnut and pear, maple or ebony. One model has both light maple and black ebony. To this end, Müller has bonded layers of veneer with epoxy resin, which are balanced to the millimeter and run in fine strips from the tip to the end of the handle. They must be worked so precisely that there are no tensions in the wood later. In any case, not every piece of wood is suitable, it has to be very hard and unbreakable. The grain has to run dead straight, says the carpenter. “It’s almost like the work of a diamond cutter. You need a lot of intuition if you have to create it with your hands.”
For example, Chop Value makes new table tops out of used chopsticks.
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Image: Photo company
Müller’s chopsticks have little to do with what is used in snack bars, restaurants or bags with food delivery. Connected to a small block at the end of the handle, the light-colored disposable sticks first have to be split in two. It doesn’t always work without splinters – and never without at least a bit of destructiveness. But the disposable cutlery also indirectly owes its triumph to the tin pots that Linh had warned about in Hanoi: they promise hygienic meals. An unbroken pair of chopsticks is an unused pair of chopsticks – that hasn’t just been pulling since the Corona pandemic.
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