For the almost thirty years that I spent in a kitchen, a knifegrinder came around every couple of months and touched up the 'monkey' knives up on a slack belt. Monkey knives are the cheap plastic handle jobs that kitchen helpers and dishwasher abuse. Chefs would not let anyone touch their personal high dollar knives. Once a week or so, hit a diamond stick, then it's just plain ordinary steel applied about 20 times per day.
When I used the Sabatier Au Carbon knives, I had a three sided oil bath set of stones that I used. However, when Stainless came along, it was too hard for the stones and dished them out too bad. The stones were very expensive to replace and fell out of favor when the hard German knives became vogue.
I went through a phase when my work knive was a 12 inch Heinkel Chef knife. It finally dawned on me that the Heinkel was too hard to keep sharp and too big to be as handy as the smaller knife.
I finally went to the 'girlyknife', a 7" Messermeister Santouko with the scalloped edge. It was easier to use than the large german style chef knife and a lot easier to keep sharp.
The traditional shaped chef knife still has its uses and one should be kept handy in a kitchen, but the jap styled knives are superior for about 90 per cent of what a chef needs a knife for.
Pity the poor culinary students. When I sold my last restaurant three years ago, Johnson Wales and Culinary Institute of America were requiring their students to buy sets of Freidrich Dick knives. Good knives at a very reasonable price, but hard to sharpen and keep sharp.
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