About Don Smolik and Kolter Livengood
Don Smolik is the founder of Study The Blade, an Austin-based knife sharpening service that works with both professional chefs and home cooks. A former chef himself, Don built Study The Blade around the belief that understanding your tools starts with knowing how to maintain them. His work sits at the intersection of practical culinary knowledge and the craft of sharpening, and he has become a trusted resource for chefs in the Austin area who take their edge work seriously.
Kolter Livengood is a Dallas-born, Chicago-trained chef who co-founded Brightwok Kitchen before leaving the restaurant industry in 2020. After years in luxury fine dining and fast-casual concepts, Kolter turned his deep knowledge of knives into a second career. He founded Livengood Grindhouse in 2024, building custom kitchen knives by hand in Texas. His background using high-performance blades in demanding professional kitchens directly shapes how he approaches design, geometry, and the relationship between a chef and their tools.
Episode Overview
Knife work is the foundation of professional cooking, and most chefs never learn it correctly. In this episode, Andre Natera sits down with Don Smolik and Kolter Livengood to break down what chefs actually need to know about knife maintenance, sharpening technique, steel selection, blade geometry, and how to choose the right knife for the work. Both guests bring a chef’s perspective to the conversation, which means the advice is grounded in real kitchen experience rather than collector theory. They cover common mistakes, the habits that ruin good knives, proper stone care, and how to build a sharpening practice that keeps your tools performing at a high level over the long term.
What You Will Learn in This Episode
How to Actually Sharpen a Knife — The correct technique for sharpening on stones, how angle consistency determines edge quality, and why most chefs develop bad habits that quietly degrade their tools over time.
Blade Geometry and What It Means for Performance — How spine thickness, edge taper, and convexity affect how a knife feels and cuts, and why geometry matters more than the brand name on the blade.
Steel Selection for Professional Kitchens — The differences between steel types, what high-carbon and stainless options each offer a working chef, and how to match your steel choice to your actual kitchen environment and habits.
Stone Care and Maintenance — How to properly care for whetstones, why a neglected stone produces a bad edge regardless of skill, and the basics of flattening and maintaining your sharpening setup.
Knife Etiquette in the Kitchen — The unwritten rules around borrowing, storing, and handling other people’s knives, and why a chef’s relationship to their tools says something about their standards overall.
How to Choose the Right Knife — What to prioritize when selecting a knife for professional use, how to think about the investment over the long term, and why the best knife is the one that fits how you actually work.
Connect with Don Smolik
Website: studytheblade.com
Instagram: @studytheblade
Connect with Kolter Livengood
Website: livengoodgrindhouse.com
Instagram: @livengood_grindhouse
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