Calling all chefs — professional and at-home — Jess Nichols and Mark Bolchoz have created the perfect getaway knife roll travel kit just for you. Nichols is the co-founder of carry goods retailer, J. Stark, and Bolchoz is the culinary director of Italian concepts for Indigo Road Hospitality. Together, they’ve combined their expertise to craft this kit.
The collaboration was sparked by Bolchoz’s love of J. Stark’s products. He was gifted a J. Stark baby diaper bag three years ago from Trevor Stough, former general manager of Indaco and current wine director of Indigo Road Hospitality.
“[The bag] was made with different materials I had never seen before,” Bolchoz said.
The quality of the bag led him to reach out for a custom knife roll, something he needed at the time.
“I had that knife roll for a long while, and then recently we spoke with Jess Nichols, one of the founders [of J. Stark] and a former Indigo Road employee, and we had this idea to do an official collaboration,” Bolchoz said.
“They approached me about working together and seemed really excited about the idea of bringing two very different worlds together,” Nichols added. Other than being a former employee of Indigo Road, Nichols had worked with the company in the past with J. Stark, making knife rolls for Jeremiah Bacon, executive chef and partner of the restaurant group for a Feed the Need event.
The knife rolls come in two sizes, a weekend tool kit for quick two- to three-day trips and an extended stay tool kit for “when you need almost everything but the kitchen sink,” according to J. Stark’s website.
The weekend kit is made with four 2-inch slots and four 1-inch slots, while the extended stay has one 3-inch slot, six 2-inch and five 1-inch slots for more versatility. The extended kit also has a small zipper pocket for the things that are just too small to fit in the slots like business cards, peelers, thermometers and more.
“For the small one that would fit into like a standard backpack, hitting just the right measurements so that it could fit a standard chef’s knife, a few spoons and tweezers and still roll up tight was a big thing,” Bolchoz said.
The kit uses two straps for both sizes for extra security, Bolchoz added, as he’s had many that weren’t secure enough.
“We’d always wanted to come back to them and never really had a good catalyst for it,” Nichols said. “So this was a good chance to get back to knife rolls because it’s such a food driven city.”
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