Alexandra, Victoria, Australia · High Performance Japanese-Influenced Kitchen Knives
Mark Cordina
Cordina Customs
About the maker
On the workshop
Alexandra sits in the Goulburn Valley, about two hours north-east of Melbourne, and it is from a workshop there that Cordina Customs has run since 2020. Mark Cordina came to knifemaking through an unusually useful combination of trades. When the outdoor education work he had been doing stopped during the lockdowns of that year, he made his first knife from a discarded industrial hacksaw blade and offcuts already in the shed, then entered a maker competition with his second. Behind those first pieces were years of sheet metalwork and building, along with time spent working as a cook — experience that left him fluent in both how a tool gets fabricated and what a cook asks of one.
The knives are conceived as working tools first, with material and construction choices following from that premise. Cordina's work spans forged mono-steel, San Mai, copper-clad and honyaki constructions, with 26C3 — long favoured in his composite work — appearing alongside other steels selected for the particular knife. His culinary range moves through gyuto and K-tip gyuto, bunka, petty, kiritsuke, sujihiki and chuka bocho, while hidden-tang construction and Japanese-influenced profiles remain recurring signatures. Handles favour deep black ebony and highly figured timbers, particularly material with the fine curl and movement that emerges under finish.
Cordina summarises the approach simply: “Quality begets quality.” It is visible in his preference for carefully selected materials, in the tooling he has progressively built around the work, and in an insistence on understanding the process rather than relying on ornament to carry it. The result is an increasingly distinctive body of work in which performance remains the starting point and visual character grows from the construction itself.
That progression was recognised early. Cordina took second place in the Beginner Chef Knife category at the 2021 Australian Knifemaking Awards, followed by Best New Maker at the 2022 Sydney Knife Show. Since then, his work has expanded into honyaki, copper-clad constructions, one-of-a-kind signed knives and numbered collection pieces without losing the practical premise behind the first blades. For Modern Cooking, Mark Cordina belongs in the Collectors Selection as an Australian maker building knives meant to be cooked with, lived with and kept.
— Mark Cordina
Limited release
Reserve your place
Mark Cordina's work is highly sought-after for its distinctive combination of craftsmanship, performance, and design, with each piece produced by hand in extremely limited numbers — a pace of production that naturally cannot keep up with demand.
For those hoping to secure a piece through Modern Cooking, joining the waitlist is the best way to register your interest in Mark's work and share your preferred dimensions, design preferences, and intended use. As opportunities become available, we use this information to guide future allocations with care and consideration.