Toma Fenes

Toma Fenes works from Paltin Monastery near Petru Vodă in Romania, and at just twenty years old he already has a remarkably multidisciplinary practice. He grew up working with his hands in his father's woodworking shop, and that early grounding has expanded into a body of work that moves between wood, steel, copper, brass, and stone. Alongside the forge he is a serious fencer, having trained from the age of twelve under one of Romania's last master sword fighters, and his interests range across medieval history, fantasy fiction, historical architecture, and the culinary arts. It would be narrow to call Toma a bladesmith alone — artisan craftsman is closer to the truth.

His knives grew naturally out of a love of cooking. After an early kitchen knife was well received by a local chef, demand built quickly, and culinary work became a central part of the practice. Toma forges using traditional techniques and largely hand tools, working from a humble workshop that has pushed him toward mono steel construction rather than complex laminates. Within that constraint he has developed a distinctive visual language: classically inspired profiles, exceptional cutting performance, and surface treatments that lift simple mono steels into genuine functional artworks. The same culinary instinct that drives the knives has also produced fresh dairy work, a custom-built wood-fired pizza oven, and a small line of beautifully resolved pizza cutters.

The signatures are unmistakable once you have seen them. Hand-forged mokume, museum-fit bolsters, and domed pins recur as quiet structural details, while captivating hamons, inlays, and rich surface textures animate the blades themselves. Each piece reads as the work of a maker drawing equally on sculpture, painting, wood carving, and blacksmithing — and on a genuine love of the food the knives are made to cut. We are proud to present Toma Fenes within the Modern Cooking Collectors Selection, where his one-of-a-kind blades and pizza cutters bring a singular artistic voice to the lineup.