Nambé Glacier 5-Piece Place Setting, Service for 1

When I decided it was time to finally replace my aging flatware (22+ years of use and they were hand-me-downs when I got them) I spent a lot of time looking at and researching various patterns. I narrowed down my search to the Nambe Glacier and two Yamazaki patterns. All had the simple, clean lines I was looking for and excellent build quality. To compare them I ordered a single setting of each and compared them side-by-side to come up with a winner.

When the Glacier arrived I was immediately impressed with quality and attention to detail. But really the first thing that grabs you is the size and weight of this pattern. The weight is the heaviest I have run across. This size of all of the pieces is much larger than any other that I have seen. The dinner knife and soup spoon are approaching serving fork/spoon size. To put it in perspective, the salad fork from the Nambe set was almost identical in size to the dinner fork in my current flatware. Another thing I noticed is a lot of the weight is in the handles. Although everything felt pretty well balanced I did notice there was tendency for the utensils to want to fall of the edge the plate/bowl when carrying them to the kitchen from the table because of the long, heavy handles.

The knives in this set are beautiful to behold. A unique design that doesn't look like any others that I have seen. Unfortunately, function lags behind form in this case. Because the knives are a single piece design, not the hollow handle higher carbon stainless blade design you usually see in flatware in this price range, they are extremely heavy. But the real downfall is the blade design with is very thick. Although there is an edge ground on and it has tiny serrations, the knives just don't do a very good job cutting. As a test, I put some baby carrots on a plate and took turns slicing them while holding them with a fork. The two non-serrated but thin bladed knives had no problem slicing the carrots. The Glacier knife on the other hand didn't fair so well. Because of the thickness of the blade the knife had a difficult time with the carrots. Using a sawing action did not help. The only thing I could do was to keep increasing the pressure until finally the blade would chop through the carrot which would instantly go flying off the plate onto the floor.

While beautiful to look at and build like a battle tank the Nambe Glacier had too many drawbacks for me to pick it as my everyday flatware. I could have learned to live with the size and weight of the set although I would have preferred they scaled it down about 10%. The real deal breaker though was the knife. While I don't expect it to cut like fine cutlery or a steak knife I do expect it to be able to do rudimentary tasks and it failed miserably at those. As a special occasion set it would fine but it lost out for my everyday set.

I have this flatware that I purchased several years ago. I decided to add to my service. Nambe has changed the design and added a serrated edge to the knife. In my opinion, it defeats the purpose of the sleekness of the design. I'm pretty sure that the new knife edges will scratch the existing knives unless I some how keep them from rubbing each other as I open and close the drawer.

Great knife before some one decided to "improve" upon the design!

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