Sabre Bistrot Flatware and Its Many Lookalikes
Of all the flatware patterns vying for a spot on your table, one has risen of late to become the It fork, spoon, and knife. That honor goes to Sabre’s Bistrot line of skinny French flatware—and the many variations and knockoffs it has inspired.
An elegant, well-crafted update of classic bistroware, itself an update of 18th-century wood- and bone-handled cutlery with visible rivets on the handles, Bistrot’s appeal may come from the fact that it’s produced in a confetti of colors. The company was founded in 1993 by husband-and-wife team Francis and Pascale Gelb, who applied his expertise as a goldsmith and her foodie focus to come up with an everyday line that disrupted the formality and predictability of tableware by, in their words, “combining utility with delight.”
Forged just outside of Paris of top-quality 18/10 stainless steel with resin handles, their designs have become ubiquitous: seemingly every retailer that sells cutlery—from Hawkins New York, Hudson Grace, and East Fork to Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and Urban Outfitters—has started offering pieces from the Bistrot collection. And plenty of others, like Ikea and Home Depot, have come up with something like them. Here’s a look.
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N.B.: The brand is no longer a mom ‘n pop: two big French investment companies took over majority ownership of Sabre in recent years, which also explains its enormous growth.
The colorful resin handles are composed of a BPA-free plastic that can be put through the dishwasher with a caveat: over time, heat can degrade the material and cause it to leach microplastics into the water system, where most but not all get filtered out.
