My first meeting with Raz was very short. I was introduced to him by Haim Yosef, the food photographer, who is a close friend of both of us. We were both cooking at a slow food event in Tel-Aviv and Raz ended up in the hospital that day. It wasn’t my fault but it was quite shortly after we met and let’s just say a sharper knife could have helped avoid it all... I’ll leave the details of the story vague, but the point of sharing this is to highlight Raz's long standing commitment to sustainability and the slow path our friendship took since that day, more than a decade ago. 

The second time we met, I was a guest for the first time at OCD, a memorable and unique experience and perhaps most of all, very unusual for a Tel-Aviv establishment at the time. Raz and OCD were trailblazers, bringing classic fine dining to Israel.

I’m a great admirer of this ambitious young man, who is both a dreamer and a doer. It was always clear to me that Raz is a leader and an early adopter, and as leaders in the fine dining cutlery industry, I was sure we would work together one day. We have collaborated twice now, with the second collaboration being a set of knives in memory of his mother, taking inspiration from the colors and patterns of her teapot collection.

For OCD, Raz reached out with a request for something that’s both a novelty and in keeping with the spirit of the restaurant. Drawing on the zero-waste mission which is at the heart of OCD, we chose this to lead our design. We chose a recycled polymer, made of local milk cartons, for our handle scales. We assembled these with Stainless Steel rivets and no glue whatsoever. If the handles bend or break, we can easily mount new ones on the same blade. The blade itself is 85-90% recycled steel, the entire knife is made of approx 95% recycled materials and the knife itself is 100% recyclable.