Fante's Kitchen Wares online
Trolling the Web for kitchen gadgets is an occupational hazard around here. Sometimes it's vaguely disappointing; other times you find truly amazing things. A few weeks ago, while looking for bannetons, I came across the website for Fante's Kitchen Wares Shop in Philadelphia. Not only did the 102-year-old company, which has a brick-and-mortar shop in Philadelphia's historic Italian Market, have a terrific and reasonably priced selection of the often difficult-to-find cane baking baskets, it had about 5,000 other things too.
Can't find escargot utensils at your neighborhood kitchen store? Fante's has them, along with sourdough starter, beechwood butter paddle sets from Slovenia, marble pastry boards, truffle shavers and hammered copper Turkish coffee pots (for $16.99), complete with instructions on how to make the intense brew. In fact, the site is jammed with history, recipes, descriptions and how-to illustrations. Need replacement gaskets for your Bellman Espresso maker? Here they are, along with a hand-drawn parts list. Browse for charlotte molds and get a history of the dessert. And underneath the gorgeous photos of that solid brass duck press (a $1,559.99 impulse buy, maybe, since the copper Mongolian fire pots are currently out of stock) read a list of "fun duck facts." There are also links to foodie websites and publications, plus handy links to housewares manufacturers.
The original Fante family sold the company in 1980 to the Giovannucci family, which took the store online in 1999. Nick Giovannucci, the company's vice president, says they get a lot of their product ideas from their customers: "Sometimes it's a letter from a customer, sometimes it's research, sometimes customers come in who have relatives overseas ... it's the people we know." As for the stories on the website, Giovannucci says people like information. "There's a lot of interesting stuff," he noted. A beautiful understatement.
Fante's Kitchen Wares Shop, 1006 S. Ninth St., Philadelphia
-- Amy Scattergood
Photo by Amy Scattergood
