From Pastry Chef to Knife Designer: The Story Behind the KUF - Liong Mah Design

From Pastry Chef to Knife Designer: The Story Behind the KUF

Most pocket knives are designed by people who love knives. The KUF was designed by someone who spent his career thinking about cutting - just in a very different room.

Before Liong Mah founded Liong Mah Design, he worked as a professional pastry chef, including time in prestigious New York City restaurants. Years of precise, repetitive cutting work gave him something most knife designers don't have: a professional cutter's understanding of exactly how a blade should meet its material.

The insight: a chef's geometry in a pocket knife

Spend enough hours with a chef's knife and you internalize its geometry - the way the edge sits low, below your knuckles, so the full length of the blade works with a natural forward motion. It's one of the most refined cutting tools ever developed.

Liong's question was simple: why doesn't a folding knife work like that?

The answer became the KUF - the Kitchen Utility Folder. It's one of the only folding knives on the market with a cutting edge that sits lower than the handle, borrowing the chef knife's edge-to-handle ratio so slicing takes less effort. Meat, vegetables, packaging, rope: the geometry that makes a chef's knife glide does the same work in pocket-knife form.

As Liong has explained it, the knife was never really meant to replace a kitchen knife - it's for all the moments you need to cut something, food included, and the tool in your pocket is a folder. The kitchen thinking just makes that folder cut better.

A landmark design

The original KUF was a landmark piece for Liong Mah Design - the knife that proved a culinary background wasn't a detour from knife design but an advantage. Reviewers and collectors noticed immediately: here was a production folder that thought about cutting the way a chef does.

The design has evolved through several generations since, each refining the formula:

  • The original KUF - the landmark: modified sheepsfoot blade with the edge below the handle, titanium frame lock.
  • KUF V2 - built by Reate, with an innovative top flipper deployment.
  • KUF EDC 3.0 - a more pocket-friendly 3-inch take in Elmax steel with monoblock construction.
  • KUF 3.5 - the current flagship: 3.5-inch blade in CPM Magnacut, contoured titanium monoblock, ceramic bearings.

Through every version, the core idea hasn't changed: a folding knife that cuts like it learned its manners in a professional kitchen.

What the KUF says about the brand

The KUF is Liong Mah Design in miniature. Refined simplicity over ornament. Real cutting performance over spec-sheet boasting. And a willingness to borrow brilliance from outside the knife world - because the best idea for a pocket knife turned out to come from a pastry kitchen.

It's also why the company's knives feel different in hand. They weren't designed to look like they cut well. They were designed by someone who cut for a living.

The KUF family today

Want to hear it in his own words? Liong tells the story himself on The Knife Junkie Podcast, Episode 498.

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