Nella Food Equipment & Kitchenware

first and foremost, I am fascinated by the fact that, before me the highest star rating was a three.
an absolute diamond in the rough this location is, that looks tiny on the outside, but has some serious inventory, im pretty sure that if they don’t have what you need right away, they can get it, in a pretty quick fashion. the customer service at this location is top notch, I had a tiny question about a knife, which turned into a 30 minute lesson about knifes. everything and anything was discussed, from the type of handle I could get, and what would be best for my hand (I had a massive hand injury a couple of years ago, so function with my fingers is not always fun) every detail and aspect about the set of knives I would be inquiry about was looked into. I would also like to bring focus to the awesome layout of the displays throughout the store, almost all the displays looked to be stocked, with no empty hangers, or spacing wasted at all. I will fully admit, im not a person in the food industry, but I enjoy having higher quality items at my home to cook with, I don’t see the point of buying a 20 dollar item every six months when I can buy a $ 100 item, that will last me a decade (case and point my industrial French fry cutter)
this location is off of the downtown core, but has excellent accessibility from a transit standpoint, lots of street parking, and a parking lot just across the street.
great service
great location
excellent bang for you’re money.

Unethical business. They bought several website domains with the name of my parents’ small business in the same industry so that they can’t create a website with their business name. I’d never set foot here.

It was about 5 years ago and I still remember the disgusting way I was treated at Nella. I had purchased a carving knife and found if unsatisfactory and returned a few days later and asked if I could exchange it. I was willing to pay additional for a higher grade knife. The sales man/​owner? was having a heated argument with another unsatisfied customer. When he got rid of her he turned to me and tried to humiliate me in front of my wife for thinking I could walk in his store and ask for an exchange. He was still yelling insults at me as we hurried to escape his abuse. The guy was a boor and a bully. I can not recall ever experiencing such hostile rude treatment at any kind of retail business.
How do they stay in business?

I brought my set of four cooking knives (three sizes of chef’s knife from Haenckels and a Chinese cleaver) for sharpening. I finally picked up my knives today, and the outcome was not the best — the 8″ chef’s knife is not strictly convex (sorry, I’m a mathematician :)) and all knives have some harsh edges at the base where the blade meets the tang. But they are old knives and the edge on the blades is decent enough. However, my real problem, and the reason for the low rating, is that I was blatantly misled by their staff about how long the job would take! And no apologies, just feeble excuses afterwards!
The story is: I emailed their staff to find out when I could expect my knives back, and I was told «15 minutes at the Norfinch location and 2 – 3 days at the Queen street location.» I took them at their word, and brought my knives in. However, the sharpening job actually took 13 days. From start to finish — 13 days. That’s a long time to spend cooking with the back-​up knives from Loblaws. I asked repeatedly about my knives and mentioned the emailed promise of a 2 – 3 day turnaround time, but I was basically told «stuff happens.» The excuse provided was the Canada Day holiday — but of course that only accounts for 2 days’ worth of delay. When I persisted with my emails, I was met with silence. When I finally picked up my knives, I explained the situation again, and the promise of a rapid turnaround time, and I was told «there are never guarantees with sharpening.»
I really got the impression that Nella didn’t particularly care about my customer experience — they were too busy sharpening the knives of the various professional chefs participating in Summerlicious (as they mentioned) to worry about whether my sharpening job took 5 days or 13 days. I will have to look for someone else to sharpen my knives in future.

I had passed by this spot before but never had a chance to go in but after visiting their other spot. This place a downer especially after visiting their other location.
So with that out of the way the setup is more of an industrial/​office space just converted into a display area. Just rack after rack of items (somewhat organised).
This would have been acceptable had the customer service been better. But nope not here I had to ask for help a few times before the cashier decided to leave the empty main area to help me out.
Prices are decent for some items and they don’t carry many high end items unlike the other store. There is a commercial equipment area upstairs that I didn’t venture. The variety is somewhat limited and apparently one gets a discount if one is student of a culinary school (I assume this is to entice students from the college nearby)
If you are looking for variety/​value you can do a lot better.

Nella’s vast selection and below-​average prices had me seriously excited when I walked in for what should have been the first purchase of many – a beautiful, 10-​inch frying pan that turned out to be defective (it did not sit flat on my ceramic burner). When I returned with pan and receipt in hand, the store would not replace it but instead directed me to the manufacturer in California – a slow and expensive non-​solution to my problem. I live walking distance from Nella and had looked forward to updating my kitchen gear there. I’d rather take my business to a store that values customer loyalty and stands behind what it sells.

Come here for all your fancy kitchen prop needs. If you’re a cooking school student you get a discount — unfortunately I wasn’t able to convince the cashier of my lifelong culinary education so I didn’t get said discount, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t practically empty the store’s shelves anyway.
I did, however, pick up some fancy pastry knives, bowl scrapers and clear bowls in a dizzying range of sizes for the ever-​impressive ‘mise en place’ spread that is so satisfying to complete and looks great on a kitchen counter.
Also, they have those wide paddle knives that are excellent for sandwich spreads — $ 1.59 each. For example, smearing an entire tub of Cheese Magic hummus or herb & garlic cream cheese onto one side of a bagel. You know?
TIP: If you want to buy one of those fancy chrome wire racks that all chefs have, you can buy custom ones here but they’re $$ and have to be custom ordered. I picked up the same thing (
) at Canadian Tire for a fraction of the price, where they often go on sale.
Finally, I hear that at the other Nella locations you can take cooking classes taught by megacute boys. «I’m in!»