I was trolling through The Kitchen blog which I highly recommend. It is part of the Apartment Therapy website and has a nice mix of kitchen equipment finds, store reviews, and food and recipe advice.
One store that The Kitchn wrote about back in 2007 is Fante’s Kitchen Wares Shop out of Philadelphia, PA. The physical store is over 100 years old, and there is also an online shop, but what sets this kitchen store apart from others is its bewildering amount of kitchen items. Just look at the rolling pin page as an example.
But Fante’s goes even further. On the product category pages, they also put helpful kitchen tips and information on how to make better shopping choices and even go so far as to put recipes and public service announcements. For instance, the ‘honey’ page warns that honey should not be fed to infants under one year of age. They even have pages dedicated to informing about plastics, coffee beans, how to choose cookware and many other topics. This kitchen store has truly gone the extra mile, and after seeing how many pages there are with unique content, I can truly appreciate the effort that went into this online store.
With that said, even though Fante’s offers a wide range of products, the site is pretty basic and cluttered. It is not so much navigation as it is exploration, and their store directions, privacy policy and contact pages are buried along with all the kitchen products. However, there is some charm to the simple chaos too, and browsing through Fante’s is akin to rummaging through an antique store or used-book shop. Just reading through the categories will beg you to click and see what is offered: ‘patriotic cookie cutters’ and ‘Mongolian fire pot’ were two that piqued my curiosity. Then again, some categories are so basic that they make one curious for other reasons such as ‘banana‘. What I found was a selection of amusing and probably not-so-useful banana gadgets such as the slicer pictured above.
Regardless of the site’s shortcomings, Fante’s Kitchen Wares Shop is a useful resource. It might not be the site where you end up purchasing an item online, but it could very well be that place where you start looking for something that is hard to find. And even if you don’t find it, chances are you will see something else of interest.
