Hi Charlie,
It depends a lot on culture. When I got started, it was a 6" Bowie style hunting knife to clean game–and a butcher knife to cut it up. Utility knives or other kitchen tools for the veggies.
.
Revolution #1 Some year later, in Japan, they gave me a nakiri and told me it would be great for those veggies.
Revolution #2 About 7 years ago, I decided to make home cooking a serious hobby. My Scandinavian and Scottish roots led me to choose a Wusthof 8" Classic Ikon–and later a 3 1/2" Wusthof Precision parer–and I was Europeanized. Learned to rock chop–use different parts of the Chef’s knife for different tasks: didn’t use my butcher knife as much . . .
But
That Seki Magoroku nakiri I was given was unbeatable for veggies–and I had a Japanese collaborator come over and show me how to push cut.
Revolution #3. My Japanese collaborator explained to me that back in Japan they had switched from nakiri to santoku, so I thought I’d give one a try–but an Americanized one. I ended up with a Shun Kaji–that looked a bit like my Classic Ikon–with a completely unique profile and damascus cladding over a sg-2 core.
Wow!
I switched to push cutting for everything–and my Shun Kaji hollow ground santoku displaced my Wusthof Classic Ikon as my effective Chef Knife–and I even got a small 4 1/2" sg-2 Kaji Petty to back it up.
I sent a flexible 9" SS slicer w/burnt handle to my morgue, and upgraded to an American Ken Onion 9"–keeping my Americanism alive.
I added several other American upgrades, including a 6" tojiro sandwich knife, and I was rolling . . .
Except
I had this almost genetic need to chop–and not that civilized European rock chopping!
Revolution #4. At Chowhound, Damiano showed us how he could do almost everything in his kitchen with a Chinese vegetable cleaver–and it seemed like a safe way to get chopping out of my system, so I shopped around and found an 8"X4" truly Chinese Shibazi Cleaver. Damiano was right–and I now had my chopper:
Given the muticultural SOCAL world I currently live in-especially with our local recent Chinese immigrant community–I’ve begun to look for ways to fuse those cultures in my batterie–and have even taken to repurposing a single beveled deba to retire my old butcher knife. Cultural fusion is where I’m thinking these days.
Ray