Squeezy olive oil bottles, Meghan’s pot filler tap and the rise of ‘cheffy’ kit in home kitchens

Social media ‘chefluencers’ and open restaurant kitchens have made chefs more visible and inspired aspirational gadget-buying

T he Duchess of Sussex is no ordinary home cook, but when Meghan appeared on Instagram this week at a hob presided over by a special pot filler tap , it spoke to a shift in the everyday kitchen, the rise of “cheffy” kit.

While the pot filler is now most often found in luxury residential kitchens, it was reportedly invented in the early 20th century as a functional fixture for commercial kitchens. It joins a wealth of other restaurant equipment to have infiltrated our homes, from squeezy olive oil bottles to stainless steel mixing bowl sets.

At Sous Chef, a UK-based independent speciality food brand, sales of chef presses are up 26%, while sales of chef’s trays are booming, according to Holly Thomson, the company’s food editor.

For Ella Risbridger, author of The Kitchen Book: Good Food for Every Day : “It’s an amazing thing, the blurring of lines between restaurant and home kitchens.” A byproduct of the increasing visibility we have of professional chefs at work, whether via open kitchens in restaurants or “chefluencers” on social media, the utilitarianism and gadgets of restaurant kitchens are increasingly aspirational. This week, in a home tour with Architectural Digest, Julianne Moore showed off her Ikea industrial shelves.

“People now can see what is happening in professional kitchens,” says Risbridger, “and likely, if they are watching The Bear or a lot of cheffy Instagrams, the algorithm knows that and knows what you might, might, want to buy for yourself.” From the white T-shirt to the Japanese Hasegawa chopping board , people want to channel Carmy and Syd as they make dinner midweek.

Thomson suspects it might have something to do with the economic climate, people are thinking: “‘I’m not going to spend 90 quid on a meal, but I might invest in these products that are going to help me take eating at home a bit more seriously.’” According to James Lawless, a spokesperson at David Mellor, this shift links back to the pandemic, which “reignited interest in home cooking”.

“Professional chefs’ equipment may have specialist functions, but it isn’t special,” says Lawless. “They are first and foremost tools to perform a particular function.”

For Thomson, they are “an extra piece of kit that adds a bit of ease, finesse, or streamlines the process”. Coming from a professional kitchen, where “you don’t have anything that takes up space that isn’t fully useful, used every day and has multiple purposes,” they’d have to be.

Of course, one person’s useful can be another’s waste of space. In the case of the pot filler tap, in an ordinary small kitchen that might be unnecessary, but, according to Helen Parker, the creative director of deVOL Kitchens, it “has become the must-have addition to a larger kitchen”.

Sometimes, you don’t know what you don’t know. As Thomson says of the squeezy olive oil bottle, which, at a few quid, is proof that this isn’t all about expensive equipment: “Precision squirting is just so useful, and once you’ve done it once, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is so much better than glugging oil out of a bottle.’”

For Risbridger, “the trick is that it’s nice to buy something fancy for a hobby, it’s often a shortcut to taking yourself more seriously … you can now access a reasonably cheap version of something professionals use, and that makes you feel more like a professional. Which increases confidence. Which makes the thing you make better, whether or not you could have achieved it without the gadget.”