The Moka Express — Alfonso Bialetti's 1933 octagon from Lake Orta that made every Italian kitchen an espresso bar. Alfonso opened the Crusinallo aluminum workshop in 1919; the 1933 Moka is named for Mokha, Yemen.
Best for The octagonal Moka Express and the in-house roastery in Coccaglio, Brescia.
Bialetti's own site marks 1919 as the year the company began at its Coccaglio workshop outside Brescia, more than a decade before Alfonso Bialetti's octagonal Moka Express — the aluminum stovetop pot from Lake Orta that turned Italian kitchens into espresso bars — arrived in 1933. The company still operates its own roastery, La Torrefazione Bialetti, alongside the cookware lines that made the name a household fixture. Bialetti frames its identity around continuity: the site's own language, 'Reinventiamo il caffè dal 1919' (we've been reinventing coffee since 1919), and its claim to more than ninety years spent making 'the taste of being together.' The Moka's eight-sided aluminum body was engineered to distribute heat evenly across the base, forcing water up through the grounds under steam pressure — a design essentially unchanged since its debut and still the reference point for stovetop coffee worldwide. Recent decades have added licensing runs with Dolce & Gabbana, a Netflix tie-in, and The North Face, extending the brand into fashion and outdoor gear without retiring the core pot. What ships from Coccaglio today ranges from the original Moka through pressurized and electric variants, all roasted in-house rather than sourced out, which is unusual among mass-market Italian coffee names.
Hananoya has bent Kiso cypress and sawara wood into magemono food containers in Narai-juku since 1937, continuing a trade its owners trace to Edo-period magemono makers in the same post town. The shop steams and curves each oval or round form by hand, stitching the seams with cherry bark to make ohitsu rice tubs, sushi tubs, steamers, and bento boxes sold from its two Narai storefronts.
Best for A magewappa bento box or cherry-bark-stitched ohitsu rice tub
Paris professional kitchen outfitter since 1921 — copper cookware, cutlery, and working-chef essentials.
Best for Professional copper cookware and knives for chefs since 1921, from Les Halles
La Bovida was founded in 1921 as a small meat company and later expanded into professional kitchen equipment supply. In 1925, it merged with the Godefroy Spice Shop, forming an excellent firm specializing in quality raw materials and kitchen utensils for professional chefs. The merger gave La Bovida its enduring symbol: the Caravelle ship. Located on Rue Montmartre near the Étienne Marcel metro station, not far from the former Les Halles neighborhood, La Bovida has served butchers, charcuterie shops, and professional kitchens for over a century. Only recently did the company open its doors to the general public, allowing home cooks to browse the shop's curated selection. Inventory includes top-quality ergonomic zesters, icing bags, pepper mills, coffee sets, corkscrews, whipped cream siphons, tableware, sauté pans, and much more at competitive prices. The store remains a destination for working chefs seeking professional-grade equipment and Paris's culinary tradition of quality materials and craftsmanship.
Yamaka Ogimura Shikkiten has sold lacquerware from its Kiso-Hirasawa storefront since founding in 1912, now run by third-generation proprietor Ogimura Minoru. The shop stocks everyday pieces such as cylindrical cherry-blossom-lacquered cups and red-rubbed cups and plates.
Best for Third-generation lacquer bowls and trays from a 1912-founded Hirasawa shop
Yamaka Ogimura Shikkiten (山加荻村漆器店) has traded lacquerware from the same address on the main street of Kiso-Hirasawa, Shiojiri, since its founding in Meiji 45 — 1912. The town is now a nationally protected preservation district for its lacquer-trade townscape, and the shop is one of its longer-running retailers.
The business is currently led by third-generation proprietor Ogimura Minoru, who has been covered in regional press (including the Nikkei) for the range of goods and approach he brings to a century-old family shop. The shop maintains an active blog, running since 2015 with well over a thousand entries, documenting both new products and the everyday use of lacquerware in the home.
On the shelf, Yamaka Ogimura carries pieces meant for daily use rather than display alone: cylindrical bowls finished in a cherry-blossom lacquer pattern, and cups and small plates in a red-rubbed (akazuri) finish that shows the wood grain through the coating. The shop's own framing emphasizes lacquerware as something to live with day to day, not a special-occasion object.
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