Generally speaking, flatware has one job: Get food from your plate to your mouth. But it&#;s also part of your whole dining room presentation, so it should also look good and hold up to everyday use. To find the best silverware sets that succeed in both form and function, I overloaded my silverware organizer with 9 popular flatware styles and used them all for a few weeks to see how they felt in my hand&#;and how well they held up in the not&#;so-delicate hands of my kids. And, yes, I put them all in the dishwasher. Repeatedly.
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Before I ordered enough flatware to supply a small restaurant, I spent a lot of time researching different sets, with a goal of offering a variety of styles, finishes, and price points. I narrowed down my shortlist based on materials, versatility, variety, popularity, and cost. I also spent a lot of time reading customer reviews to ensure that, overall, the people who&#;d been using these sets at home were happy with their purchases; if a set had a lot of negative reviews, I didn&#;t even bother testing it for inclusion on this list.
Whether you like your flatware shiny, matte, ornate, or completely unadorned, there&#;s a set for you below. Keep reading to see how each of the nine best silverware sets lived up to the hype.
Made In&#;s DTC cookware and tableware is manufactured responsibly in partner facilities around the world,and is used in restaurants from New York to Los Angeles and in between. The brand&#;s restaurant-quality stainless-steel flatware is my top pick for silverware sets to use at home, too, because it&#;s both casual and elegant. The handles have a curvy, timeless shape and there are zero embellishments (save for the tiny &#;made in Italy&#; stamped on the forks and spoons) so it would work with just about any kind of tablescape from shabby chic to super modern. Each piece is well balanced and substantial without being too big or heavy and the polished 18/10 stainless steel makes it resistant to corrosion and scratches. Given the quality and timeless appeal of this flatware, the price is pretty reasonable too; at the time of publishing you can get four five-piece place settings (20 pieces total) for just under $200. I&#;ve used this set at home for more than a year now, and though it shows some very minimal signs of heavy use, it still looks great.
Material: 18/10 stainless steel
Pieces in each place setting: Dinner fork, salad fork, tablespoon, dessert/teaspoon, dinner knife
Additional pieces available: No
Dishwasher-safe: Yes
Mepra Fantasia Flatware, 5-Piece Place Setting
It's hard to find colorful bistro-style flatware without those cheap-looking silver dots on bloated plastic handles, and it&#;s near impossible to find any two-tone flatware that doesn&#;t have at least a handful of customer complaints regarding subpar materials and durability issues. But this popular Italian-made line from Mepra is high quality&#;it&#;s made of 18/10 stainless steel with resin handles&#;and there are a number of color options, though the color availability varies by retailer. It&#;s also dishwasher-safe. Overall, it&#;s a great little set and, I do mean little&#;while most of the pieces are fairly comparable in measurement to the corresponding pieces in other flatware sets, the teaspoon is practically toddler-size and more like a dessert spoon or sugar spoon. But perhaps it was always meant to stir a tiny little cup of Italian espresso.
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Materials: 18/10 stainless steel and resin
Pieces in each place setting: Dinner fork, salad/dessert fork, tablespoon, teaspoon, dinner knife
Additional pieces available: Yes
Dishwasher-safe: Yes
My (admittedly not colorful) Mepra set on the left with its tiny spoon, next to Made In&#;s flatware set.
Sometimes I look at super modern flatware and just know the artsy shapes are not at all conducive to getting sufficient amounts of food from a plate or bowl into my mouth (Exhibit A: the three tiny tines on this fork, which looks like some sort of awful spork I&#;d be forced to use on a camping trip before giving up and using my bare hands to scoop cold beans straight from a can). No, I want my flatware to be as functional as it is stylish, which is why I love the Jaxson line from Fortessa. It gets its modern look from slender four-sided handles, which are nicely weighted and uniform across every utensil in the five-piece place setting (the knife handle is just barely bigger than the others) and almost perfectly round spoon heads. Importantly, the parts that are meant to hold food, like the fork tines, actually do. This flatware is made from 18/10 stainless steel, and though some retailers offer it with mirror-finished handles, I prefer the brushed handles for the contrast and visual interest.
18 refers to 18% chromium content, and the other number refers to the percentage of nickel content. There is no difference between 18/8 and 18/10. It's purely marketing. 18/0 however, has no nickel content, which means it won't keep its silver-like shine over the years.
The numbers 18/0, 18/8 and 18/10 refer to the percentages of chromium and nickel in the stainless steel alloy. The "18" refers to the chromium content, which gives flatware its rust-resistance properties, and the "8" or "10" refers to the nickel content, which gives it its silver-like shine and some rust-resistance. There is a lower quality flatware commonly available called 13/0 or 13 Chrome, which simply has 13% chromium content.
These numbers are merely "nicknames" for the lay person to use, and are only used for marketing efforts by flatware manufacturers. When a manufacturer purchases stainless steel from a steel mill, they purchase stainless steel Grade 304, which has a range of 18-20% chromium, and 8-10% nickel content. Grade 304 in flatware is usually at the lower end of that range. To keep the cost down, steel manufacturers will make grade 304 with 8.2% nickel, which clears the legal hurdle of calling it 18/10.
What does all this mean? It means that there is no difference between 18/8 and 18/10 stainless steel in flatware. The difference between the two is purely a marketing effort.
18/0 however, is a different story. It's made from the "Grade 400 series", which contains no nickel.
Keep in mind that these numbers do not refer to the weight of the stainless. If the weight is a concern to you, please ask your sales representative about the weight and feel of patterns you are interested in. As a general rule, the Silver Superstore does not sell stainless steel flatware that is flimsy, or bends easily.
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