In all her travels around the globe, Lynn Hillaby found herself in cooking stores noting down and collecting must-have kitchenwares: Moroccan tajines, French egg crackers, British bean frenchers. She’d end up paying overweight luggage fees for hauling copper pots and arriving home with tajines that turned to rubble. “You learn a lot about a culture from what they’re cooking and their implements,” she says. “You go to Morocco and you see some things that are so far from our culture, and yet we’re making very similar foods.”
Lynn’s transition from collector to importer, opening up Hillaby’s Tools for Cooks in 2011, was a natural one. She already had years of stock lists and a passion for cooking and inspiring others to cook. “Cooking is the ultimate gift,” she says. “ ‘I like this and I think you will too.’”