"You should have a good knife but cheap pots and pans that are heavy enough to kill someone with" and also the story about all of the students at the school stealing each other's expensive knives.
- Get a big new knife.
- Get a big wooden cutting board.
Too many people are suffering with a tiny kitchen knife or even an eating knife or bread knife, trying to cut their stuff on tiny plastic cutting boards. No wonder they hate cooking!
And you don't need an expensive kitchen knife, it just has to be big. All new knifes are sharp. When it's become dull after a year or two you can throw it away and get a new one, or get a better knife.
Edit: For all of you repeating "learn to sharpen" - that's nice, but if you deal with people in the real world, you know that they don't want to be bothered with sharpening their knives. It is better for them to get new knifes, rather than stick with dull knifes.
The best knife is also the one you will use. No need to be frugal with knifes, when a new knife costs less than the ingredients for your next meal.
There's almost certainly a business in your town (regardless of where you live) that will sharpen your knives for you. The one near me charges $1 per knife. Surely that's cheaper than buying a new one, not to mention less wasteful.
For most people it's probably too much of a hassle unless they have expensive knifes. Easy to pick up a new knife when you're at the department store, and keep the old knife for yard stuff.
One more thing for first time knife buyers: If you're going to chop a lot of onions, get a knife with a thin blade. If you're going to cut a lot of stakes, get a thick blade.
All you have to do is run the knife through it a few times for a decent sharpen. No power, no effort, no skill required.
If you're going through 10+lbs of veggies every night, the longer knife starts to make more sense. Still seems unnecessary for home cooking though.
- learn to sharpen it
The place where I bought my knife offered a sharpening class and sold stones. It’s meditative to sharpen, keeps your knife in good condition (vs mechanized commercial sharpeners) and saves money (vs outsourcing it). But I don’t see these classes offered much. There are good tutorials on YouTube, if that works for you.
I’ll also say, “big” is not so important past a certain point. I have a 10 and am generally very happy with it but you do need to clear more space /above/ your cutting board the longer your blade is.
And if someone is buying their first chefs knife they generally (as you correctly note!) will want a larger cutting board than they likely have now. So having a super sized blade (vs a more reasonable 8) amplifies the extent you will need to learn to tidy up and clear space before and while prepping (chopping).
In my defense: my family loves watermelon, we eat a ton of it, and I'm happy to have a special "Watermelon Knife".