Have you seen this knife? Food truck owner devastated after her 'Pretty Boy' goes missing

Laura Dale has travelled the world with her ”Pretty Boy”.

It’s the name of a knife that she commissioned from a custom knife-maker in California about 10 years ago.

“He sent over a kit to make a mould of my hand, so the handle is fully customised to my grip,” Laura explains.

“There’s sections of onyx stone and 1000-year-old Californian redwood in the handle, and inlaid mother-of-pearl between the two.”

The whole process took more than a year, and cost more than a month’s wages.

As if it wasn’t perfect enough, the company was Aura Knives – only one letter away from her name.

“I thought it was pretty perfect,” she says.

It’s why Laura was devastated to come out to her car last Thursday (9 January) to find someone had prised open the doors and taken the knife – along with its three honing steels – from the glovebox.

Laura took over the running of Canberra’s cheekily named food truck, The G Spot, from her father, Andrew Dale, several years ago. It’s open four days a week between 6 and 11 pm, based in the carpark of the Gungahlin Lakes Golf Club.

“I normally take the knife kit home at the end of the day and bring it inside with me, but this just happened to be the only time I left it in the car,” she says.

She immediately reported the theft to police and published messages to local Facebook groups in the hope someone may have seen something.

“One woman who also lives in Palmerston said her car was tampered with on Thursday evening as well, so it seems there was a bit of a crew going around,” Laura says.

“I’ve got a heap of people actively on the lookout for it, and I’ve been searching all my photo galleries and folders for better, clearer photos of the knife, because while I’ve got heaps of photos of it, I’m always holding the handle, where it’s most distinctive.”

Laura describes the period in which she received the knife as a “pretty imprinting time of my life”.

“I’d just finished my chef apprenticeship and my partner at the time got it for me as a qualification present,” she says.

“And the same week it arrived, I did the World’s Greatest Shave and raised, like, $7000 for leukaemia.”

A few years later, in 2017, she took it on a part-business, part-pleasure tour of Europe, or – as she puts it – “three months of awesomeness”. And armed with her chef qualification, it was all well and good until she went to leave Barcelona in Spain.

“The authorities wouldn’t let me leave with it,” she explains.

“We’d already booked all these trains and plans to get to and from where we were going, but we ended up having to stay an extra week in Barcelona while we got it sorted.

“It cost an arm and a leg … but it’s kind of like buying a dog – there’s the initial cost, and then sometimes they need to go to the vet.”

On arrival at a friend’s place in Lyon in France, she decided to ship the knife back to Australia to avoid any more trouble and it ended up arriving the same week she returned, six weeks later.

“So it’s a knife that’s gone through some troubles and been all over the world.”

While the search continues, a friend has bought her a replacement knife set that enables business at The G Spot to go on interrupted.

“As long as I can cut and prep, that’s all I need.”

But they’re not the same.

“As a chef, these things are extensions of our arms, and who we are, so we need something that’s comfortable and reliable.”

Contact Laura Dale via phone (0402 523 122) or email ([email protected]) if you have any information.

Original Article published by James Coleman on Riotact.