Why this knive earns its place
The cook's knife is the one blade a kitchen cannot work without, and 10in is the volume-prep length. It gives you a cut long enough to go through a whole cabbage, a swede or a melon in a single pass rather than sawing at it, and enough height at the heel to keep your knuckles clear when you are guiding fast against the board. It is more knife than delicate work asks for, which is exactly why it belongs to the person doing the day's onions, not the person turning garnish.
The green handle is the hygiene half of the job. Colour-coded handles exist so that a blade's station is obvious at arm's length: in the scheme used across most UK kitchens green is the salad and fruit colour, which keeps the knife visibly separate from anything that has been near raw meat or fish. That visual separation is what makes the discipline survive a busy shift, when nobody has time to check where a blade has been. As for the blade itself, stainless holds a working edge as long as it gets a few passes on a steel before service; wash and dry it straight after use rather than leaving it in a sink of water, and store it on a rack or in a guard rather than loose in a drawer where the edge takes a beating.
