From $29.95, williams-sonoma.com
Welcome to The Esquire Endorsement. Heavily researched. Thoroughly vetted. These picks are the best way to spend your hard-earned cash.
This cast iron skillet comes with a backstory. All cookware should, shouldn't it? So you can use it to make meals that provide the backdrop for more stories? In this case, it's a story of honoring roots. Lodge, the foundry America has trusted with cast iron since the early days of cowboying and sizzled meat, was originally called Blacklock; that's what Joseph Lodge named it when he founded it in Tennessee in 1896. A hundred and twenty-five years later, Blacklock is Lodge, and Lodge is a company to whom heritage means something. So it crafted and released a special line of cast iron called Blacklock—a circle made full. The Blacklock line falls in that sweet spot between cheap Lodge classic cast iron and upper-echelon-of-cookware cast iron from the likes of Smithey. It has more character, like the vintage cast iron you may've been hunting down. It's good stuff.