At the Blue Cashew Kitchen Homestead in Uptown Kingston, quality counts. For the past six years, the kitchenware store at 37 North Front Street has been delivering the kind of durable, well-made pots, pans, blades, and gadgets that you won’t find at a big-box store or in the cooking aisle at your local supermarket. For owner J.T McKay, the emphasis on utility with a dash of style, along with an in-house kitchen that allows customers to test products and explore new culinary horizons, sets the shop apart in Kingston’s increasingly competitive market for high-end home goods.

“Our customers value quality,” said McKay. “They would rather spend X for something that’s going to last for years than half of X for something that’s going to be trash in a few months.”

The shop’s walls and display cases are full of legacy brands, some of which have been Blue Cashew staples since the business began in High Falls back in 2005. Along one wall, magnets hold in place a collection of glimmering steel kitchen blades from venerable German manufacturer Messermeister. On the spacious island countertop with a built-in gas range where the shop hosts kitchen classes there’s a stainless steel stand mixer by Swedish manufacturer Ankarsrum. McKay explains that the company got its start in the 17th century, manufacturing weapons for the Swedish Royal Family and — nearly unheard of among kitchenware companies — hand-tools all of its own parts.

“You won’t see a lot of electrics here because most of them are garbage and we don’t sell garbage,” said McKay. “It’s got to be well made, things you can actually fix if they ever break.”

Along with the $150 chefs’ knives and $750 stand mixers, the Blue Cashew offers items aimed at shoppers who want to add a little affordable flair to their kitchen. Brightly pattered Danish dish towels will last as long as 14 rolls of supermarket paper towels and with considerably more style. Then there’s the “disco sponge,” a glittery alternative to your basic counter scrubber that is both the shop’s cheapest and top selling item.

“They’re four bucks, they last four months, they never smell bad and it just makes every day better,” said McKay. “That’s the price of entry and it speaks to everybody.”

Then there’s the kitchen where customers can get hands-on experience with the Blue Cashew’s offerings at regular cooking classes. The classes, hosted by visiting chefs, take in a range of cooking styles — recent offerings include Korean glass noodles with spicy pork belly and the classic French fish stew bouillabaisse. During the store’s early days on Wall Street when high-end boutiques — now ubiquitous — were still a rarity, McKay said that the cooking classes helped bring in locals who might not have the money to be regular customers but could still appreciate working with high-quality utensils in a tricked out kitchen.

“When we first opened, we were kind of aspirational for a lot of the people in the area but the classes were what really seemed to create a community around us,” said McKay. “A lot of those people still come to the new classes, but there’s a whole new crop of people in town.”

That new crop included a rush of well-heeled residents of the five boroughs who moved to town with the disposable income to drop on the Cashew’s pricier items, as well as a taste for the hottest kitchenware trends, like the comically tiny whisks that were flying off the shelves recently. Once an outlier in high-end retail in a neighborhood of professional offices, eateries and hair salons, the Blue Cashew is now just one of a whole constellation of boutiques, design houses, and purveyors of bespoke home goods. But McKay said the influx of new money has been offset more recently by high inflation. Despite the challenges, he said, the Blue Cashew would continue catering to a customer base new and old alike who value timeless quality in a disposable age.