6 Kitchen Gadgets Nobody Asked For (But Everyone Needs)

Every kitchen has a junk drawer, and every junk drawer deserves better junk. Forget the immersion blender you registered for and never use — these are the gadgets that actually get pulled out when guests are watching. None of them will make you a better cook. All of them will make you the reason people remember your dinner party.

1. Pirate Corkscrew — Somewhere between a bar cart and a Halloween costume, this corkscrew has a peg leg for a handle and a hook for a — well, you'll see. It opens wine exactly as well as a normal corkscrew, which is to say the joke is the entire feature set, and that's fine.

2. Pizza Slice Night Light — A single glowing wedge of plastic pepperoni pizza, plugged into the wall, guiding you to the bathroom at 2 a.m. It provides zero nutritional value and roughly the same amount of light as a phone flashlight, but it commits to the bit harder than anything else in this list.

3. Golden Toilet Mug — A ceramic mug shaped like a tiny golden toilet, for drinking coffee out of what is unmistakably a toilet. It is dishwasher safe, which somehow makes it worse. Great for the coworker who's already emotionally checked out of the job.

4. Banana Bunker Protective Case — A hard plastic shell shaped exactly like a banana, designed to protect an actual banana from getting bruised in a bag. It is, technically, a solution. It is also a bright yellow banana-shaped case that you now have to explain every single time someone opens your lunch bag.

5. Eddingtons Egg Cuber — Takes a perfectly good hard-boiled egg and squeezes it into a cube, because eggs having corners is apparently a thing people wanted. There is no practical benefit to a cube-shaped egg. There is, however, a very real chance someone at brunch asks "wait, how," and that's the whole point.

6. OTOTO Nessie Loch Ness Monster Soup Ladle — The handle is Nessie's neck and head, so when you ladle soup, her little face rises dramatically out of the pot like she's checking on dinner. It is the single most delightful piece of soup-adjacent equipment ever produced, and no one asked for it.

The thing all six of these have in common: not one of them is trying to be a better version of an existing kitchen tool. They're not disrupting anything. A corkscrew doesn't need a peg leg, a night light doesn't need to be pizza, and an egg definitely doesn't need corners. That's exactly why they work as gifts — nobody puts "novelty egg cuber" on their wedding registry, which means nobody else is getting them one. You will be the only source.

Buy one for the person whose kitchen is already a shrine to bad puns and worse decisions. Buy two if you're not sure which of these fits them better — you're right, none of them do, and that's fine too.