TV review
Maltster vs. Wassmer
“Kitchen Impossible” is when the star chef has to call Grandma to defeat Tim Mälzer
Looks close, but still fit a few sheets in between: Tim Mälzer wants to make star chef Sven Wassmer sweat on “Kitchen Impossible”.
© RTL /picture alliance/Gian Ehrenzeller
In the third duel of the new season of “Kitchen Impossible”, Tim Mälzer meets star chef Sven Wassmer and is at least mentally in top form. As the “savior of culinary art” he wants to give his opponent a humiliating defeat.
Tim Mälzer on the skateboard is about as absurd as a hippopotamus in ballet. When star chef Sven Wassmer cruised towards him on the first “Kitchen Impossible” date with blowing hair and a toothpaste smile, he grumbled rather mousy: “This is the perfect world: young, good-looking, talented.” But he didn’t let so much youthful coolness demoralize him. After all, shortly before he had proclaimed himself the “savior of culinary art”. So he grabbed the board and… well, well, um.
After 50 episodes of “Kitchen Impossible”, Mälzer now has the master’s certificate for something else: teasing the competition with adventurous and unsolvable tasks. When he looked into the box, even the relaxed Swiss man lost his smile. He got to do with “real pig tasks”. And was so off track for a short time that he tried the telephone joker. Grandma’s tips should put him on the road to victory.
The highlights of the duel Mälzer vs. Wassmer
The concept is the same: Tim Mälzer duels with a chef. Two tasks have to be completed at two locations each with four original chefs (whose dishes the opponents have to recreate). A jury evaluates the result and awards points. The winner of the duel is the one with the most points.
These chefs had to prove themselves:
Tim Mälzer can’t help it. He loves to compete with the who’s who of top gastronomy. Or as he said: “Challengers, to whom I shouldn’t even hand a drinking bottle on paper.” Sven Wassmer is therefore a godsend for him. Wassmer has been Culinary Director at the Grand Resort in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, since 2019. This means that the 35-year-old is the head of the two-star restaurants “Memories” and “Verve by Sven”, which also has one star. Wassmer is one of the “young wild ones” of the New Swiss Alpine cuisine and conjures up exactly what maltsters hate: frippery with tweezers. Nevertheless, the Hamburger describes him as one of the three best chefs in Switzerland.
They had to do the following:
Tim Mälzer has to cook at the vegan restaurant KLE in Zurich (Switzerland) with original chef Zineb “Zizi” Hattab: smoked carrot tartar and BBQ mushroom sandwich
Sven Wassmer cooks in Munich with chef Graciela Cucchiara in the delicatessen with restaurant: Vincisgrassi (a special lasagna)
At the Klösterle restaurant in Lech am Arlberg (Austria), Tim Mälzer is dealing with modern alpine cuisine by Ethel Hoon and Jakob Zeller: tirtten & pepperoni dip as well as char & nettle
Sven Wassmer cooks a traditional dish in Markus Dirr’s butcher’s shop in Endingen am Kaiserstuhl: aspic.
The aversion to risk
If the opponents have learned anything from the last few seasons, it’s that Mälzer doesn’t like to copy modern small-small avant-garde kitchens. If it then also goes into the vegan corner, the horror for the hamburger is perfect. So Wassmer’s decision to let Mälzer cook just that was hardly surprising. He played it safe.
The lack of willingness to take risks among the challengers is sometimes tiring, and not just for maltsters. It’s not for nothing that the saying goes: no risk, no fun. A little more gambling and a wink instead of dogged ambition and fear of defeat would add to the entertainment factor. Especially since Mälzer has had to cook dishes from this culinary corner so often that he finds his way around it very well. Still, he doesn’t enjoy it. Again and again he complained recently that he wanted more heart and less intellectual fiddling with the tasks.
His wish was by no means Wassmer’s order. He had him cook vegan dishes in Zurich in “meat guise” aka “new modern rags” (maltsters). On the Arlberg, Mälzer then tried his hand at naive hope and dreamed of a real alpine dairyman. Instead, he was served modern alpine cuisine. “It’s like free jazz, it doesn’t make any sense,” he grumbled and annoyed. The otherwise confident analyst stumbled.
Nice is the little brother of …
Nevertheless: On the game board of “Kitchen Impossible” no one knows how to move as gallantly as Tim Mälzer. Not least because he is a master of mental uppercuts and charming psychological terror. But also because he knows how to choose tasks that transport emotions, traditions and culture. He doesn’t shy away from being edgy and extravagance. This is entertainment.
So he let Wassmer “ride” through Munich as a would-be Southern cowboy with a leather jacket on a Vespa (the embarrassment was the point of the thing), and then he was first intimidated by the great three-star chef Jan Hartwig and then served a supposedly mean lasagna allow. But it was tough and turned out to be an analytical jigsaw puzzle. There was nothing in it, absolutely nothing prepared in a traditional way. The original chef Graciela Cucchiara was also unconventional – a real original.
Just like Markus Dirr, in whose butcher shop Wassmer first had to cut the meat from the pig himself in order to then make a plate aspic. A dish that raised the hairs on the back of Wassmer’s neck. “A real pig job,” he grumbled. And then he called his grandmother. Your tips were pure gold.
Tim Mälzer: “Your performance: killer”
While Mälzer threw inflationary terms like “brilliant” and “brilliant” around while cooking and praised himself, Wassmer practiced silence. He fought, he fought well, but he fought for himself. Instead of emotional outbursts à la Mälzer, the Swiss showed himself to be emotionally rather slow-moving. It wasn’t unsympathetic, but it wasn’t thrilling either. Quietly, far from his comfort zone, he muddled through the really really difficult (sorry!) tasks without scales or even tweezers.
Wassmer was sometimes miles away from the original recipes, but the jury liked it. They rewarded the chef’s perseverance and diligence with a warm shower of points. With an average of 14 points, he showed Mälzer (12.6) a long nose. In the end, he had to benevolently admit: “Your performance: killer!”
After the win at the start of the season against Björn Swanson, Mälzer had to put up with the second loss in a row. In the coming issue, it’s against cook Viktoria Fuchs.
“Kitchen Impossible” can be seen every Sunday from 8.15 p.m. on Vox and in Online stream on RTL+