Small Palatinate cliché: Heidelberg is the city of philosophers and professors, home of elaborate beauty and chiselled subtlety, always striving for the highest spheres and Aristotelian perfection.
Mannheim is the city of proletarians and posers, no frills, unadorned and also proud of it, not a place of etiquette and ceremonies, but one where you get straight to the point.
Jakob Strobel and Serra
deputy head of the feature section.
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All nonsense, will reply Tristan Brandt, who with his biography at least refutes the clichés in culinary terms himself: In his restaurant "Opus V" in Mannheim he cooked himself two Michelin stars in 2016 with a highly ambitious, aromatic complex, detail-obsessed haute cuisine and four years long, before switching to the Heidelberg restaurant "959", in which he now serves a cuisine that concentrates on the essentials, completely without garlands and arabesques, devoid of any ambition for complications and pretense of multi-components - wrong world on the Rhine and Neckar.
A gilded pizza oven
However, the “959” is a restaurant that any horse-power-addicted proletarian poser from Mannheim could also like, because elegant restraint doesn’t count for much here. It glitters and shimmers and is glamorous everywhere, even the pizza oven is gold-plated, and hundreds of liquor bottles are strolling along the front of the building in a paternoster. The other walls are covered with art by Markus Lüpertz and AR Penck from the private collection of the owner, a Heidelberg entrepreneur with a penchant for high society, whose month and year of birth gave the restaurant its name.
Ever since Tristan Brandt became managing director and Timo Steubing promoted from sous chef to chef de cuisine, the place has been booming - thanks to a concept that seems like an alternative to the classic high kitchen, although both chefs were socialized in it, not with Hinz and Kunz, for example, but with Luminaries like Harald Wohlfahrt, Christian Bau and Thomas Kellermann: the kitchen is open all day, the menu ranges from schnitzel and goulash to turbot and poussin, lengthy menus are not served as a matter of principle.
This is one of the reasons why the mood is not at all sacral, but just as animated as in an inn, and only the encyclopedic selection of wines, including Burgundian rarities at used car bottle prices, reveals that you are not sitting in a conventional restaurant after all.
Brandt and Steubing have a simple claim: they only want to put the best on the plate and in doing so, avoid all the frills, all the playfulness and all the distractions.
That's why the pizza comes from an oven designed by the famous Neapolitan grandmaster Stefano Ferrara, prepared by an original Roman pizza maker who doesn't leave the flatbread in the heat for ninety seconds.
The result is a crunchy work of art in which the Taleggio cheese has the consistency of a cream, not a paste, the Lardo does not become cheeky despite its dominance and the porcini mushrooms still smell of fresh forest soil instead of lying slackly on the dough like Dalí clocks lie.