“He’s so intelligent,” Dr. Matthes said. “We talk about something, he goes home, reads up on it and develops a recipe.”
“Usually, patients say to us, ‘I know it’s healthy, but I don’t like it,’ ” Dr. Matthes added. “Now they are saying, ‘I never thought oats could taste so good!’ He’s a star chef, so he can make things delicious.”
André Nagy, whose partner, Kathleen Kuntzsch, was breast-feeding their newborn daughter in the hospital, agreed. He said the couple had chosen Havelhöhe in part because they had heard the food was so good. “Food is important, you’re here to heal,” said Mr. Nagy, who said his favorite dish was the sweet-potato casserole. “It’s regional, it’s organic; they probably cook better than I do.”
Not everyone at the hospital is completely onboard. There has been some grumbling, for example, about Mr. Wodni’s decision to drastically reduce the amount of meat served — it used to be twice a day, now it’s three times a week, plus a Friday fish dish — in favor of things like chickpeas and couscous.
“In general, the food is good,” said a heart patient, Waldemar Lichtneckert, in a recent television interview about the new menu. “But there could be some meat in there. And more sauce.”
As Mr. Wodni began slicing fish into uniform servings, saving the scraps for a broth, he said that now that the Havelhöhe program was up and running, he was stepping out of day-to-day cooking and into a more supervisory role. This was in part because his wife, an art historian, had landed a teaching job a good distance away, in the Eifel region outside Cologne, where they live with several other families in a commune in an old castle.
