My turn to write a brief review/impressions. Thanks to Dave for making this happen. Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of time to cook since I have been busy with work. To make my time with the knife worth it I decided to cook "Sancocho" which is chicken soup on steroids. Basically you start with a sofrito, add celerry and then potatos, carrots, butternut squash, among other things which is the perfect test ground for knives.
To make thins interesting, I did an A/B test using the Maillet, a small Yanick, a small Radiona, and my small Bidinger. Long story short the best performer of the group was the Radiona, closely followed by the Yanick, then Bidinger and lastly the Maillet. I tried different ingredients and the Maillet just didn't perform as expected with onions (could not get a clean cut despite a fine tip and decent sharpness, the other 3 knives were great), carrots wedged a little bit and food release with more dense ingredients was ok (Radiona and bidinger were the best at this), at the end the Maillet just didn't cut it for me (pun intended). On the other hand the Radiona just took everything I threw at it, I have to say that Tomi's work is criminally underrated specially for the price.
Before I go any further, I want to say that I am not an expert cook, and probably some of the difficulties I faced were due to skills. I also don't have the knowledge of some of the guys in here to diagnose if something is wrong (if anything).
Anyway continuing with the knife, it arrived in good condition and sufficiently sharp; I was able to cut paper towel; however, not 100% clean cuts but there was no need for me to sharpen it, all the other knives where in a similar state. I did notice that the knife has been sharpened a few times and probably at different angles since the edge was not completely uniform. I wonder if the knife got thick behind the edge and that's what I experienced?
In terms of profile, I loved it, decently flat spot and felt really nice on the hand. The knife looks great and from an aesthetic POV is 10/10, a few areas of improvements could be the choil and spine. Both have slight sharp edges which could use more rounding specially considering the price point.
I cannot completely write off Maillet yet as I didn't have enough time to fully tested it out. I'll probably need to find another one and give it a go. The knife is now on it's way to the next participant.
*apologies for any grammar or spelling mistakes - english is my second language