W
HEN THE CLASSICALLY TRAINED CHEF WOLFGANGPUCKcame to LA in 1975, he started cooking at one of the city’s most exclusive French restaurants, Ma Maison.
Puck quickly earned himself a reputation for his thick Austrian accent, fiery temper, and food that thrilled the hard-to-please Hollywood set. The restaurant, which had been on the verge of bankruptcy, began to thrive. Puck put in eighteen-hour days in the kitchen and lived in a retirement village close by. He would often forget to cash his salary check. After all, what did he need money for? He was busy feeding lobster salad and warm salad of preserved duck to the likes of Gene Kelly, Orson Welles, Cary Grant, and Sylvester Stallone.
It was not long before talk turned to Puck opening his own restaurant. His idea was along the lines of an Italian eatery with checkered tablecloths and a Mt. Vesuvius mural on the wall, hard-ly the stuff of empires. He could have been just another talented chef with dreams of his own restaurant. But Puck was different thanks to the beautiful, glamorous, entrepreneurial, and pushy Barbara Lazaroff. They met in 1982 in a Hollywood nightclub and married in 1983. Lazaroff urged Puck to demand a payrise at Ma Maison and get serious about his future. They started planning a
new restaurant in West Hollywood, with Lazaroff playing the role of designer and project manager. (She ditched the checked table-cloth idea fast.) The place would be called Spago, slang for spaghetti in Italian. A consortium of twenty investors put up
$70,000 capital for the venture, which opened in 1982 above a car rental business on Sunset. Lazaroff came up with the idea of an open kitchen so that diners could watch the theatre of Wolfgang Puck at work as they ate.
On opening night, Spago ran out of food. Hollywood society began fighting ferociously for one of Spago’s window tables. The restaurant declined three hundred restaurant reservations a day.
“Spago barely acknowledged average people, who were escorted to the back room, if they were lucky,” reported the New York Times.
Spago was not as snooty as Ma Maison (which had an unlisted phone number) but the general public would typically wait three months for a Spago table. Puck learned to cater to this notorious-ly needy, fickle celebrity clientele, keeping a private menu for reg-ulars, ever mindful that they always need to feel special and be in the limelight.
The pug-nosed Wolfgang Puck was born in in 1949 in St. Viet an der Glan in Austria. His father was a coal miner and his mother cooked in a restaurant. He was sent to work in the kitchen as an apprentice at the age of fourteen. After eighteen years of classical training, Puck came to the U.S. in 1973 by way of France where he worked in Paris, Monaco, and Provence, a region that would great-ly inspire his cooking style. He cooked in New York and Indianapolis before his arrival in Los Angeles.
The Puck/Lazaroff partnership was a formidable one: the combination of Puck’s food and Lazaroff ’s drive, dealmaking, and organizational abilities came at a time when a wave of culi-nary change was sweeping California. Puck was one of a handful of chefs moving away from laborious, overly rich, formal, and fussy food, opting instead for new, fresher flavors that showcased
the produce of the area. This more informal approach inspired dishes such as Puck’s “Jewish” pizza (smoked salmon, crème fraiche, chives, red onion, and a dollop of caviar), Sonoma baby lamb with braised greens and rosemary, and grilled Californian goat cheese salad. Investors clamored to be a part of future Puck projects.
A second restaurant, Chinois, followed a year later, an East-meets-West fusion restaurant serving raw fish, wontons, and Szechuan flavors complete with Lazaroff ’s dramatic, extravagant interiors, fine art, antiques, custom-made light fittings, and car-pets. Again Puck and Lazaroff triumphed (and inspired countless copycat restaurants around the world). As word spread, opportuni-ties to extend Puck’s name into a brand went way beyond best-selling cookbooks—there were plenty of other high-margin ways to turn Wolfgang Puck into a household name.
By the early 1990s, there were four restaurants grossing $25 million a year, a $10 million packaged foods deal, and a series of pizza-cafes in the planning. Lazaroff was extremely savvy about forging relationships with appliance makers, for example, prom-ising them editorial coverage in the lifestyle magazines that loved to write about Puck for their patronage. In years to come, Puck would become as famous as many of the people he cooked for and amass a $300 million fortune from fine dining, cafes, frozen pizzas, tinned soups, blended coffees, saucepans, cutlery, cook-books, syndicated columns, and television programs. He has designed food for airlines, has more than forty restaurants, a catering business that handles functions for the White House’s Governors Ball, rock stars, royalty, and Swifty Lazar’s Oscar night dinner.
On the surface, his personality was not really suited to schmoozing. He was shy and prone to screaming in the kitchen (that would have been fun to watch), but he got over his aversion to coming out and pressing the flesh.
In 1997, Space Beverly Hills opened as their flagship restaurant with an indoor garden, mahogany and Italian marbles, fountains, and Lazaroff ’s quirky color palette. The original Spago suffered, closing in 2001, the same year Puck signed an estimated $20 mil-lion deal with ConAgra, the second largest retail food supplier in the U.S., to license Wolfgang Puck food products.
Puck has always been frank about his lack of financial skills, claiming to fall asleep at the accountant. He deals with money pres-sures by gaining weight. (He put on twenty-five pounds in the lead-up to Spago opening.) Not every Wolfgang Puck venture has worked. A frozen dessert venture flopped, a Malibu restaurant could not survive seasonal fluctuations, and Puck and Lazaroff divorced amicably in 2002. Lazaroff once described their partner-ship as Puck being able to “laugh and play but I’m the one that takes the shit.” Puck remains the president and CEO of Wolfgang Puck worldwide. Lazaroff remains on the board of directors.
An estimated 500,000 people eat Puck’s food in some shape or form every month. Wolfgang Express cafes can be found in airports around the country. Puck’s move into the mainstream can be cred-ited to the late Johnny Carson, who used to order up stacks of Puck’s woodfired pizzas, stick them in the freezer and reheat them after his show. More than 5 million Wolfgang Puck pizzas are sold each year.
One thing has remained consistent throughout his career besides his duck sausage pizza—a monumental workload. He upholds the theory that people who only work twelve hours a day can never be successful. Puck’s ex-wife Barbara Lazaroff told New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl: “He thinks I don’t work hard because I need more than two hours sleep.”
NOTES
“Spago barely acknowledged . . .” Weinraub, Bernard. “For the Old Hollywood, Last Suppers at Spago,” New York Times, 3.29.01, p.14.
“Laugh and play” Reichl, Ruth. Comfort Me with Apples, Random House, 2001.
“He thinks I . . .” Reichl, Ruth. Comfort Me with Apples, Random House, 2001.
REFERENCES
Reichl, Ruth. Comfort Me with Apples. Random House, 2001.
Associated Press, BusinessWeek, Chicago Tribune, Florida Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, USA Today, Variety