Hollywood on a plate: Wolfgang Puck

Wolfgang Puck

10 April 2012

Wolfgang Puck is the international A-list's favourite chef. Since he opened his iconic restaurant Spago on Sunset Strip in 1982, he has tempted the palates of everyone from Elizabeth Taylor and Sidney Poitier to John Travolta and Hugh Grant, not to mention every US president since Gerald Ford. The Cruises employ his culinary services for their private parties and are forever dining at his LA steakhouse Cut; he's done a dinner party for Barack Obama, and is responsible for the catering at the annual Oscar night Governor's Ball (last year, the greedy guests downed 1,000lb of wild salmon, 1,200 oysters and 15lb of edible gold dust, alongside 1,600 chicken and truffle pies).

Now Puck is bringing his inimitable brand of celebrity catnip to London. An American steak-house, also called Cut, is opening next spring at 45 Park Lane, a new boutique hotel owned by the Dorchester Collection, at the behest, it seems, of Sir Elton John. 'A lot of my customers felt London needed it,' Puck explains. 'Elton told me that Cut was his favourite restaurant. And when I saw Michael Caine last week – he and his wife Shakira are old friends – he was so excited when I told him we were opening.'

We meet at The Dorchester where Puck is staying for a couple of days to oversee the progress of his new restaurant. I am surprised but relieved to see that although he is a constant presence on American TV, and admits to being 61, he appears free of Botox, facelifts, hair implants or other regulation Hollywood tweaking. He has also kept his Austrian accent more or less intact, though naturally he is trim and tanned with pearly white teeth and an immaculate grey suit.

Nobody knows how to pack in celebrities like Puck. So what's his secret? 'Everyone seems to love quality food that's not too complicated. When it's fussy, you can only go once in a while. For Jennifer Lopez's wedding – the one before last – she wanted fried chicken and waffles and pork chops with onions. She said, "That's what I like, it's what I grew up with." It's not what you cook, it's how you cook it. We buy the best ingredients and try not to screw them up.'

So Cut will focus on steaks, sides and sauces, plus fish, game and no doubt some very expensive truffle- and caviar-based appetisers to allow the show-offs to flex their platinum credit cards: his signature dish being pizza with smoked salmon and caviar. 'True luxury for me is something really refined, but really simple.'

But of course the secret of Puck's success is about much more than the food. Urbane and friendly, he puts one at ease immediately. 'Most people are very nice, so it's easy to hang around with them, but sometimes they are shy, too,' he says of his most famous clients. 'I remember when David Beckham started to come in with his wife. I said hello, because I love soccer, and one day I sat down and talked to them. Since then, they are so friendly, they call me up and invite me to football games.'

Puck is also tactful, an essential attribute when coping with fragile egos who all insist, for example, on being seated at the 'best' table. He denies that any such table exists – 'though we usually put a celebrity at the side so they're not at the first table at the entrance' – but at Spago, table three was reputedly the one to ask for. 'It's strange, that table thing. There are some people who are very fussy. I remember at Chinois, our restaurant in Santa Monica, we had a customer who always sat at the same table until she saw Elizabeth Taylor at another table. The next time she came, she wanted to sit where Taylor had been.' He clearly finds all this jockeying for territory a bit silly, recalling with approval how one of his regulars, the late Daniel Melnick, producer of Straw Dogs, would always opt for a table in so-called Siberia at the back of the restaurant. 'One day, I went up to him and said, "Dan, wouldn't you feel more comfortable if I gave you a nice table up front?" He said, "No, wherever I sit is the most important table in the house so it doesn't matter."'

Puck has been in the business too long to be starstruck by the actors who throng his restaurants. 'When you live in LA, you get to know almost everyone in the movie industry,' he shrugs. 'If I lived in Dallas, it would be sports stars.' It's the politicians who get Puck reaching for his autograph book. 'The time I felt really impressed was when Moshe Dayan [the Israeli military leader] walked in, and everyone stood up and applauded,' he recalls. 'That's rare. It sometimes happens when the President comes, but not always. That's probably the biggest moment for us because there's such a com-motion. They put in a special telephone line, bring in dogs and everyone has to leave.' So which president was most appreciative of his cuisine? 'Clinton, I think,' he says, after some thought, 'though Obama also likes good food. The Obamas go to my restaurant, The Source, in Washington. Michelle had her birthday there.'

Puck's restaurant empire now encompasses four Spagos and two branches of Cut – London will be the third – along with more than 80 Wolfgang Puck Express outlets and a vast range of cookware and gourmet food. He is as rich and famous as any of his clientele, thanks to his TV shows (he's even had the ultimate accolade of featuring as himself on The Simpsons).

In many ways, Puck is the living embodiment of the American dream: his background could scarcely be further from the glitzy world he now inhabits so comfortably. He was brought up near the small Austrian town of Klagenfurt. He never knew his biological father, who walked out on his mother Maria before he was born. Maria, a chef, subsequently married Josef Puck, a boxer turned coal miner, with whom she had two daughters, now both teachers in Austria, and a son who works for his elder half-brother. Money was tight: meat was a once-a-week treat; they had no phone or car; and the first time Puck came to England was on a trip organised by Save the Children for underprivileged youngsters.

During summer breaks, young Wolfgang would spend time with his mother in the kitchen of the hotel where she worked, which is where he first learned to love cooking. 'The pastry chef let me whip up egg whites, to see the mixture becoming bigger and bigger. I thought that was amazing.' Although Josef had adopted Wolfgang as his own son, he was a harsh, tyrannical parent. 'He was very tough,' Puck recalls. 'He used to drink a lot and he always told me I was good for nothing. Thank God he was away from home so much or probably I would have left when I was ten. He used to beat me all the time. I can't even think about it. We lived right next to a forest and my father would send me to pick a stick for him to hit me with. Naturally I didn't choose the biggest, and I cracked it a few times so he would hit me twice and the whole thing would fly into pieces.'

Josef was even less impressed when Wolfgang announced that he wanted to be a chef. 'He thought that was the worst thing. So I left home when I was 14.' He became an apprentice in a hotel restaurant in Villach, 50 miles away, where he was put in charge of peeling the vegetables. 'About two months after I started, on a Sunday lunch, we ran out of potatoes. At the time I was the one peeling the potatoes and boiling them to make mash, so it was my fault. The chef told me I was good for nothing and I'd better go home. I thought, "I'm going to kill myself first."' Distraught, he contemplated suicide, standing on the parapet of a bridge for an hour wondering whether to throw himself off. 'Finally, I thought, "I'm going to go back to the restaurant tomorrow and see what happens," because the chef used to drink a lot and sometimes he forgot.' Assisted by the other apprentice, who wasn't keen to take over the potato peeling, he worked in the cellar for ten days until the chef discovered him. 'He said, "What are you doing here?" and I said, "I can't go home."'

At the end of his apprenticeship, Puck got a job in a restaurant in Dijon, moving on to the Michelin-starred L'Oustau de Baumanière in Provence, where he impressed his superiors by being unafraid of kitchen tantrums. 'I was so used to the shouting because of my father that it didn't bother me. At that time, people used to throw things at you in the kitchen. If you did something wrong, the chef kicked you in the butt.' From there, he moved to Monaco's Hotel de Paris, and finally Maxim's in Paris, where, in the early 1970s, he cooked for Salvador Dali, the Chaplins, Kennedys, Catherine Deneuve and Aristotle Onassis (who liked his beef tenderloin with lots of fat left on, he recalls). In 1974, he emigrated to America, where he got a job in Indianapolis, at a French restaurant called La Tour. 'It was a bit of a culture shock,' he admits. 'People liked their steaks well done. They couldn't even eat with a knife and fork!' Initially, Puck refused to lower his Michelin-trained standards, but his food kept being sent back. Eventually, the Irish rotisseur showed him how to microwave the meat so it came out a uniform grey.

No wonder he fled to LA the moment he got his green card. As chef at Ma Maison, he began to rub shoulders with the rich and famous. 'Orson Welles used to come to lunch every day and we talked about food,' he says. 'Once I made him a grilled duck salad with sautéed mushrooms and he liked it so much he ordered another. He told the owner, "If you ever let this guy go, I'll leave with him." ' During his time off, Puck played tennis with his customers Gene Kelly and Sidney Poitier. Then, in 1981, he opened the first Spago at a cost of $500,000, backed by students at his cookery classes (most of whom were lawyers during the day). 'It was a very good investment for them,' he chuckles.

In 1984 he married interior designer Barbara Lazaroff, who helped set up his business and designed several of his restaurants. They divorced in 2003, but Lazaroff is still his business partner, although they don't seem to get on. 'Sometimes there is a reason that divorce is so expensive – because it's worth it,' he jokes. 'But we have children together so we have to live with each other.' (They have two sons, Cameron, 21, and Byron, 16.) In 2007, he married the Ethiopian handbag designer Gelila Assefa, who he met when she was working at Spago; they also have two sons, Oliver, five, and Alexander, three. Although Mrs Puck has the streamlined elegance of someone who exists on lettuce leaves, here's hoping, for the sake of marital harmony, that she appreciates a good dinner. 'I always say to her, "It's crazy to spend money on shoes or diamonds or handbags when you could have truffles,"' says Puck (a man who once spent £13,000 on just such a mushroom for Robert De Niro). 'I could spend $5,000 on a truffle with my eyes shut, and a week later it's gone. But I keep a little piece in my pocket, just for the smell. A simple pizza with white truffle is a perfect thing.' As well-heeled London gastronomes will shortly discover.

PIZZA WITH SMOKED SALMON AND CAVIAR
by Wolfgang Puck

Makes 4 pizzas
Pizza dough
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 medium red onion, cut into
julienne strips
¼ bunch fresh dill, minced, plus
4 small sprigs for garnish
1 cup sour cream or crème fraîche
Freshly ground pepper
16oz smoked salmon,
sliced paper-thin
4 heaped tbsp domestic
golden caviar
4 heaped tsp black caviar

Method
Preheat the oven with a pizza stone inside for 30 minutes to 500C/Gas Mark 10. Roll or stretch the dough into four 8in circles. Place the pizzas on a lightly floured wooden board. Brush the centre of each pizza to within an inch of the edge with olive oil and sprinkle it with some red onion.
Slide the pizza on to the stone and bake for 8-12 minutes or until the crust is golden brown. Mix the dill with the sour cream or crème fraîche and
add freshly ground pepper to taste. Transfer the pizzas to heated plates and spread with the sour cream mixture. Divide the salmon and arrange decoratively over the cream. Place a spoonful of golden caviar in the centre of each pizza, then spoon a little of the black caviar into the centre of the golden caviar. Cut each pizza into quarters and serve immediately.

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