The Untold Truth Of Wolfgang Puck's Ex-Wife, Barbara Lazaroff

When longtime watchers of the Los Angeles restaurant scene hear the expression "behind every successful man is a strong woman," chances are an image of Barbara Lazaroff will flash in their minds. Just as her now-ex-husband, Wolfgang Puck, defined California cuisine and pioneered national dining trends such as pizzas with non-traditional, artisanal toppings, Barbara Lazaroff is widely considered responsible for defining the public image of Wolfgang Puck, turning him from a respected but quiet chef into a global celebrity and entrepreneur, according to Forbes.

But during her 20-year marriage to Puck, Lazaroff was far more than just Puck's personal muse. A respected interior designer, she brought her passion for design to Puck's restaurants, which became known for their memorable, dramatic interiors as well as for their food. And it was her entrepreneurial bent that encouraged and enabled Puck to build a restaurant empire and become a household name. Her journey with Puck and afterward has been filled with surprises — here is just some of what she has accomplished, both with and without him.

As Anthony Bourdain graphically described in "Kitchen Confidential," the "testosterone-driven, male-dominated world of restaurant kitchens" has long been one in which women are not only vastly outnumbered, but sometimes made to feel unwelcomed and even physically and verbally abused. Spending extensive time in Wolfgang Puck's restaurants — not just as a designer, but as a hands-on co-owner — Barbara Lazaroff was quick to notice the gender imbalance in their kitchens and just as quick to decide something had to be done to correct this. One barrier for many women aspiring to become chefs, she realized, was the absence of female role models and advocates for other women within the restaurant industry.

"The reality is that until there are more women as executive chefs," Lazaroff told the Los Angeles Times, "there will be less women hired in kitchens and less going into the restaurant industry." To push for this change, she and a group of female chefs collaborated to form the International Association of Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, an advocacy group to promote professional development and networking opportunities for women in the restaurant industry. The ultimate goal of the group, Lazaroff told the Los Angeles Times, was not just to help women get a foot in the door, but to help them attain leadership positions. "We need more women in positions to sign the checks," she said. "That's when people listen to you."

Before Wolfgang Puck and Barbara Lazaroff hit the culinary scene, fine dining meant formal dining: If you wanted to enjoy gourmet ingredients, meticulous preparations, and a carefully curated wine list, you knew you'd need to wear a suit and tie (or a nice dress, nylons, and heels) and be on your very best behavior all evening. Nice restaurants, conventional wisdom assumed, were elegant, formal, and above all, quiet.

But with her design of Spago Hollywood, Barbara Lazaroff shattered this formula. "When people first walk into Spago, they are surprised to see how casual it is. There is so much hype and publicity surrounding Spago that it is difficult to imagine how comfortable it is inside," Lazaroff said in the book "Restaurants That Work" (per Lazaroff's website). "It was one of the first open and bright dining rooms where everyone could see and be seen. The tables are very close together, encouraging people to talk with their neighbors. Utilizing blond woods and other natural materials, I wanted to create the relaxed feeling of a California beach house in the midst of the city." Her unusual design was a hit, and launched "the transformation of the stuffy and traditional to the friendly, fun, and colorful" in restaurants across the country, according to her website.

In the restaurant business, professionals standardly refer to the kitchen and its staff as "the back of the house" and the dining room and its staff as "the front of the house." This terminology comes from the traditional assumption that the dining room and the team running it are the public-facing part of the restaurant, while the kitchen and cooks — essential as they may be — are to stay strictly hidden from public view.

In another radical design innovation, however, Barbara Lazaroff chose to shatter this tradition, making the kitchen at the original Spago in Hollywood the center of the house. The open kitchen was not only clearly visible from guests' tables, but intentionally designed and lit to attract their attention. "Other places may have embraced the idea of an exhibition kitchen, but Lazaroff took it to new heights," wrote Michael Bauer in "The Classics of California Cuisine" (per Lazaroff's website.) She treated the open kitchen like a theatrical stage, complete with lighting that spotlighted the action." As Wolfgang Puck told The Hollywood Reporter, Lazaroff's design kicked off a trend that continues today. "In 1982, there were no restaurants with an open kitchen," he said. "Today, there is virtually no restaurant without an open kitchen."

While Wolfgang Puck was respected for his skills as a chef before meeting Barbara Lazaroff, he wasn't naturally entrepreneurial. Indeed, he sometimes appeared to be almost allergic to the idea of handling money — as Smart Money noted, his own personal finances were so unorganized, he sometimes had to borrow cash from his waiters to buy gas. And when he married Lazaroff, he was happy to delegate his bill-paying chores to her. "I can't do it," he told Smart Money. "It paralyzes me."

Lazaroff not only helped Puck put his personal finances in order, but provided the business know-how and marketing savvy that empowered Puck to go from salaried chef to co-owner of a restaurant empire. "Fundamentally it has been Barbara all along who has understood Wolfgang best and who has helped to make him the phenomenon he is today," wrote Juliette Rossant in SuperChef (per Lazaroff's website). "Whereas the humble village boy might have hesitated and cautiously undersold himself, Barbara constantly oversold him, confident that Wolf would always live up to her billing. And he did." In 1994, she co-founded Wolfgang Puck Food Company (now Wolfgang Puck Worldwide), which encompasses their fine dining restaurants, catering operations, and licensed products divisions, according to her website. Her impact on Puck's restaurants has earned her numerous awards for entrepreneurship and leadership as well as for design.

Barbara Lazaroff has always been passionate and opinionated about her design choices, throwing herself into every detail of each project. For her design for Spago Beverly Hills, for example, she envisioned "elegant bones with sensual overlays and adornment; a space evoking the feeling of an old soul, but with a young spirit." 

Details included large, colorful paintings commissioned specifically for the space, colored glass skylights, and hand-blown chandeliers. The design, she noted on her website, was inspired by her poem "The Flame of Life" about "the importance of striving for excellence and living a life filled with purpose and passion." In short, her design choices were deeply personal.

So when Wolfgang Puck decided to remodel the interior of Spago Beverly Hills after their divorce, it's not surprising that Lazaroff was less than thrilled. Indeed, according to The Hollywood Reporter, she felt not only personally insulted, but believed some of the new design choices to be both ugly and impractical. 

"Why rip out this gorgeous skylight and replace it with a flat clear one ... who will clean the bird poop off it every day?" she wrote in a Facebook post (per The Hollywood Reporter). She also resented the new, somber color theme and the replacement of the art glass divider between the kitchen and dining room with plain glass, writing "Why, for what other purpose than to say, Barbara's design is going!"

Barbara Lazaroff is the first to admit she has a strong personality and can rub some people the wrong way. "Have I been difficult sometimes? Absolutely," she told the Los Angeles Times. "Has Wolfgang? Absolutely. The difference between the two of us is I was willing to show it, and he'd do it covertly. I think one of the reasons I have a reputation for being difficult is I have standards of excellence." Puck concurs, telling the Los Angeles Times, "She's so headstrong, it feels like whatever I told her, she wanted to do the opposite."

Her insistence on standing her ground resulted in her butting heads at another high-profile restaurant in West Hollywood, according to Page Six. Lazaroff was celebrating her birthday there and taking pictures of herself and her friends when the owner of the restaurant — which, like Spago, was a favorite celebrity hangout — asked her to stop, saying he wanted to respect the privacy of the other restaurant guests. Rumors emerged that she had kicked up a fuss and was asked to leave, but while Lazaroff admitted she disagreed with the owner's request, she said she left quietly on her own accord. "Jeff [the owner] and I didn't see eye to eye. He didn't realize it was my birthday and I wanted to take pictures," she told Page Six. "I wasn't thrown out, I paid my check and left."

Besides building a restaurant empire, Barbara Lazaroff and Wolfgang Puck also had two sons together. And despite her fierce professional ambition and demanding workload, Lazaroff has always considered her sons her top priority. "Although my professional life is very rewarding, I still feel my most important creations, greatest successes and blessings are my sons, Cameron and Byron," she wrote on her website. She added that her primary goal as a mother was to model healthy living and raise her sons to have "good moral stature" and "go on to contribute positively to the world at large."

Both sons are now adults, and Lazaroff reports on her website they "have both grown into fine young men, both with great spirits and on paths to successful fulfilling careers." At least one of the two has already decided to follow his parents' footsteps into the culinary industry. As reported by HollywoodMask, Byron Puck was tapped by his father in 2020 — at the age of 26 — to take over as general manager of two of his cafes, Merois and Ospero, both in West Hollywood, California. This wouldn't be his first stint as a restaurant manager — according to HollywoodMask, he had already served as manager at Spago Beverly Hills for two years.