Don't Eat At A Wolfgang Puck Restaurant Until You Read This

Dress your best when dining out at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant. For, there is a good chance the person sitting at the next table is a Hollywood celebrity you adore. Like George Clooney or Oprah Winfrey. They have been previously spotted at Puck's Spago in Beverly Hills, and are among the many A-listers who have grabbed a bite at a Wolfgang Puck's restaurant. 

Puck is a familiar face on television and has appeared in countless movies and television shows including The Simpsons and The Smurfs! TV cameos aside, though, Wolfgang Puck has spent decades cultivating a food business empire that includes upscale and casual dining restaurants, catering, and brand products such as Wolfgang Puck frozen pizzas and soup. The numerous restaurants that he runs include the two popular restaurant concepts — Spago that serves California cuisine; and Cut, which is a high-end steakhouse. In stark contrast to the five-star hotels that most of Puck's restaurants rest in, a separate line of Express restaurants can be found in airports, hospitals, universities, and casinos around the world. 

While customers never know what items to expect on the menu until they visit (Puck said in a Reddit post that all menus are freshly printed), what is known is a milieu of facts that can prep you for that special dining experience.

Wolfgang Puck's smoked salmon pizza was a fortunate accident. It so happened that one night, actress Joan Collins, popular for her role in the TV series Dynasty, came to Spago on Sunset Strip and ordered smoked salmon and brioche. Since Puck was out of bread, he thought on his feet and served the salmon on a pizza crust instead of brioche. Little did he know that he had invented a dish that would mark a big revolution in the pizza world (via Michelin Guide).

Smoked salmon pizza, besides getting its own place on the restaurant's menu, also paved the way for the rise of gourmet pizzas in the United States. New York Times Cooking went so far as to credit Puck's kitchen for kicking off the 1980s California pizza trend of including toppings "beyond basil and mozzarella."

Puck himself, during his travels to Europe, found that his smoked salmon pizza was being served under the name of "Spago pizza" in many European restaurants — including the famous French chef Paul Bocuse' restaurant. "I said, 'Paul, what the heck?' and he showed me the menu and the name of the pizza was 'Spago Pizza.' It was a proud moment for me," Puck told Michelin Guide.

Wolfgang Puck grew up in a small town called Sankt Veit an der Glan, in Austria. Most meals were made with ingredients sourced right from the garden, he told Life and Thyme. They raised chickens, and therefore did not have the necessity to buy eggs from the market, and he simply went into the forest to pick berries. Puck would later adopt and practice this simplistic farm-to-table concept in his restaurants.

Since Puck's family did not have the money to send him to school, he started helping his mother cook at the hotel where she worked. Though his childhood was replete with challenges — dealing with a "crazy" stepfather, unable to get a job, financial shortage, etc — what he fondly remembers about growing up are the dishes that his mom made. "When I was a kid, her wiener schnitzel and mashed potatoes were my favorite. She fried it in oil, and pork fat and a sprig of rosemary gave it an amazing aroma, especially in the winter when it was so cold out," he told First We Feast. This humble dish is now part of Spago's menu that Hollywood A-listers browse. Yet another childhood favorite of Puck that, according to the chef is a huge success in his restaurants, is Kaiserschmarren — an Austrian dessert that tastes like a delicate souffle. "I used to have it when I was a kid, my mother used to make it for me," Puck said.

After working as a chef at Ma Maison for close to six years, Puck decided to branch off on his own and was very certain about one thing: He didn't want to be just stuck in the kitchen. He wanted to supervise the entire restaurant and talk to customers. ( via Food & Wine) His first restaurant, Spago, on Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, was designed by his then-wife, Babara Lazaroff. According to Lazaroff, as mentioned in Restaurants that work: case studies of the best in the industry by Martin E. Dorf, the restaurant "was one of the first open and bright dining rooms where everyone could see and be seen" (via Barbara Lazaroff's website).

In a 2015 interview with Marketplace, Puck said: "When we opened Spago, we were the first restaurant with an open kitchen." By this concept what he meant was that the chef was in complete control of the kitchen, and did not have to get orders from anyone. "Before, you had all these fancy restaurants that poured your seafood on an iceberg and some ketchup with horseradish and everything. That was the traditional thing, and maybe they cut a steak in front of you. But there was no imagination because it wasn't a chef who ran the restaurant. It was some owner or a maître' d or a director of the restaurant," he said.

Wolfgang Puck was friends with popular visual artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. He told Forbes: "I knew Andy Warhol and I asked him to design a menu cover and a wine label for Spago but then he went into the hospital and didn't come out. For our San Francisco restaurant in a hotel we needed something for a big wall so I asked Robert Rauschenberg if he had any leftover paintings. He said no but I'll make you one. The restaurant is no longer there so the painting is in my house."

When CUT opened in Beverly Hills, conceptual artist John Baldessari did nine pieces specifically for the restaurant. With all the pieces displayed on the white walls of the restaurant, Puck said the space looked like a museum. "We always have good art in our places — it's a big part of the experience for me. Not everybody appreciates it, but I think it's a good thing," said the chef (via Du Jour). CUT, LA, also sports original pieces by artist Damien Hirst (his pieces have sold for as much as $5.85 million), and CUT, New York features pieces — curated by Puck's wife Gelila Assefa Puck — by artists such as Alex Israel, Julie Mehretu and Tracey Emin (via CNN).

Wagyu beef is known for being some of the best beef in the world because of its tender and umami-rich flavor. This particular breed of Japanese cow is specially bred to ensure the best possible marbling of the meat and it's this characteristic that gives Wagyu beef its unparalleled texture, raising it to the status of a delicacy. 

As soon as you sit down for a meal at CUT, a waiter brings the cuts of Wagyu beef wrapped in black napkins and arranged on a China platter. "Each hunk of muscle is pointed out and described appreciatively. There is less ceremony when you buy a diamond at Tiffany," writes restaurant critic Pete Wells of The New York Times. The meat is imported from Miyazaki Prefecture in Japan, and is a rarity in American restaurants. Each ounce is $25, and the smallest cut offered at the restaurant weighs six ounces. So yeah, that's a $150 for the cheapest Waygu steak. 

According to Wells, Puck also has a special way of cooking his steaks that involves grilling them over wood and charcoal, before hitting them with a 1,200°F broiler. This leaves the meat with an outer texture that the food critic said was similar to a good loaf of sourdough.

As a mentor to Wolfgang Puck, the French chef Raymond Thuilier made him realize that a chef could be a true craftsman. Years later, when Puck moved from France to the States and started his own restaurant, he did not hesitate to take risks. He used unusual ingredients, kicking off trends that the world was, as it turned out, ready for. The result of such kitchen adventures were never-before-seen dishes such as duck-sausage pizzas and the more popular, smoked salmon pizza. He also popularized the use of goat cheese in fine dining. Most Americans hadn't even heard of it as the product itself appeared in the market only in 1979, two years before Puck started his restaurant. 

In 2017, Puck made another bold move. He opened his test kitchen in West Hollywood for the public to dine in. The space, where chefs working at different Wolfgang Puck restaurants come together to create new dishes, started accepting reservations from diners. He introduced uncommon appliances such as a centrifuge and a distiller for chefs to play around with. Puck was clear that the focus of the space was not to make money. "It's to stretch their imaginations. Everybody is like a songwriter or a painter. You're not going to tell them what to write or paint. I don't want to put boundaries on anything," Puck told Food & Wine.