Wolfgang Puck: The Making of a Household Name

The Grand Tourist with Dan Rubinstein

In this season finale of The Grand Tourist, Dan Rubinstein interviews legendary chef Wolfgang Puck about his journey from a difficult childh

Key takeaways

• Wolfgang Puck experienced a challenging childhood in Austria involving an abusive stepfather and began working in professional kitchens at age 14.
• His culinary expertise was refined in France, specifically through training in three-star Michelin restaurants like Beaumarnier in Dijon.

Main topics

• Early life in Austria
• French culinary training

Notable quotes

Intuition is a big part of success.

Conclusion

The episode provides an inspiring look at how resilience and intuition

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Intuition is a big part of success. You have to follow your intuition and you have to follow your dream and you have to follow what you believe in. If I don't really believe in it, if I'm worried about it, you know, how do the guests feel? How do the employees feel? So I think I really felt like this was the thing to do. Speaker 2 (0:18) Hi, I'm Dan Rubenstein, and this is The Grand Tourist. I've been a design journalist for more than 20 years, and this is my personalized guided tour through the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel. All the elements of a well-lived life. And welcome to the 15th season finale of The Grand Tourist. We'll be back in September with all new episodes and a new print issue in October. So visit thegrandtourist.net and son of our newsletter to make sure you stay in touch. Speaker 2 (0:47) My guest today has been a mainstay of American food life for as long as I can remember. Throughout his career, he's helped to redefine American food culture and has been the face and voice for this evolution on TV, in the pages of books, and in his countless restaurants. But like the many great American chefs of his era, he's an immigrant who infused our culinary life with the flavors of his own unique life experience. Wolfgang Puck. Puck was born in Austria and like many of my previous chef guests, was raised in a household where food was always central to life and work. Despite the misgivings of his father, he left home at an early age to train at some of the most famous eateries in the world, before taking on a somewhat random job in the United States. In, of all places, Indianapolis. That didn't quite work out, more on that later, but it brought him eventually to Los Angeles. The rest, as they say, is truly history. He helped reboot the city's dining scene with a legendary spot called Ma Maison, and eventually opened up his own place, the one and only Spago, in 1982 on the Sunset Strip. Over the years, he fully embraced his new home in California, and through his books and menus, helped shape what we call California cuisine. And in the process, he became a household name on television. Speaker 2 (2:06) Still going strong today, he's helping to pass the torch along to his son, Chef Byron Lazaroff-Puck. And as part of our spring issue, in stores now and available online at thegrandtourist.net, we visit Wolfgang and Byron at Spago in LA. On this episode, I speak with Wolfgang about his difficult childhood, how he reinvented Hollywood's relationship with food, why celebrities absolutely love mac and cheese, how pure intuition is the key to any creative success, and more. Speaker 2 (2:39) It's an afternoon there in Los Angeles, which is probably, you know, I would say, in my mind, the farthest thing from a small town in Austria that I think I can imagine. And I read that you're, you know, growing up at home, that there was kind of a, from a food point of view, kind of self-sustaining of... chicken and eggs and pigs and things like that. Is Speaker 1 (3:02) that true? Yeah, it's true. We had a beautiful vegetable garden. We had a pig forest where we picked mushrooms in the summer, berries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries. And we had a great garden. So my mother... made her pickled vegetables and stuff like that. And later on, she got even a freezer and she blanched them and froze them for vegetable soup in the winter because in the winter we didn't have much. So it was Speaker 2 (3:32) interesting. Speaker 1 (3:33) And then obviously we had chicken, we had eggs, the farmer had pigs and we raised two pigs generally too. So whatever was left over, the chicken ate or a dog ate or mainly the pigs, I think. Okay. Speaker 2 (3:49) And your mom was quite the cook, it sounds like. Yeah, my Speaker 1 (3:52) mother was a professional chef, so she was very good in the kitchen and, you know, very resourceful. And she could do amazing things with very little, you know. She could probably produce a meal for $10 for the whole family, you know. Speaker 2 (4:06) Was there a dish that she would make for you as a child that you remember really liking a lot? Speaker 1 (4:12) Well, we always loved sweets more than anything, you know, but there we are probably from the savory side. It was probably on Sundays sometimes we made wienerschnitzel or in the springtime, late spring or whatever, she made the fried chicken because we had the chicken. When the chicken hatched, then the roosters, they didn't lay egg, they didn't save them. So they had to get sacrificed for fried chicken. So we had really good fried chicken. And then... Speaker 1 (4:46) I think sweets was really a dish, the palatschinken, which were amazing, which is the, you know, the crepes filled with apricot marmalade. We had a few apricot trees too, or raspberry marmalade sometimes, and just a little powdered sugar on top. And that for us was with a glass of milk. The milk came right from the farmer next door. So for us, that was really something amazingly good. Speaker 2 (5:13) And I read that your name Puck comes from your stepfather. Yeah. That's sort of your original birth name. And I read that he was quite the strict father figure. Can you tell me a little about that? Speaker 1 (5:26) It's a very difficult memory for me because he really was totally bipolar, I think. And he was very – he drank a lot. Speaker 1 (5:42) He punished us when he went in one of these things. He punished my sister and myself and abused us verbally, abused us physically and so forth. So it was not a good thing. So my first years as a childhood were not my favorite ones. You know, a lot of people will say, oh, I had such an amazing childhood. You know, we did this, we did that. We never went on vacation with the parents or anything like that. So I think my vacation was when I went. where my mother was a chef in a hotel on the lake. And I went there for a month and that was my vacation. But I worked picking up tennis balls or when it was raining, I worked in the kitchen where my mother was working. Speaker 2 (6:22) That's quite young for someone today, right? I mean, you know, no one would just send someone off at 14 to go work. Speaker 1 (6:29) Yeah, since I have children too, I have four kids. So I always look back and I say, what would I say? Even if they wanted to go, you know, leave at 14 in another town. At that time, we didn't have telephone. We didn't have a car. I had to take the train and then walk for an hour if I wanted to go home. So if I needed something, I had to write a letter. So I think it's Speaker 2 (6:52) different today. And, you know, tell me about that first apprenticeship at the hotel. Like, how did you, how did that lead to? So I started the Speaker 1 (6:59) apprenticeship and, you know, I was a little guy, like four foot eight or something like that. And it was interesting because my stepfather always told me I was good for nothing, you know. And when I left with my little suitcase to go take the train to go where I do the apprenticeship in Villach, he always told me, oh, you're good for nothing. Speaker 1 (7:22) He didn't want me to become a cook. He said, cooking is for women. It's not a profession for men. You should be a carpenter or a mechanic or a mason or something like that. And then I went there and the chef was just as crazy as my stepfather. So after about two months, we ran out of potatoes. I was making mashed potatoes. At the end, he was screaming and crazy and he used to drink a lot too on the job. He always ordered two bottles of wine and I think by two in the afternoon, he drank them. So his face was all red and like blown up and he screamed like crazy. I mean, at that time, it was a little bit like that to be a chef. So I think he was maybe not the only one, but people were hitting people and so forth. So he fired me after two months because we... ran out of potatoes and I said, you know, I don't want to, he told me too, you know, I'm good for nothing, I'm too young, I'm too little and everything. Speaker 1 (8:25) Then that night I said, you know, I don't want to prove my stepfather right, that I'm good for nothing or whatever. I'm not going to go home. So I stood on the bridge going over the river there. It was a big river in the city, in Villach. And I said, I'd much rather jump in the river and finish my life. And that's it. But after about an hour standing and looking down, all of a sudden I said, well, I'm just going to go back tomorrow and see what happened. And so sure enough, I couldn't sleep all night. In the morning early, I went to the hotel. It was a small hotel with a big restaurant. And when the apprentice who was ahead of me saw me coming in, he was all excited because he said, oh, now I don't have to peel potatoes anymore and I do all the cleanup or whatever. So he hid me in the vegetable cellar and I was peeling potatoes and onions and carrots and everything down there. He brought me a little soup or something to eat. And then after about 10 days or so, the chef came down in the cellar and saw me and grabbed me and said, you go home, I fired you. And I basically yelled back at him because at that time I had nothing to lose. And I said, I'm not leaving, I'm staying. And he didn't know what to do. And he called the owner of the hotel, and the owner had another hotel, a small hotel in town. And they sent me there, and there it got better. They had the lady who was the chef, and she was nicer, you know, a little bit calmer. She didn't drink. She wasn't drunk. So it was okay. I started there, and everything, the rest is history. You know, I did my three years in apprenticeship. When I was 17, I moved to France and spent seven years in France. And then I... came to the United States. And why France? Why did you decide to... Well, because at that hotel, we had a gastronomic week from a French restaurant in Dijon called Trofaison. And so I was so intrigued the way they cooked. You know, they make cocoa and beef bourguignon. They made pâtés and they made the escargot and stuff like that. I never saw a fish like with a white wine sauce. And so I said, wow, I have to go and learn really how they cook. It's more interesting than what we did in that hotel in Austria. So I... Speaker 1 (10:54) wrote them. They accepted me as a stagiaire and I stayed there about a little over a year or so. And then the owner gave a party for the employees, like in the afternoon, a glass of wine. But they gave Michelin came out and they gave us one star at the restaurant. And I saw the way they were talking in Dijon, that this is the capital gastronomic of France. You know, that's the best place, the best wines, the mustard, the cheese and cassis and all the things. So, and then I looked through the book and all of a sudden I found out there were two-star and three-star restaurants. So I said, I'm not going back to Austria until I work in a two-star, three-star restaurant. I started to write all the three-star restaurants. And maybe the 10th or 12th or whatever it was, was Beaumarnier and Mr. Thulier accepted me. And I started to work there in a three-star restaurant. And that really changed my life. So for me, that was a elevation. Totally the way they cook, the way they looked. after the ingredients and everything. So I think that's still today in my head. And I think that changed really the way I thought about cooking. He became my mentor. Speaker 2 (12:09) And I read that you've, you worked at a restaurant in Paris. I think it's pronounced Maxime's. Yeah, Maxime's. Yeah, Maxime's. It's in the heart of the city. It's still around today on the Rue Royale. I think it's the first, we're only small or something. HM, HM, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, It was such a famously eccentric place with a lot of famous people that are known to have gone through there. What was it like working there? I think Speaker 1 (12:35) it was amazing. But for me, Beaumarnier was really the Speaker 2 (12:37) main place, you know, because Speaker 1 (12:39) also we had famous people. And Thulier was really the first one. He was in the kitchen and he was like 72, 73 years old at that time. And he used to bring Elizabeth Taylor in the kitchen and Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve in the kitchen and Picasso in the kitchen. He used to walk with them and show them the kitchen and everything. So I think for me, when I look back, I said, you know, as a kid at that time, when I was like 20, 21, 20, maybe, yeah. And I said, I want to be like him one day. I want to be like him one day on my own restaurant. And so then after I left there after two and a half years. I worked in Monaco at L'Hôtel de Paris and La Réserve in Beaulieu and then Maxime's in Paris. And Maxime was the most amazing restaurant too because they had music on Friday night. It was black tie. Everybody who was anybody in Paris, in France, or in Europe, or in the world. they used to go to Maxim's. Maxim was the place to go to, you know, everybody. I mean, I saw almost everybody there, you know, from all the famous movie people, the politicians, the artists, you name them, they were all at Maxim's. I remember like Salvador Dali used to come every day for lunch. You know, we had to, Jule Brunner used to come all the time and Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin came really late at night and he asked me to come out. I was the night chef at the end to have a drink with them and everything. So it was really a great experience, a great restaurant, also a three-star restaurant. And also, I think for me, a great learning experience. But then somebody told me, one of the waiters said, you know, I have a friend. in New York and he's opening a restaurant and he's looking for a chef. Maybe you want to go to New York because everybody makes so