How Wolfgang Puck became Hollywoods chef to the stars the secrets to his success
I thought I would much rather jump into the river and kill myself. So I stood on a bridge over the river and I thought, “Should I jump in? What will happen? Are you going to heaven or to hell?” After thinking for about an hour, I decided to go back tomorrow and see what happens.
I didn’t want to go home because my stepfather had said I would come back within a month and ask for money because I was good for nothing. So I went back the next day and the chef saw me and wanted to throw me out. I dug my heels in and said, “I’m not leaving, I’m not leaving.” He called the hotel owner who sent me to work at another of their hotels. The chef was a woman who had kids. She was like a mother in a way.
Learning French: When I finished my apprenticeship, after three years, chefs from a French restaurant called Aux Trois Faisans, in Dijon, came to cook at our restaurant. I was fascinated; they made pâté en croûte, cooked beef in red wine. That’s when I wanted to go to France and learn French cooking, like coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon. That restaurant accepted me as a stagiaire (trainee) in Dijon and it was hard at the beginning because I didn’t speak French.
After a year, I was planning to go home when the Guide Michelin came out and we got one star. The owner spoke as if we were the best restaurant in France and Dijon the gastronomic capital. I looked through the Guide Michelin and saw there were two-star and three-star restaurants. I thought, “I cannot go back to Austria now, I want to work at a two-star or three-star restaurant.” I wrote application letters to [Paul] Bocuse, Troisgros, [Roger] Vergé, La Tour d’Argent and Maxim’s, all three-star restaurants. The first to accept me was Raymond Thuilier at L’Oustau de Baumanière, a three-star restaurant.
Everybody loves Raymond: Thuilier didn’t cook from a cookbook and he used amazing ingredients. He was so passionate when he was cooking and he could be very temperamental. But after a while, he really liked me. When I made a sauce, he would taste it and say, “OK, put a little salt and pepper in.” And when he made something, I would taste it and say, “OK, put a little salt and pepper in” – the same as he told me. The other young guys just said, “Oh, it’s so delicious.” They were scared to say anything. He really took a liking to me and that was the first time I felt proud and excited.
After about a year at Baumanière, they fired the chef at La Cabro d’Or, their one-star restaurant, and I replaced him. I was 20 years old and had four or five French cooks under me. That made me feel important. I remember Thuilier bringing Pablo Picasso into the kitchen. Queen Elizabeth came to the restaurant, and Elizabeth Taylor and all these famous people. I thought, this is how I want my life to be, I want to cook like Thuilier, my mentor. All of a sudden, I felt different about cooking.
I stayed for two-and-a-half years and eventually ended up at Maxim’s in Paris. After a year there, I became the night chef responsible for the kitchen from 10.30pm to 2am, cooking for people who came from the opera and concert hall. Again, I was the youngest guy in the kitchen and had the third-highest salary.
On the road: When I was at Maxim’s, I got an offer to go to New York, but when I got there I didn’t like it. The city was so chaotic, so different from Paris. I knew Charles Masson, the owner of La Grenouille in Paris, and he found me a job in Indianapolis. I’m a big fan of outdoor racing, Monaco, Formula One, the Indy 500. I had only US$50 or US$100 left.
I took the Greyhound bus and it took a day and a half to get to Indianapolis, which is nothing like Monaco. It was flat and it was in late fall, full of fog, but I had no money to leave. I started cooking in a French restaurant called La Tour. I tried to teach the diners to have their steaks medium rare, but they would send them back. Finally, the restaurant director told me to just cook them well done.
In 1975, I moved to Los Angeles and started working at Ma Maison, which was doing terribly. I took my first pay cheque to the bank and it bounced. So I made a deal with the owner to give me 10 per cent of the restaurant. I stayed for five years and the restaurant became hugely successful. But the owner didn’t trust me and it made me feel awkward so I started looking for restaurant spaces.
Ready for his close-up: In 1981, I found a place on Sunset Boulevard. It was terrible, with hookers all over the boulevard, but the rent was cheap. My then-girlfriend, Barbara, who later became my wife, designed the interior. I wanted a kitchen in the dining room because I wanted to manage and see the customers, and I wanted the customers to watch us cook, which was an amazing experience for them because they had never seen anything like that. I could see everybody coming in, like the king of Sweden and all the movie people – Sidney Poitier, Elizabeth Taylor and the Kardashian kids – and Spago became a huge success.
Matters of taste: I bought the best ingredients. I went to the fish market where the Japanese chefs went. I went down to Chino farm and got fresh vegetables and fruits. Everybody else ordered from big produce companies, where everything was just big, looked exactly the same but had no flavour. People said, “I don’t understand when I go to another restaurant the salad has no flavour. When I come here, it tastes so good.”
Then I opened a few more restaurants, Spago in Tokyo and Chinois, my first Asian restaurant. It was difficult at the beginning because I had never cooked with a wok before. I also had a wood-burning oven to cook Peking duck because I love duck. I made my own plum sauce and I even blew air between the skin and the meat.
I didn’t have an air compressor so I went to the gas station where people add air to their tyres. I took the air compressor and stuck it in the duck neck and blew up the duck. People wondered what I was doing, but to me it was like an experiment.
Oscar nomination: There was this famous agent, Irving Paul “Swifty” Lazar, and he did the Oscars party at Spago every year and everybody came, like Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Sean Penn. We got amazing publicity. When Swifty passed away, in 1993, the Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) asked me to cater for the Governors Ball after the awards show. We have done it for 25 years now.
In the beginning, it was a formal sit-down dinner; now we serve 30 different small plates, like baked potato with caviar, Chinois lamb chops, tortellini with black truffles, even macaroni and cheese. The first time I served chicken pot pie, Barbra Streisand said it was the best thing she had ever eaten and I had to make it every year.
Bio pic: David Gelb, creator of Netflix series Chef’s Table, is filming my biography. I think it’s important for my children, or other chefs, to understand it wasn’t easy. My kids thought I was already well known, I already had a successful business. But I want to show them there is adversity in life. We will film in Austria, in the little schoolhouse I went to, then go to Baumanière and a few of the places I worked so people see my progression.
Next generation: My second son, Byron, is really into cooking. He went to the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, in the United States, and he has worked with the Roca brothers in Spain, Guy Savoy in Paris, and Eric Ripert and Grant Achatz in New York. Now he’s working at Spago and the Bel-Air Hotel. He’s very passionate, so I have great hopes for him to take over. He’s only 24.
I look back sometimes and think, “Why me?” Until I was 30 years old, at Ma Maison, I thought there were a lot of cooks who were pretty good, too – I wasn’t the only one. How come I was chosen? And then I look back and think, “Wow, where did I come from? How did it happen and why did it happen? Is there really somebody up there who guides us?”
I think it’s a little luck, timing, hard work and a little talent, but a lot of it is perseverance. I could have jumped. I could have stayed in Austria and played it safe. But I am a risk taker. I love what I do. What I enjoy more and more is seeing young people who are really good and pushing them to get better.
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