Wolf is a lamb.
He sits here in his Wolfgang Puck restaurant, in a flashing commercial corridor of Niagara Falls, Ont., completely innocent to how disappointing it is.
His publicists say it's his first restaurant in Canada, but that's not quite right. In 2003, a Wolfgang Puck restaurant opened in Oakville, Ont., but closed shortly after. It was a location problem, his management phalanx says. Well, okay, but maybe it had the same problem this one does. With pastel-coloured walls, wood trim and indoor potted trees, and a boring menu -- pasta dishes at $14, baked chicken at $19, sandwiches at $13 -- the bistro-style restaurant, despite his famous branding, is no reason to drive to Niagara Falls. You could get this in any mall anywhere.
But never mind. Wolfgang Puck is plucky about it all, guileless in his charm, bright-blue-eyed and smiling beatifically.
A short, stout man of 55, he is poured into a white chef's jacket that has a small, embroidered WP on the left breast. He has dozens of these custom-made jackets sewn for him, which he keeps stashed in his restaurants, at last count over 60, around the United States and Asia. When he travels, which he does at least 200 days a year, to his various Wolfgang Puck Worldwide enterprises -- there are three levels of restaurants: "fine dining" (his word for his string of high-end places, such as Hollywood's Spago and Santa Monica's Chinois); bistro (such as this one); and express (or fast food) -- he brings three jackets with him, and puts one on every morning.
"What else should I wear?" he asks innocently. "I always do things in the kitchen," he explains in his thick Austrian accent. "If I had a nice suit on, I couldn't go in the kitchen." Since he arrived, he has been bustling around the space, talking to lunchtime patrons, posing for photographs and signing autographs in his big, generous scrawl. His privately owned empire is estimated to be worth $300-million (U.S.).
People are eating it up: his legend, his effusive, childlike personality, his mediocre food.
"Sometimes, I look back and think, 'What do I need all the aggravation for?' " he says, when asked why he works so hard. He routinely sleeps only four to five hours a night. He widens his eyes, shrugs.
So, what's the answer? "There is no answer," he chuckles. "I don't want to retire, ever. I don't know what I would do.
"We are not here to say, 'Okay, we have to cover every city with restaurants.' I just open a restaurant when we have the people. If I have a really good chef and a really good manager, I say, 'Okay, I find a good location and somebody who wants to spend the money to build it,' then we do a restaurant!" In Canada, he was approached by Liberty ITM to buy the franchise. Two more Wolfgang Puck bistro-style restaurants will open in Toronto within the next year and a half, one at the Constellation Hotel near Pearson International Airport and the other downtown at Yonge and Dundas streets.
"I don't feel that I am a brand," he says. "I feel as though I am always doing new things. The people who speak negatively are generally jealous people," he says with a good-humoured smile.
Puck scored, overnight, in January, 1982, when he opened Spago, his culinary epicentre in Los Angeles. It had 120 seats and a revolutionary approach to food, which spawned a thousand copycat restaurants. The kitchen was open, with a line of chefs visible to the patrons. He made designer pizzas, such as smoked salmon on thin crusts, an innovation, among others, that led to his food being called a Californian-Italian hybrid. "I wanted to play around with Asian food, too," he says. "I put raw tuna on the menu," he recalls, "and there was no Western Caucasian-style restaurant that ever had raw fish. It didn't exist. Now, everybody has raw tuna."
Trained in French cuisine, Puck had been working in Ma Maison, a well-known L.A. restaurant. "It wasn't that I had had enough of French cuisine. I really thought, 'Who are we? And what fits into the place? I want to do something which fits with California.' Food is an expression of the place you live in. I looked around, and in California, there are a lot of fresh ingredients and we also have a lot of cultures."
Movers and shakers flocked to the place. The plan was to serve lunch and dinner, but he was so overwhelmed with dinner reservations soon after word got out that he opened only in the evenings. Even then, the phone in the restaurant was never answered, because everyone was too busy preparing the food for the evening. "It would ring off the hook!" he exclaims boisterously. The only way to get a reservation was to know the private home numbers of Puck, his manager and chefs, he says. "Ha, it was crazy!" he chortles.
Puck witnessed temper tantrums as people jockeyed for the best table in the house. "Not celebrities," he explains. "It's the lawyers for the celebrities or the agents. If they don't get the right table, they scream and shout, 'I'm never going to bring so and so back to this restaurant!' " All sorts of celebrity hanger-on types pushed for inclusion as well. "We would get a dentist calling, who said, 'I fixed Farrah Fawcett's teeth. I want a table!' "
A few years later, Puck approached Swifty Lazar, the late, legendary agent with the enormous black-rimmed glasses, who threw an annual Oscar party at another Hollywood hot spot, the Bistro Garden. "I said, 'I'll give you the same price, only give you better food and wine,' " Puck recalls. "After that, Spago became The Hollywood Restaurant."
And oh, the stories! Lionel Richie once brought tennis star Jimmy Connors, but there were no tables, so Puck seated them on the stairs and served them pizza and wine. Even celebs love informality! There was a Hollywood mogul Puck refuses to name who came to the restaurant every Friday night with a different hooker. The mogul's favourite course was the service the babe-du-jour would give him in the upstairs bathroom. "And then they would leave, and the girl would always kiss the manager on the mouth, and everyone knew what she had been doing!" Puck exclaims, laughing uproariously.
Spago was named by Puck's friend Giorgio Moroder, a three-time Oscar-winning composer who created the scores for Top Gun, Flashdance and Midnight Express. "Spago means a string with no beginning and no end," Puck explains, clearly pleased with its prophetic symbolism. When he opened Spago, he and his friends invested $550,000. Eight years ago, he moved the location and built a new Hollywood Spago. Cost: $5-million.
But there have been fallouts from his success. In 2002, after 17 years of marriage and the birth of two sons, he and Barbara Lazaroff, an interior designer who had helped with the restaurants, divorced. "It had become a competition between us," Puck says, offering his version of events. "So we had these huge fights," he says, sighing. "We went to a shrink."
He waves off the trauma of divorce as if it's a bad odour. He's in love again, he tells me, smiling broadly. His live-in, 34-year-old girlfriend, an Ethiopian-born clothing designer, Gelila Assefa, who he says looks like the former model and David Bowie's wife, Iman, is expecting their first child. Will he marry her? "If the baby comes out okay, maybe," he laughs. Sidney Poitier will be the child's godfather, he adds.
Puck's sense of humour and obvious joie de vivre are easily explained. He was born the eldest of four children into a poor family in a small country village. "We ate meat only once or twice a week," he says. His late father, Josef, was a coal miner; his late mother, Maria, to whom he has dedicated all six of his cookbooks, worked in a hotel kitchen. "My father was terrible," Puck says. "He always told me I would amount to nothing. He was very abusive. I once talked to my mother and asked her, 'Why didn't you leave?' And she said she was scared that he would kill everybody."
Puck left home at 14 to live 80 kilometres away, and earned a living as an apprentice in a professional kitchen. At 17, he left for France, where he worked in famous restaurants, including Baumanière and Maxim's. "I told my father when I left for France that I'm going to come back in a Mercedes and drive through the front door, I was so pissed off with him!"
In 1973, at 23, he immigrated to the United States. Did he ever reconcile with his father? "Ach, later on, I forgave him," says Puck with his easy generosity. "I was successful, and he completely changed his tune." By that time, the young culinary entrepreneur and celebrity chef was also driving his favourite car. Yup, a Mercedes.