“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! THE FOOD IS SO GOOD.”
That this diminutive, shy, Austrian-born, thickly accented whisk would come to define the very concept of celebrity chefdom was, appropriately enough, the stuff of Hollywood. . . .
Fade in on the south-central Austrian town of St. Veit an der Glan, where we meet Wolfgang Puck as a boy who harbors kitchen ambitions, born of his love of cooking with his mother, a professional pastry chef. But his stepfather, a coal miner and onetime pugilist, scoffs at him, tells him cooking is for sissies, that he should go into construction. Puck has skills enough to win a national culinary contest, but he’s also a klutz; at one interview, he steps into a row of cakes cooling on the floor. At fourteen, Puck boards a train from Klagenfurt to take an apprenticeship at the Hotel Post in Villach. His stepfather shouts after him: “You’ll never amount to anything!”
That all really happened—and amazingly, it got worse. Arriving at his destination, Puck set himself up in a rented room in a septuagenarian’s apartment, close enough to walk to work. “I was basically like her kid,” he says. At the hotel, it was less than a month before he screwed something up, allowing the restaurant’s stash of potatoes to run out. “[The chef] told me I’m good for nothing; I should go home,” says Puck. “That was the worst day of my life.”
A well-known story goes that he thought about killing himself, but today he says it was only a passing, abstract consideration that flitted in and out of his mind that night during an hour spent lingering on a bridge. His professional devastation paled alongside the prospect of returning to life with his stepfather. “I’m not going to go home and prove him right,” he vowed.
At home, he tossed and turned until morning, then devised a Hail Mary plan: return to work and see what happened. The apprentice who had had Puck’s workload heaped on top of his own was so happy to see him that he hid him in the cellar, where he snuck him staff meals so he could stay out of sight. “I’m sure some people knew,” says Puck. “But everybody was scared to tell the chef because he was a crazy guy. And then one day, he comes down and sees me there and says, ‘You got fired. You have to leave.’ I said, ‘I can’t leave. I’ll kill myself before I leave.’” (When Puck tells this story today, he seems to channel his younger, feral self: His eyes tear up, his muscles tense, and he sets his jaw as if ready to fight. It’s intense.) The owner took pity on Puck, sent him to his other property, the Hotel Park. There the chef was a woman with kids Puck’s age; she coached him that if he just did his work and kept his nose clean, everything would be fine. And it was.
When he was eighteen, Puck wrote to several of the Michelin two- and three-star restaurants of France until he was hired on at L’Oustau de Baumanière, a three-star affair in Les Baux-de-Provence, in the South of France, where he fell under the spell of chef Raymond Thuilier, perhaps the most unlikely of the band of French chefs who rose to fame in the mid-twentieth century. Though Thuilier came from a family of aubergistes, he had spent two decades climbing the ranks of an insurance company before opening his restaurant, in equal partnership with Madame Moscoloni, in his mid-forties, in 1946; the restaurant ascended to three-star Valhalla in 1954 and remained there for thirty-five years. After three months, Puck told Thuilier he couldn’t afford to work for free any longer, but the old man had taken a liking to him and put him on the payroll.
“He was my mentor,” said Puck of Thuilier. “Town mayor, painter, and a great chef who cooked from the heart without recipes. A real Renaissance man.” Years later he would write that Thuilier’s “robust and poetic approach to all aspects of his life touched and deeply influenced me.” On his rare day off, Puck grew fond of the decidedly French pizzas served at nearby Chez Gu et Fils, especially their pissaladière, a cheese-less rectangle topped with anchovies, black olives, and caramelized onions.
From there, he progressed to La Réserve in Beaulieu, the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, and Maxim’s in Paris. In 1973, he relocated to New York City, to become the chef at La Grenouille in Midtown Manhattan, but was discouraged when he got there, concerned that he’d grow bored cooking what he considered bistro food after having been to the nouvelle mountaintop. So owner Charles Masson arranged a job for him at La Tour, atop the Indiana National Bank Building in Indianapolis. Puck, a racecar enthusiast, jumped at the chance to live in the home of the Indy 500, but immediately realized that Indianapolis was no Monte Carlo, and became quickly frustrated by the restaurant’s conservative continental fare. In 1975, he and Leroy migrated to Los Angeles and the Arco Towers, two office buildings with subterranean shops, which was where he was slaving when Terrail tracked him down.
At Ma Maison, Puck and Terrail collaborated on a new menu, cribbing from Outhier’s, which Terrail had retained from his recent travels, and from Puck’s copy of a menu from L’Oustau de Baumanière. Puck quickly proved himself talented enough that Terrail let Leroy go and hired him full-time.
Just as Terrail saw his fortunes reversing, a pall of disillusionment fell over Puck. “I didn’t know the restaurant was bankrupt,” he says. “My first paycheck bounced. Everything was COD. I went to the fish market: Scandia bought lobster meat for lobster cocktail; I bought the shells to make lobster sauce and lobster soup. Ma Maison had no money at all. Maybe three or four refrigerators outside, like home refrigerators. There was no walk-in.”* Even worse was the food: “They had on the menu: sardines, radishes with butter. Everything was precooked and everything was terrible. They had mashed potatoes in cans, powdered potatoes to make soup.”
Though only twenty-five years old, Puck knew he could do much better. He started to make his mark, phasing in his own dishes like cream of sorrel soup, lobster terrine, and grilled squab with thyme and honey.
“All of a sudden people started to say, ‘Shit, the food is so good today,’” remembers Puck. Actress Suzanne Pleshette, Bob Newhart’s husky-throated first TV wife, came into the kitchen swooning over a salad. Producer Larry Spangler burst in one day, crying, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! The food is so good.” Before long, say both Puck and Terrail, the chef had become a minority partner, to the tune of roughly 10 percent.
The resourceful Puck made the most of what ingredients were available in the pre-enlightened food days of 1970s Los Angeles. Mark Peel, a San Gabriel Valley native who was hired by Terrail as a prep cook and was quickly promoted by Puck, remembers, “Wolfgang became somewhat famous for beurre blanc with fresh tarragon. He loved using fresh tarragon all over the place. And the reason he loved using fresh tarragon was because it was really the only fresh herb you could get other than parsley. It wasn’t that he discovered tarragon, was in love with tarragon. There was one place out near Pomona that was growing it.” Peel was still in school out that way and Puck tasked him with exploring what else the tarragon farmers might grow for him, but the farmers only spoke Chinese and Japanese, so the mission was a failure.
Peel vividly remembers Puck’s early repertoire such as a potpie-like sweetbread dish, a duck in two courses, leg of lamb en croûte, and fish en croûte, which he eventually learned were borrowed from Puck’s stints overseas. “It was all straight from Baumanière,” says Peel. “But it was a revelation for Los Angeles.”
Puck wasn’t a kitchen screamer, which he says was trained out of him at Maxim’s, where it wasn’t tolerated. But he could be stubborn with Terrail and his customers. Freed to cook as he desired, he wasn’t in the mood to make concessions. “I was very tough. If somebody wanted their steak well done, I told them to eat the chicken.”
Word spread quickly, and Ma Maison was on fire. Cue the montage: Terrail was hosting a who’s who of the day: Burt Reynolds, Sylvester Stallone, Johnny Carson, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra. In time, film legend Orson Welles would lunch there daily; Carson’s Tonight Show sidekick Ed McMahon would become a constant presence, dropping by on his way to Burbank every morning to hang out in the office, sit at Terrail’s desk, and make phone calls. The restaurant became a hub for openings, gatherings, private-room celebrations, and
rituals like a waiters’ race based on a Bastille Day tradition in France. Anything could happen at Ma Maison, like the Friday afternoon when opera soprano Carol Neblett burst into an aria, or the night David Bowie bought out the place and a paparazzo leaped from roof to roof along Melrose until he could get a shot of the rock star, in violation of the restaurant’s privacy policy; Terrail smashed his camera. All along, Terrail milked the glamour, directing his valets to park Rolls-Royces, sometimes dozens of them, closest to the entrance. The restaurant was also among the very first to employ an unlisted number, although Terrail insists it was only to avoid a crush of “men in leisure suits” after an anticipated People magazine article. (The story was delayed so long that it was revised to mention the detail.) He also found himself welcomed into local French hospitality royalty, participating in a weekly Tuesday meeting among the owners of other well-regarded restaurants that had opened within a few years of each other—Bernard’s, L’Ermitage, Le Dome, Le St. Germain, and L’Orangerie—at which trends, charities, opportunities, and concerns were bandied about.
To describe the food at Ma Maison, Terrail began employing a variation on nouvelle cuisine: California nouvelle cuisine. “I think we were the first people to use the term,” he says. “Probably in 1976. I think at that time in France they were referring to nouvelle cuisine, and then Roger Vergé came out with the term cuisine of the South.* So we kind of bastardized both of them and did California nouvelle because we wanted to be nouvelle and we also wanted to be California and we also wanted to be the South.” To him, the phrase meant baby vegetables, local products, and minimalist presentations. There was also a lightness that suited the Hollywood lifestyle: “In L.A. they’re very health conscious. At lunch it was the warm lobster salad, the chicken salad—a lot of salads. Dinner we went heavier.”
To obtain more parking, Terrail bought three buildings adjacent to Ma Maison—rented one out to a gallery, turned another into a jewelry store for his mother, and converted the third into a cooking school, Ma Cuisine.* He and Puck imported nouvelle cuisine headliners, American icons such as Julia Child and an about-to-ascend Martha Stewart, as well as other chefs from around town who were famous or getting there, such as Ken Frank and Jonathan Waxman.
Puck wasn’t born in the United States, but set the stage for much of what would happen to his profession in his adopted country, starting with his kitchen at Ma Maison, which began attracting young American talent, many of whom were enjoying a backroom version of the fun times in the dining room. Susan Feniger, a Culinary Institute of America grad, remembers it as “just sort of this wild time. Most of the waiters were French and we would be doing things, like at four o’clock in the afternoon, we might go upstairs and have a glass of wine and hang out. It was just one of those things that doesn’t happen anymore, sitting around and having a glass of wine at the end of the shift. It was such a cool time, because you’d be cooking at lunch for Orson Welles, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda. You knew who was in the restaurant. It was definitely star-studded. I’m still starstruck. I had just moved from Chicago, and seeing all of these people that I’d seen on movies and TV was mind-boggling. And we were partying at that time. Jesus Christ. We’d finish our shift at eleven, we’d all be going out to Moustache Café and party all night long. That was the late seventies, the days of lots of pot, and lots of coke, and lots of drugs, and we would party all night and I’d come back into work at seven in the morning.”
Despite the Dickensian dichotomy of their upbringings, Terrail and Puck had much in common: lost boys, far from home, with links to three-star French restaurants, and an arrogant streak. Both had at one time in their lives contemplated or at least been low enough to reflect on suicide; both had been uncomfortable enough with their true selves to take on other identities with L.A. women.
But one was living off the other. Terrail’s star was ascending; Puck was the dutiful soldier, thanklessly toiling away, unknown to many—if not most—of the customers. (In Terrail’s defense, this was common practice.) And even if Puck did crave the spotlight, some say he wasn’t ready for it. Remembers Jannis Swerman, who worked for Puck in the front of the house in the 1980s: “Donald Sutherland ate there all the time. And Patrick came in to say that Donald Sutherland wanted to meet the chef. Wolfgang came out, and his English wasn’t very good then. He stood there and he said, ‘Hello.’ And then he walked away. That was it. It was very, very awkward.” (Puck chalks that and other encounters up to an innate shyness that he’s more than overcome. “I don’t think my English was that bad,” he says. “I didn’t know what to tell them. How are you? How is your family? They are private people and I don’t want to ask them that. If I knew what movie they were in, it was okay. If I knew what they were interested in, like I remember later on I met Paul Newman in London and I knew he was into racecar driving, and I love racecars, so we talked for three hours. But if somebody’s not outgoing right away, asking you questions, I didn’t know what to tell them.”)
More vexing was the economics. Puck says the restaurant was grossing $18,000 a month when he arrived; now—thanks to his cooking—it was pulling down $350,000 monthly. And there was something else: “What bothered me with Patrick was that he didn’t trust me,” says Puck. “When he left on vacation or somewhere, he did not let me sign the checks. I was supposed to be his partner, even a minority one, eight or ten percent or whatever it was. He had the maître d’ sign the checks. It annoyed me so much, but I said, ‘Okay, it doesn’t really matter.’ Then I ordered Villeroy & Boch plates, like $5,000 or $3,000 worth. He was so upset. What do we need these plates for? ‘Because I don’t want to have this ugly plate and have my food on it.’”
Terrail feels Puck got plenty out of the arrangement: “I was the key person who transacted making a chef a star,” he declares. He also claims to have put Puck’s name on the menu (unheard of at the time). Some customers would disagree with his characterization. Marcia Nasatir, a United Artists executive during the Mike Medavoy era, who lunched weekly at Ma Maison with the studio chief, says, “I never knew there was a Wolfgang.” Terrail also claims to have been the first person to put Puck on television, featuring him on his local cable show Dining with Patrick Terrail, produced by sitcom revolutionary Norman Lear. Each episode featured some travelogue footage from Terrail’s adventures, a celebrity interview (for example, Suzanne Pleshette, Ed McMahon, Orson Welles), and a recipe: “Wolfgang would do the cooking, and I would explain what he was doing because he couldn’t speak English.”
“I FELT LIKE AN IDIOT.”
“Everybody remembers history differently,” says Puck today. We’re having coffee in the bar of his preferred Midtown Manhattan hotel. He’s sixty-six years old, in New York City for one night only, to participate in the annual Citymeals on Wheels benefit at Rockefeller Center, and he’s making the most of his twenty-four hours in Manhattan. He touched down midmorning, ran an errand in Brooklyn, then checked up on the site of Cut, an outpost of his steakhouse concept, in construction at the time and, after all these years, his first Gotham restaurant.
When it comes to Puck and Terrail, he’s not kidding about different memories. Those Villeroy & Boch plates Puck bought? Terrail says he purchased them of his own volition as part of the upgrade undertaken when Puck came on board, but Mark Peel shares Puck’s recollection: “They only got good china ultimately when Patrick went on vacation and Wolfgang took it upon himself and bought all new china so when Patrick came back it had already been used. Couldn’t return it.” Remember how somebody at Maxim’s gave Terrail Puck’s name? Puck says Scott Miller, a Ma Maison cook he had once fired in Indianapolis, actually connected the two. And there’s plenty more where those came from.
It’s taken years to land this interview, eventually requiring an introduction from a chef contemporary. When I finally shake hands with Puck, he’s every bit as affable as he’s been described to me over the years; en route to our banquette, he lights up the place, shaking hands with all the busboys and bartenders, who know
him from previous stays. The welcome is an apt reflection of Puck’s place in the industry: Nobody, it seems, has a bad word to say about him, and he’s managed to keep a team of talented chefs and administrators in his orbit for decades. The next day, he tells me, he’ll be jetting back to California. At week’s end, he’s headed to Florida, then to the Far East. The roughly half dozen espressos he knocks back during our time together only enhance his aura of inexhaustibility. Toward the end of our meeting, his son Byron, an aspiring chef and student at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration (yes, Terrail’s alma mater), drops by. How sweet it must be for Puck to encourage a young cook in the family, given the derision with which his own culinary ambitions were met. He himself plans to go back to school: “I’m going to go to Harvard for a three-year period for about a month each year,” he tells me. “To learn, with a group of CEOs from different places.”
Puck wears a dark, exquisitely tailored suit with no tie. I don’t know what he’s worth personally, but his companies—which own and operate restaurants and retail food-service concessions and a catering operation; produce supermarket products including a line of frozen pizzas; and manufacture cookware and other equipment—generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually. He’s completely unaffected and perfectly engaged. “I love the unpredictable,” he says. “When I go to one of our restaurants, I say, ‘Make me something I never had.’ And if they don’t and the chef says, ‘Why don’t you come visit?’ I say, ‘Because you always make me the same old shit.’ I love change and always have.”
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