Emboldened, the women began expanding their repertoire into unprecedented eclecticism: Feniger returned from a trip to India, added potato samosas with chutneys, a vegetarian plate with dals, and lamb curry to the menu. Milliken returned from Thailand and on went a Thai sausage salad, duck red curry, eggplant curry, and pickled tomatoes. A trip to the Japanese fish market was followed by monkfish liver. They persuaded a garden in Brentwood to grow organic produce for them, including black mustard sprouted from seeds Feniger brought back from India.
“We weren’t making it accessible,” says Feniger. “We were just doing the food we loved. As long as people were buying it, we never thought about it. We never thought about what the press will say; we didn’t go there.”
One day, it hit Feniger in a flash—the same way it had hit Waxman and Puck in that passing glance at Ma Cuisine—that step by step, imperceptibly as it had happened, she had entered a new world. “Oh my God,” she thought. “We can do whatever we want!”
“THIS IS VERY SAD, WOLF. THIS IS NOT OKAY.”
Barbara Lazaroff, then a stranger to the restaurant industry, saw the inherent injustice in its power structure. Puck had saved Ma Maison but Terrail was reaping the spoils. The dynamic was symbolized in the paycheck Lazaroff found in Puck’s bathroom one day, an amount so meager she assumed it was a week’s pay, and insufficient at that. When Puck told her that’s what he earned every two weeks, the New Yorker within was unleashed: “You’ve got to be shitting me,” she snapped. “I earned more than that when I was eighteen years old. This is despicable. You need to go talk to Patrick and tell him to double your salary.”
“What?”
“Double it!”
Says Lazaroff, “Wolfgang had transformed Ma Maison. It was going to go out of business. And Wolf transformed it and made it a huge success with a great name. So, yeah, I said, ‘This is very sad, Wolf. This is not okay.’”
“The next day I went to Patrick,” says Puck. “I said, ‘We have to talk. You have to double my salary or I’m going to leave.’ He said, ‘Go talk to Sid.’ Sid was the accountant. He had a little office there. I said, ‘Sid, you have two choices: You have to double my salary or else I’m leaving. This is ridiculous.’ He said okay.”
Lazaroff also helped the newly single Puck clean up his home, hammering ice blocks out of the freezer, sorting through storage boxes piled up all over the place. (He also only owned one fork; in time she’d convince him to do a $35,000 renovation of his kitchen.) One of the boxes contained what Lazaroff calls “faux shares.”
“What are these?” she asked him.
“I’m a partner in Ma Maison,” he said.
“No you’re not,” insisted Lazaroff. “These are not real.”
They went back and forth but Lazaroff insisted “they were bullshit. And sure enough,” she says, “they were bullshit. He just printed out shit, a thing that looks like a bond.
“Wolf is very naïve,” says Lazaroff.*
Puck was working lunch and dinner six days a week, and dinner on Sunday. She’d pick him up in the afternoon, and the two drove to her place and hit the sack between services.
One afternoon, Puck turned on the television, saw one of his waiters on the small screen, promoting an industry charity marathon.
“What is he doing on TV?” Puck exclaimed. “He’s not even a cook.”
“Do you want to be on TV?” asked Lazaroff.
“Well, yeah.”
Lazaroff worked her burgeoning L.A. network, eventually reaching independent casting director Lillian Mizrahi, and pitched her Puck.
“That’s really funny,” said Mizrahi (according to Lazaroff). “We wanted him to come on to cook something on one of these shows but Patrick Terrail said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I go on,’ or somebody else. ‘He doesn’t want to do that. He doesn’t like doing that.’”
Lazaroff pushed her luck, asking if there was a national show that might book him. Mizrahi made some calls, came back with Hour Magazine, a syndicated features program hosted by Gary Collins that aired in 117 markets. Puck did a cooking demo the next week.
All the while, Lazaroff was training Puck for stardom. Despite Puck’s protestations, according to her (and others), his English was substandard so he’d rely on a meager set of shticky one-liners in customer interactions. A diner might say, “How are you?” and he’d respond, “Not as good as you!” In their limited time together, Lazaroff read Time and Newsweek to him to punch up his fluency.
Many of their contemporaries say that Puck wouldn’t be where he is today had Lazaroff not come along. Puck, before we began recording our interview, groused that this impression annoys him, and Ruth Reichl understands why: “There’s nobody like Wolfgang. He’s incredibly talented. He’s the best manager. People love him. People who work for him love him. Even people who have left, nobody will say anything bad about him. And he’s got an amazing palate. He loves to cook. I watched him once in the kitchen at Spago, this is when Sherry Yard was there as the pastry chef. And he was going through, tasting. He just stuck his finger in the ice cream and said, ‘Why did you use different ginger?’ And she was like, ‘How do you even know that?’ He’s unlike many businessman chefs who start hating to cook. He is always there. It’s like I said: I never saw Michael [McCarty] in the kitchen. I never didn’t see Wolf in the kitchen. He’d invite you to his house. He loves cooking. He’d get in the kitchen and push people aside. I once asked him, ‘Why do you open so many restaurants?’ And he said, ‘Look. You develop these chefs and they’re really good, and at a certain point they’re going to leave you.’ So he said, ‘Instead of letting them leave, I open up a restaurant for them to run.’ Every chef in America should know that, right? That you become partners. You develop people, and you become partners with them. I mean, the idea that Tom Kaplan [senior managing partner of Puck’s corporation] is still working for him, what, thirty-five years later? It’s amazing. In this business, how many people have that tight organization that people stay and stay and stay and stay and stay? That’s what I mean when I say he’s a genius.” That said, Reichl does believe that Lazaroff accelerated the process.
So I believe Puck when he tells me that he had concluded that the only way to get what he wanted at Ma Maison was to become a partner, and the only way to accomplish that was to create a second restaurant, force Terrail to join forces with him and create a management company as fifty-fifty equals. (Puck says that Terrail promised him they’d take over La Tour d’Argent someday. “My uncle is so old, in five years we’re going to run La Tour d’Argent,” Terrail told him. “Then we went to La Tour d’Argent, the uncle comes over and says hello, shook everybody’s hand at the table. Did not say, ‘Oh, Patrick. So good to see you.’ He was like a stranger. I said, ‘Shit, we’re not going to own La Tour d’Argent!’”)
With all of this percolating, Puck commented to Lazaroff one afternoon at her apartment that he longed to have his own restaurant, something like you see in the South of France, in particular Chez Gu et Fils, where he used to enjoy those Sunday afternoons in his Les Baux-de-Provence days.
“But you probably couldn’t have a pizza oven,” he sighed, resignedly.
Lazaroff picked up the phone, dialed the fire department, asked to speak to an inspector.
“We’re thinking of doing a restaurant and we want to put a wood-burning oven in it,” she told him. “And we want to make pizzas in the wood-burning oven.”
The inspector asked if customers could come into contact with the oven. She assured him that there’d be a counter to act as barrier.
“It sounds okay, lady.”
That was enough for Lazaroff. She and Puck began conceiving their restaurant, a casual pizza joint, both filling a longing to replicate the magic of Chez Gu et Fils and to fill a void in the burgeoning L.A. dining scene. He initially envisioned a by-the-numbers joint with red-checkered tablecloths and candles stuffed into straw-wrapped Chianti bottles.
Puck was also spurred by a visit to Bertranou—hi
s head swollen in the full throes of his brain tumor—at his hospital bedside. “I used to bring him the duck salad,” says Puck. “I said, ‘Jean, look what I’m doing at Ma Maison now.’ And he said, ‘You should open your own restaurant.’ He said, ‘Get away from this guy. He’s not good. Open your own restaurant.’”
Puck and Lazaroff went through a few possible partners: Seattle SuperSonics owner Sam Schulman came and went, followed by composer Giorgio Moroder, known for his synth-heavy 1980s-defining soundtracks to Midnight Express and American Gigolo, who suggested the name Spago, but they couldn’t come to terms. (According to Puck, Moroder wanted 60 or 70 percent of the profits in perpetuity instead of a more standard 65-35 model that would flip once he recouped his investment.)
The solution presented itself in the same place where Puck and Lazaroff began their courtship: Ma Cuisine. Donald Salk, a dentist from Chicago and fledgling food enthusiast on his second marriage, was a frequent student there. It was easier to score a spot in the classes than a table at Ma Maison—in fact, Salk had never dined there—and cheaper, too, so Salk became a regular and bonded with Puck, who confided his discontent and desire to open what he was still describing as a pizza place. Salk offered to help him raise money, although his wife, an L.A. native, told him he was crazy. But Salk was turned on by the idea of owning a restaurant, or even just part of one. He connected with Michael Roberts’s attorney, devised a limited partnership concept, began going after thirty-four investors at $15,000 a pop. To entice them, Puck hosted brunches and Salk wined and dined them at Ma Maison. Despite the love for Puck, there were fund-raising challenges: In time, Spago would become a shining restaurant on a hill, but its predecessor in the space, Kavkaz, was anything but: a Russian Armenian restaurant overlooking a hooker-rich Sunset Boulevard. Memories differ on the final number of investors; the consensus puts it in the midtwenties. Down the homestretch, Puck and Salk put their houses up as collateral to surmount a funding gap. They raised a total of $510,000, which Puck supplemented with an equipment loan. It was barely enough: “I had $10,000 or $12,000 left and I put it in three different banks, and wrote checks on all of them,” Puck said, the intention being to give the impression he had more money than he did.
With the financing in place, Puck says he approached Terrail: “I said, ‘I found this location up there, we’re going to do this Italian bistro. There’s only one condition: We have to form a fifty-fifty partnership and we have to spruce up Ma Maison, to get it a little more luxurious, not to have Astroturf and plastic chairs.’ And he looked at me after a second and says, ‘You know I will always own fifty-one percent; I will never do fifty-fifty.’ So I said, ‘Me too.’” Puck realized that it was time to leave. He gave Terrail three months’ notice, but after two weeks, people were openly gossiping.
Unsurprisingly, Terrail recalls a different version of events, insisting that he would have taken a fifty-fifty split on both restaurants—the new venture and Ma Maison—but that Lazaroff, not Puck, did the negotiating; that he was turned off by the fact that she would be running the new place; and that she invited him to invest in the new restaurant, not be a partner. He also says that he learned about Puck’s plans, including the name Spago, when he phoned his office from vacation and his assistant told him it was in the Hollywood Reporter. She also told Terrail that television producer Bob Stivers, of Circus of the Stars success, had been trying to help Puck and Lazaroff, bringing a steady parade of potential investors—mostly dentists and doctors—to Ma Maison for lunch while Terrail was overseas.
“I come back and obviously I’m a little furious,” says Terrail. “Probably short-tempered, probably came to some rash decision . . . but I guess I was young, egocentric, and everything that goes with that. And I probably said, ‘Absolutely not. I can’t do both.’”
The ensuing breakup was, says Puck, “like a bad divorce.” Terrail cut Puck’s access to company assets: One morning, he woke up to find the company car missing. He went to the store to buy supplies, and the cashier confiscated his credit card, cut it in half. Puck retaliated in his own way: “Cat Stevens used to come to the restaurant all the time and he used to eat soft-boiled eggs. Patrick comes into the kitchen ranting and raving, ‘I need soft-boiled eggs for Cat Stevens!’ Finally I took a ladle out of the eggs and said, ‘You want the eggs, here they are!’ And bang. The eggs were on the wall and he had the egg yolks and everything on him.”
Puck had become a bit of a known quantity since his first days at Ma Maison, but when he cut the cord with Terrail, he was overcome with self-doubt. “I was so nervous . . . I put on twenty-five pounds,” he said. It didn’t help that Terrail, his L.A. papa, was—according to Puck—telling anyone who’d listen that he was a bad manager. “It was a terrible time,” Puck said.
“THERE WAS NO RECIPE.”
Puck and Salk made a visit to Chez Panisse, where Puck connected with his old cook Mark Peel, told him about his new concept, which he was still describing—despite Lazaroff’s protestations—as a pizza place that was also going to serve pasta and salads. He painted Peel a picture that would have horrified former set decorator Lazaroff: checkered tablecloths, candles stuck in Chianti bottles, a guitar player on Saturday nights. Because Puck wishfully thought he’d do Spago without leaving Ma Maison, he asked Peel to become the chef of Spago. Peel returned to Los Angeles, took a job back at Michael’s to pay the rent for the months when Spago was being built.
Before he left Berkeley, Peel obtained the name and number of the contractor who’d built Chez Panisse’s oven, a German, and persuaded the man to move to Los Angeles, where he parked his rig at the construction site, living there and insisting on being paid in cash. He built the oven, but also drank too much, had temper tantrums, fired people. One day, Salk received a panicked call from Lazaroff: the contractor was going to walk if he didn’t receive one hundred dollars immediately. Salk rushed over, cash in hand, handed it to Puck, who passed it up a ladder to the man. (Lazaroff fibbed to the Board of Health, telling them it was a fireplace, which was more true than she knew: “We found out later that he built them rather badly,” says Peel. “He built them like a fireplace—they were really inefficient when it came to burning our wood.”)
Lazaroff brought all of her design capabilities to bear in creating a space like no other, with wire chairs and what she called an “exhibition kitchen.”
Spago came together crazy fast; when it was ready to go, there was no waiting. Peel departed Michael’s, as did Nancy Silverton (with whom he had coupled up and would eventually marry, then divorce), who signed on as pastry chef. Silverton didn’t leave Michael’s lightly, because it was established. “None of us went to Spago because it was Spago,” she says. To seal the deal, Peel pulled an all-nighter, pleading his case to Silverton’s mother, earning her blessing.
As the restaurant came to life, Puck—who’d gradually been migrating further and further away from traditional cuisine—decided he wanted the cooks to reflect the changing times. If they were going to be visible to customers, he didn’t want them to look formal, staid, the way they did in, say, Soltner’s kitchen at Lutèce in New York City. “I said, ‘We’re going to make baseball caps.’ White baseball caps with the word Spago on it in our color, the pinkish color. The cooks loved it. Everybody loved it. Then it became a fad all over. It didn’t make it so starchy.”
The same impulse led Puck to design his own menu, to avoid the formality of a leather-bound tome. David Hockney had designed Ma Maison’s menu but Puck couldn’t afford him or his peers. So he drew a collage of images depicting casual dishes and scribbled the phrase California Cuisine on the cover. The dishes weren’t exact templates of what would be served, and that was fine by Puck, who intended the images as “a blueprint.”
“When we started, I said, ‘We’re not going to have a big menu,’” says Puck. “‘We’ll change it as much as we can, whatever we get.’ So we had like six appetizers, a few pizzas, and grilled and roasted food. It was very simple.”
&
nbsp; The day before opening, Peel began prepping at ten in the morning and worked straight through the night, all the way up until the doors opened. Puck put off writing the menu, a major production in the precomputer/pre-email era requiring typing, proofing, printing, and laminating.
“One day he just sat down at this crappy little desk we had downstairs, four sheets of paper, and wrote the menu. In pen. No cross-outs. No erasing. Nothing,” remembers Peel, who was allowed one menu item: He scribbled a Chez Panisse golden oldie, angel hair pasta with goat cheese and broccoli, in the margin.
“I like it that way,” says Puck. “I like the pressure and in a way I like the surprise.”
Construction continued until the last possible second as well. Says Peel: “They hammered the last nail at four; we opened the doors at six.” There were no dry runs, no practice services, known today as “friends and family” dinners. The kitchen team hadn’t cooked the menu a single time before opening. “We cooked the first night with the menus propped in front of us so at least we could remember to get all the listed ingredients into the dishes,” says Peel.
“There was no recipe,” remembers Kazuto Matsusaka, another Ma Maison alum who joined Puck at Spago. “I went up to Wolfgang: ‘How do you make this tuna sashimi salad?’ Wolf goes, ‘Cut it up. Just make it up. Just make it whatever you think is good.’ That’s how it was.”
“IT FELT LIKE BEING AT A PARTY ALL THE TIME.”
Spago opened on January 16, 1982. Puck was so insecure that he told Salk to invite his wife’s enormous extended family to ensure a somewhat full house. But when the dentist and his family arrived, they were confronted with eighteen Rolls-Royces in the parking lot and had to wait hours for a table. The restaurant did 170 covers that night.
“When the doors first opened,” remembers Lazaroff, “I was still shoeless standing on top of the kitchen counter getting the track lights correct. I thought of it as a stage. I used to study theater lighting and design; that’s what I did. So I said, ‘That’s my star. These are my stars. I’m lighting them up.’”
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 12