Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  “I never even got to realize what I was in the middle of because who would have thought Spago, which became what Spago was overnight, would become that?” says Silverton. What Silverton calls the “floods” came the minute the doors opened. Because there was only the open kitchen, she had to clear out by 4 p.m., when Ed LaDou, the pizza maker, came in. She’d prepped days’ worth of ingredients prior to opening night, but it was all gone by closing time.

  Things were even more discombobulated on the hot line. Of that first night, Matsusaka remembers: “The timing was horrible. And nobody knew what to do. There’s no system. There’s no preopening meeting or preopening discussions. There was nothing. And the food started to run out. That was the craziest opening I’ve ever done. Mark was next to me; he was on pasta. He was making a pasta at six. Later, he was cutting [more fresh] angel hair pasta.”

  Puck was a draw, which was great for business, but a double-edged sword. Continues Matsusaka: “Wolfgang was in the kitchen, so when we opened Spago, everybody came to see him. That means they’re going to start talking to him. So he was on the grill. Then the food has to go out together. So Wolfgang starts talking, nothing is coming out. So I told Mark Peel, ‘Mark, we have to kick Wolfgang out of the kitchen.’ That’s what we did. Because he loves to cook and he loves to talk. He has to be out of the kitchen so he can schmooze those people, talk to people, whatever he wants to do, then we can run the kitchen a little more smoothly.”

  “It was so crazy we could not get a handle on it at all,” said Puck. Famous customers denied a table “screamed at me and said they were never going to talk to me again.” If he tried to accommodate them, resulting in a wait, “then they screamed again. It was so hard.”

  Between Puck’s Ma Maison fan base and the restaurant’s heat, Spago began drawing a celebrity clientele. Before long, two paparazzi were stationed like snipers along the hill that ran up from the parking lot to the restaurant.

  “I had just come from five years working in a beauty salon,” says Wendi Matthews, a childhood friend of Silverton’s who became an office manager at Spago. “Lots of cocaine and lots of Quaaludes. Lots of hip, cool, young people. Everybody was sleeping with everybody. And it was sort of that same feeling at the restaurant. There were customers coming upstairs and sneaking off into the storage area to get high, and employees and people sleeping with everybody. It was that same sort of feel. It felt like being at a party all the time. I mean, even though during the day we weren’t open and it was work, but everybody was sort of having fun.”

  “You knew who was holding, who was high, who wasn’t. But definitely there was a lot of substance going on,” says Jannis Swerman, who helped run the dining room. “You couldn’t get into the bathrooms. People were going two at a time, so it was either sex or drugs or both.” Swerman thinks Puck and Lazaroff were largely oblivious to it, but Lazaroff, who maintains she was an abstainer, was routinely offered coke and pot by customers, as a tip or just to share the good times. She told them owners don’t accept tips, to give it to the staff at the door. Sometimes the sheer volume of self-abuse so overwhelmed her that she’d go home at the end of the night, throw open the door, and sob into the living room of the house she and Puck shared on Fifth Street.

  “We knew we were on this new wave, this niche of people wanting to have a place that was their own little casual playground that was exclusive in certain ways but was also inclusive, because actually you had a lot of people who were very well known in different fields, a lot of them in entertainment, but in different fields,” says Lazaroff. “And some of the most powerful weren’t known by the other people in the restaurant, like the studio heads and whatever. I mean, the stars knew who they were, but there were loads of people. Our postman who delivered our mail would come there and dine.”

  Of course I can get a table; Wolfgang is a close personal friend of mine.

  —Richard Thornburg (William Atherton), Die Hard (1988)

  All of Hollywood came to Spago, from an intergenerational mix of above-the-line names such as Michael Caine, Teri Garr, Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds, Sylvester Stallone, and Barbra Streisand, and “everybody who ever played James Bond”—as onetime dining room manager Swerman puts it—to icons like Johnny Carson, to wunderkind directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and emerging industry power brokers like Mike Ovitz. Naturally, no special requests were turned down. Puck also found creative ways to flatter VIP guests, such as automatically sending them a smoked salmon and crème fraîche pizza, known colloquially to staff and guests alike as “the Jewish pizza.”

  Like the crowds, the fame just came. “All of a sudden Entertainment Tonight was there,” remembers Matthews, who transitioned into a PR role. “I was getting phone calls: ‘We want to do a segment on ET.’ I didn’t think, ‘Oh my God, we’ve hit the big time.’ It just sort of was.” (It should, however, be remembered that Spago didn’t monopolize the entertainment business. Morton’s and The Ivy, to name just two popular old-school canteens, still drew bold-faced names, and Chasen’s retained its popularity among the over-fifty set, reinvigorated by recently elected President Ronald Reagan’s fondness for it.)

  Maybe, too, the populace was simply ready for something new: In 1981, nearly thirty years before the likes of Eataly in New York City, Jane Erickson, the punk-coiffed companion of notorious art dealer Douglas James Chrismas, opened Charmer’s Market, a combination open-air market and restaurant with more than twenty-five Champagnes, under a stucco tent in Santa Monica, a stone’s throw from the beach. Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Ali MacGraw, and Goldie Hawn were regulars. Charmer’s bridged nouvelle (scallops with raspberry sauce) and California (hot barbecued duck salad) cuisines and forecast one of the defining characteristics of Spago: dinner as entertainment, for the entertainment set. “I didn’t set out to get the Hollywood crowd,” Erickson told the New York Times. “But I guess there’s a certain atmosphere of theater here.”

  Lazaroff was the embodiment of Spago’s theatricality. As her bank balance grew, she began realizing those childhood fashion dreams with a loud, colorful, and unmistakable style that extended from head to toe: “I wear twinkling clothes, Tinkerbell clothes that glisten with beads and sequins,” she said. “My style is my own dream as a five-year-old of what I’d look like when I grew up.” (That five-year-old must have also loved animals; circling around Lazaroff like cartoon butterflies were twenty-eight of them: parrots, rabbits, cats, and dogs.) Her wardrobe, housed in a twenty-foot-long closet that she kept locked, even from Puck, comprised more than one hundred dresses and more than a hundred pairs of shoes; just two examples: a purple taffeta Karl Lagerfeld minidress with a full, circle skirt, and a black bolero Rifat Ozbek suit with white passementerie. Often, she tied primitive objects into her hair and emphasized her eyes with exaggerated black eyeliner that extended the edges. (“I paint my face as if the audience were looking at me from fifty feet away,” she said.) She maintained that it only took her twenty minutes to prepare such a getup, but hours to dress casually.

  Puck, too, flowered into fame: He was gifted at making the most demanding guests feel special. He says that because he came from a small town, where the nearest cinema was five kilometers away and they had no car to get there, he didn’t see movies as a kid. They didn’t even own a TV. As a consequence, “I was never impressed by them,” he says. “I wasn’t like most of the people were if somebody was a movie star: Can we get an autograph? Because I didn’t watch the movies. Most of them I never saw.” When he became friendly with director Billy Wilder, “I had to lie to him,” faking appreciation for his classics such as Some Like It Hot, while privately thinking, “I hope he doesn’t ask me who was in that!”

  Tables were hard to come by, but in theory the restaurant was democratic, with one exception—Terrail was forbidden. One night around 1989 while Puck was in San Francisco, his maître d’ called telling him that Terrail had shown up unannounced with good pal Ed McMahon. “You know what to do,” Puck told him, and hung up.


  “HE’S WAY AHEAD OF ALL THE CHEFS.”

  In 1983, Puck and Lazaroff settled on their sophomore effort, presenting Puck’s take on Chinese food. They secured a space in Santa Monica, named the restaurant after the location, Chinois on Main.

  Things went more smoothly this time, though there was a hiccup when the Department of Health and Safety withheld a permit from the contractor, prompting Lazaroff to call the inspector. The problem, it was explained, was that brick is porous. The DOH didn’t know who they were dealing with: Lazaroff said she’d put a polymer over it. When the inspector said the polymer would burn off, former med student Lazaroff explained that it wouldn’t: Bonds strengthen when polymers are subjected to heat. When the inspector insisted she didn’t know what she was talking about, Lazaroff exploded into action: She fished her old organic chemistry textbook out of the attic and went to his office early the next day dressed for success in a ruffled black-and-white dress. She insisted on seeing her tormentor, sat at his desk, and read to him out of the book, in a raised voice, so everybody could hear the schooling. Then she leaned in, whispering, “Mister, if you don’t sign my health plans right now I’m going to sue you.” He stamped his approval and Lazaroff returned to the restaurant, holding the paper aloft, triumphant once again.

  Chinois on Main was another seamless Puck-Lazaroff collaboration: The kitchen turned out beef sauté with a honey-chile sauce; mesquite-grilled Santa Barbara shrimp with miso; crab with black bean sauce, butter, and scallions; sole with caviar, ginger, and a vodka-spiked shrimp sauce; and—influentially—a trio of assorted crème brûlées including ginger. Puck showed that he was no one-trick pony in the kitchen, and Lazaroff did the same with the décor: In the center of the dining room were two seven-foot enameled-brass peacocks; on the green lacquered walls was Pop Art; shiny black chairs surrounded green tables; and adorning the room were gargantuan flower arrangements. (Ironically, Puck had to let any Chinese cooks go. “They couldn’t cook as we wanted,” he said. “They were making gooey sauces with MSG.” Any Asian cooks in the kitchen were Japanese.)

  As an example of just how many tumblers have to fall into place for success, consider that a year before Chinois opened, chef Susumu Fukui was offering a more formal combination of French and Japanese cuisine, in a prescient but premature tasting menu format at La Petite Chaya in the Los Feliz neighborhood. Across town in Silver Lake, another ahead-of-his-time chef, former L’Orangerie toque Tadayoshi Matsuno, offered his version of “FrancAsian” cuisine at Lyon, a fifteen-seat counter restaurant.

  Puck understood the importance of timing. “There are a lot of other restaurants like Spago,” he said years later, “but we were first. . . . That’s probably the most important thing. It seems like there are a lot of other very talented chefs, good-looking, very articulate . . . but . . . it’s hard to get as well known if you’re not first.”

  The sentiment is echoed by a still-admiring Terrail, with whom Puck buried the hatchet after his old boss got into a tussle with throat cancer, even throwing him a seventieth birthday party. “The most important thing about Wolfgang, in my eyes, from my perspective, he’s way ahead of all the chefs. He has great vision of when to change and how to adapt. And the only one that I know that has that kind of vision is Jean-Georges [Vongerichten, who came to New York City in 1985]. . . . Wolfgang for some reason has the ability to be at the right place at the right time with the right package. And if you look at all the chefs . . . Joachim Splichal, Jean-Georges, and Wolfgang, I think they’re the only guys who really see the world from their perspective and are able to grow with it.”

  The king and queen of Hollywood dining staged themselves an appropriately regal wedding in spring 1984, a medieval ceremony at L’Oustau de Baumanière, where Puck began his career. Approximately 130 guests made the trip. Lazaroff produced the ultimate fantasy wedding: horse-drawn carriages, three costume changes, and seventeen hours’ worth of festivities. But she couldn’t escape her role as hostess. When guests complained about the accommodations, she balked, “I’m the bride, why do I have to deal with this?” (They had actually been married by a rabbi in a private secret ceremony in 1983; Lazaroff wanted something that belonged to them alone. And who could blame her—the Baumanière wedding was covered by Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.)

  Through it all, Puck relied on Lazaroff for guidance on anything nonkitchen. Asked to cameo in a Shelley Long comedy, he deferred to her. “Yeah, this is cute,” she said. “But tell them we can write a funnier line.” (The scene ended up on the cutting room floor.) Before consenting to wear a suit for a Los Angeles Times Magazine cover story, he had to gain Lazaroff’s approval.

  Lazaroff didn’t resent Puck’s fame, but it peeved her to no end that her contribution was often overlooked. Lazaroff wanted credit for everything she did, which should have been news to nobody; the copyright page of Modern French Cooking for the American Kitchen features this note: “Introductory material written in collaboration with Barbara Lazaroff.”

  “When it started to take off at Spago, probably in the second year, and Wolfgang got so in demand and everybody wanted him for a different event and travel and to do different charities and stuff, there came a point where Barbara came to me and said that I had to run everything by her as well before I could just go to Wolfgang and get an okay,” says Matthews. “I think that part of it was that Barbara was a partner in it and nobody really considered her. Wolf was in the forefront. He was the chef. He was charming. He had this personality. People really didn’t know what Barbara’s place was there.”

  “I know that everybody looks at me like I’m a publicity-hungry society climber,” she said. “But the one thing I will not do is all the work on something and have somebody stick their name on it, even if it is my husband.” (Though they filed for divorce in 2002, Wolfgang Puck’s corporate website features a biography of Lazaroff on the Our Team page, naming her as cofounder, and she still spends time at Spago Beverly Hills.)

  Eventually, Lazaroff couldn’t take it anymore and began writing letters to reporters who she felt didn’t properly credit her in print. Just as Puck had kicked her under the table in that publishing meeting, he worried that she’d alienate the media and their life-giving ink.

  Says Reichl: “Wolf used to call me and say, ‘Please make sure you get Barbara’s name in when you do this story or it’s not going to be worth going home.’” When uniforms were being produced for Chinois on Main, Lazaroff had the manufacturer create a jacket for her that had a message embroidered on the back: “I’m not Wolfgang Puck’s girlfriend. He’s my boyfriend.”

  “We had a major disagreement,” said Lazaroff. “And we finally fought it out. I said, ‘Look, Wolf, you do what you have to do. This is what I need to do.’ . . . I would rather have somebody say she’s bitchy, she’s this and that.”

  Her contributions to the restaurants might have been the least of it, and the true source of her ire. Ventured one reporter: “Lazaroff’s most ambitious undertaking . . . has been the making of Wolfgang Puck.”

  One Halloween, Lazaroff made a Batman villain of herself, naming her costume “I Am Woman”—a black dress to which she sewed “my animals . . . a washboard, models of the restaurants and a drafting board, hammers, nails, cooking utensils, financial papers . . . all this shit was hanging off me. I wore a big crown and these black gloves that said SISTER, MOTHER, DAUGHTER, WIFE, SEX KITTEN. That is what I feel like all the time.”

  While Puck and Lazaroff were still living out their dizzying success, a New York Times rundown of L.A. restaurants reported the Sunset Boulevard–worthy decline of Ma Maison. “Now the Astroturf carpeting is frayed, the flowers are wilted, and the service creaks,” wrote Marian Burros. “Without Mr. Puck, Ma Maison is living on its past.” (It didn’t help that in 1982, when Ma Maison’s new chef, John Sweeney, was accused of murdering actress Dominique Dunne, daughter of writer Dominick Dunne, many believed Terrail stood by Sweeney, even enlisted legal counsel for him. In his book A Tas
te of Hollywood, Terrail insists that he merely asked a friend in the public defender’s office to make sure he had a good lawyer, and has had no further contact with the man since. Terrail writes that it was one of the most stressful periods of his life, and no doubt cost him customers.) Whatever the reason, Ma Maison closed for good in 1985. The divorce metaphor comes up often in the recounting of industry breakups and, as with the real thing, it’s the children—in this case the restaurants—who suffer the most.

  2

  The Otto Syndrome

  The fact that you were doing it for the public was something of an afterthought.

  —Karen Puro (formerly Pritsker)

  THE STORY OF HOW AN ANONYMOUS CHEF TWEAKED THE NEW YORK CITY FOOD ESTABLISHMENT WHILE BECOMING A FOLK HERO TO YOUNG COOKS ON THE EAST COAST, AND A CONSTELLATION OF AMERICAN RESTAURANT COUPLES WENT THEIR OWN WAY WITH MIXED SUCCESS AND LONGEVITY, IN AND OUT OF THE KITCHEN

  Six weeks into 1979—about the same time Michael McCarty was putting the finishing touches on his nascent masterpiece on the other side of the republic—a mythic figure rose over the eastern culinary landscape. His name was Otto, and he was a chef unlike any other, first because he wasn’t French, but that was the least of it: He favored T-shirts to starched whites; owned his own restaurant in partnership and collaboration with his wife; and toiled in bucolic bliss in the countryside beyond New York City, where he kept a small garden and a trout pond and whipped up a broad range of eclectic offerings that changed daily and so spontaneously that he couldn’t dream of scribbling the menu before three o’clock in the afternoon. He was also a mystery, a puzzle: Otto wasn’t his real name but rather a pseudonym dreamed up by The New Yorker magazine’s writer John McPhee, who introduced him to the world in a sprawling 25,000-word profile in the magazine’s February 19 issue. The article spun the tale of how Otto, with wife Anne (also a pseudonym) serving as pastry chef, sommelier, and hostess, ran a fifty-five-seat country restaurant in a rustic farmhouse-inn where the author claimed, audaciously, to have eaten the twenty or thirty best meals of his life, despite the fact that he’d dined in “the fields of Les Baux” and “the streets of Lyons [sic]”—sly references to, respectively, chefs Raymond Thuilier and Paul Bocuse. McPhee, known for his extravagantly detailed reporting (he had written a definitive piece on Greenmarkets for the magazine the year prior), stuffed the article so full of minutiae that Otto all but sprang to life and walked off the page: He was a man of mixed Austrian and British extraction who spent his life in utter servitude to his restaurant, poring over cookery books and scavenging for ingredients everywhere from Manhattan markets to his local Grand Union. He began his day at 6 a.m., prepped until the dinner hour, then cooked from an open kitchen for his customers, who might range in number from as few as two to a little more than forty. The chef shopped from local groceries and supermarkets, and had, according to McPhee, developed a repertoire of about six hundred appetizers and entrees (main courses) of his own devising, things like veal and shrimp quenelles; sautéed scallops with pesto; paella à la marinara; and a signature dish he dubbed Chicken Coriander (chicken breasts marinated in yogurt with lemon juice and cilantro). Even when he went classic, he broke with French convention, making bordelaise with boiled pork rinds instead of marrow, béarnaise with green peppercorns rather than black. This was no small matter: Most chefs still adhered to Escoffier (recall those asterisks on Ken Frank’s early menu denoting his unique dishes); to do otherwise was an act of rebellion.