From a kitchen novice from Carinthia to a multimillionaire and favorite chef of Hollywood stars: Wolfgang Puck (74) lives the American dream. His restaurant empire employs 5,000 people between Los Angeles, London, Vienna and Singapore. In the Forbes interview, the star chef reveals what he learned in life at the Hotel Linde on Lake Wörthersee, why he wants to open hotels in Switzerland and Mexico soon and why his son Byron will follow in his footsteps.
Wolfgang Puck is sitting in his property in Los Angeles, but his thoughts are back in the kitchen of the Hotel Linde on Lake Wörthersee. His mother bakes cakes and tarts there, while little Wolfgang, just eleven years old, peels the potatoes or looks over the chefs’ shoulders. He watches with childlike curiosity as they roll out the chilled shortcrust pastry, beat the cream until stiff or stir eggs and sugar into a sponge cake dough. Sometimes the chefs give him an ice cream or let him taste the end of the apricot roulade.
But it wasn’t just cooking that fascinated the young Puck back then — he also recognized what makes a good host. He learns from the owner of the Hotel Linde, Mrs. Trattnig, how she makes every guest feel special; how she uses charm and warmth to create a space that people enjoy spending time in — and thus a place that guests are happy to return to. This early lesson accompanied the future star chef throughout his entire career.Today, when young and aspiring chefs ask him for advice, he tells them about the long-dead Ms. Trattnig and the linden tree on Lake Wörthersee. Puck says: “Many young chefs only think about cooking and their dishes. But sometimes they forget what makes a successful restaurateur: He has to be a good restaurateur.”Wolfgang Puck is an icon of the American hospitality industry.
He lives the American Dream and has worked his way up from being a dishwasher and potato peeler from Carinthia to becoming a multimillionaire with an estimated personal fortune of more than US$90 million. His global restaurant empire includes 70 restaurants, including gourmet temples between California, London and Singapore.During the Zoom interview with Forbes, Puck sits in his office, in the background a massive designer bookshelf filled with illustrated books. His assistant sets up the software and the microphone for him. Puck is not a technology lover, he also likes to write by hand.
His hair is silver and his skin is a healthy Californian tan. He exudes that bright, vitamin D-fueled optimism that so many successful West Coast Americans possess. However, the fact that he speaks with a Carinthian accent proves that he continues to cultivate his roots, which form the foundation of his success.In general, Puck appears to have above-average vitality for a man who will soon be 75 years old. Why is that? “You always have to keep moving and be curious,” he says. But what accounts for the longevity of Puck’s success? And what does he plan for the future of his empire?
Anyone who talks to Puck and listens to his anecdotes travels into the glamor world of Hollywood; encounters old and new icons. The celebrity chef casually sprinkles stories about Jack Lemmon, Barbra Streisand, Andy Warhol and Tom Cruise into the conversation, like his chefs sprinkle sea salt flakes on beef chops.In Madonna’s kitchen he planned the banquet for her wedding to Sean Penn. The Kardashian daughters started coming to Spago, his celebrity eatery in Beverly Hills, for pizza as children. With Arnold Schwarzenegger, the other Californian Austrian who personifies the American Dream like no other immigrant, he regularly celebrates Oktoberfest in the former “Governator’s” property with beer and schnitzel.
What else Puck has in common with Schwarzenegger: Like “Arnie,” “Wolfgang” is a brand in the USA that almost everyone knows. Wolfgang Puck even appears — and this can definitely be considered a pop culture accolade — in some episodes of “The Simpsons”.
He also has a Hollywood icon to thank for his most famous dish: When Joan Collins comes to Spago one evening, almost all the supplies have been used up and Puck has to improvise. So he bakes a pizza with the last dough and tops it with smoked salmon, cheese spread, caviar, dill and chives. The bite becomes his iconic dish, copied countless times and quoted by other chefs. A “Spago pizza with smoked salmon and caviar” was also served in a star restaurant owned by his friend Paul Bocuse in France. Puck talks about this with pride.
Puck has been a kind of personal chef for the international jet set for decades. He is the palate of Hollywood, because for almost 30 years the restaurateur has been responsible for the culinary enjoyment after the Oscars, at the Governors Ball. He is also involved in the culinary mainstream: two years ago, Puck opened a bistro at Vienna Airport, where he In addition to down-to-earth dishes such as beer and goulash, it also offers tuna tartare.Puck is not only a multi-restaurateur, he is also a passionate entrepreneur.
Although his business generates around half a billion dollars a year, it is essentially a family business: Brother Klaus Puck is Chief Operating Officer of Wolfgang Puck Worldwide, Inc.; Son Byron is being prepared to succeed him at the top of the gastronomic empire. This same Byron Lazaroff-Puck, son of Puck’s second wife Barbara Lazaroff, was already helping out at Spago when he was twelve. Puck senior thinks highly of his heir: “At 28, he is already more advanced in the kitchen than I was at that age,” enthuses his father. And: “One day Byron will take over.”
In order to appreciate Puck’s life’s work, you have to look back at his time in Austria. Born in St. Veit an der Glan, he grew up in poor circumstances. He suffers from his brutal stepfather; The miner and alcoholic sends the nine-year-old boy into the forest, has him look for a stick with which he wants to beat him later — and tells the child: «You’re good for nothing!» These experiences also resonate when you pass Puck about his relationship to his old homeland. The chef, who serves Wiener Schnitzel and Carinthian noodles in almost every restaurant, says: The memory of his childhood and early youth in Austria tastes “bittersweet”.At 14, Puck left home without a high school diploma. “Anything was better than going back home,” he says. His apprenticeship also took him to Raymond Thuilier at L’Oustau de Baumanière in France and to the Hotel de Paris in Monaco.
In 1973, Puck emigrated to the USA — with no savings. He comes to Los Angeles via New York and Indianapolis. He revamps the French restaurant Ma Maison and makes a name for himself. After a conflict with his business partner, Puck fulfilled his dream in 1982 and opened his own restaurant, Spago. With the restaurant, which is still the heart of his empire today, he developed the “California Kitchen” by focusing on the local ingredients of the Sunshine State — and reinventing the humble pizza as a gourmet dish: he puts duck sausage and shrimp on the dough Santa Barbara, sometimes lobster. Puck revolutionizes the cuisine of his adopted hometown of California. The Spago is both fancy and fun; This concept is still in the DNA of his gastronomy projects today.
Of course, Puck also had to cope with setbacks. In 1990 he opened a brewery in California; he wants to bring Carinthia to California again. An inn with its own beer brewed on site, just modern and for an American clientele — that’s the concept. The inn is, as always with Puck, a success. He has the white sausages and “Leberkas” flown in from Munich, which is of course unthinkable today with a view to climate-neutral supply chains. However, he falls well short of selling one million cases of beer a year — he only gets rid of 30,000. There are also quality defects because his master brewer cannot preserve the beer. Unfortunately, the brewer is also Puck’s business partner and has a 50% stake, so Puck turns his back on the project, closes the inn and also withdraws from the brewery business. “As an entrepreneur and innkeeper, you always have to be humble,” says Puck – and recognize mistakes, because you learn much more from setbacks than from successes.
During our conversation, Puck’s son Byron is in Geneva looking for hotels that could expand the Puck empire. Puck also wants to invest in hotel offerings in Tulum, Mexico. The idea: gourmets should be offered a comprehensive “experience” that goes far beyond the unique experience of the multi-course menu in the evening. When asked what he is actually better at, cooking or managing, Puck has to smile. He recently completed a management master’s degree at Harvard. But it wasn’t just since he graduated from Harvard that he knew that he had to grant his managers autonomy. In its 70 restaurants, chefs have the freedom to develop their own dishes. Every boss and every manager is entrusted with their own restaurant and is supposed to run it as if it were their own. Puck’s governors in the kitchen share in the profits. The American performance principle also applies in its companies: whoever makes sales and makes money earns money. Puck’s motto: Hire good people and pay them well.
Puck is still a frequent traveler. As a global restaurateur, he racks up plenty of airline miles. He spends less time in the kitchen these days: “At my age, I couldn’t stand at the stove for seven hours or more anymore, that would be too much.” Puck also talks enthusiastically about a new project in California – for around 100 million US dollars. $ he wants to build a futuristic beach house. It is modeled on the shape of a ship and is intended to be a real architectural gem, between the Pacific Coast Highway and Malibu, directly on the beach of the Pacific. Construction is scheduled to begin at the end of 2025.
It is not yet clear how much Carinthia there will be in this Californian beach restaurant — it is quite possible that Puck will also serve an “Austrian Wiener Schnitzel” here, like in Spago, with cucumbers marinated in caraway seeds, Kipfler salad and Styrian pumpkin seed oil, for $79. For his compatriot Arnold Schwarzenegger, Puck says, the Spago schnitzel is the best thing he has ever eaten.
At least topographically, Puck returns to his Austrian roots with his Malibu project — because the Hotel Linde, in whose kitchen his journey to global culinary fame began, was also a kind of beach bar, just on the beach of Lake Wörthersee.
