The United States of Arugula (38 page)

As for Puck, he arrived in Los Angeles in 1975, right at the moment when L’Ermitage was taking off-—a circumstance that gave him hope just as he was beginning to doubt the wisdom of his move to the United States. The Austrian had come to New York in 1973, when he was twenty-four years old, after stints at L’Oustau de Baumanière, a resort in Provence, and the famous Maxim’s in Paris. He bounded into Manhattan with high hopes and a promise, through the French-chef grapevine, that a good job awaited him in the big city. But this job turned out to be at La Goulue, a ladies-who-lunch bistro in the Upper East Side shopping district. Puck, affronted, rejected the assignment. “I hadn’t gone to France and worked in all these great restaurants to do bistro food,” he says.

He next tried to secure a position at La Grenouille. The restaurant’s owner, Charles Masson, had no openings, but he took pity on Puck, and, through a friend of a friend, found an opening at an upscale French restaurant in Indianapolis. Puck, who adored auto racing, was naïve enough to expect that the city, since it was the home of the Indy 500, would be somewhat like Monte Carlo, where he had also worked. After a restless, lonely period in Hoosierland, Puck agitated for and got a job at a middling French restaurant in downtown Los Angeles that was owned by Davre, the same company as the Indianapolis place.

That Puck had even willed himself to LA was an index of how far he’d come from his unhappy childhood in Austria. His parents divorced when he was two, and when he was fourteen, he was put on a train from his hometown of Klagenfurt to another town where he was to apprentice in a hotel kitchen. The petrified, diminutive Puck, who looked even younger than he was, had been working at the hotel a few days, peeling potatoes and chopping onions, when the chef told him to beat it. In a form of verbal abuse evidently endemic to Austria, the chef belittled young Wolf as a girlie-man, telling him, “You’d better go home to your mother so she can breast-feed
you for another year.” It was a form of hazing, more of a test than an order, but the sensitive Puck was devastated and spent several hours that day on a bridge in the town, gloomily contemplating jumping off.

Yet Puck realized that he enjoyed cooking, if not authoritarian Austrian chefs. He persevered, moving to France to begin his apprenticeship in earnest. Compared to his teen years, the situation in Los Angeles was not so dire, and when he learned that a restaurateur named Patrick Terrail was looking for a chef at his West Hollywood bistro Ma Maison, Puck saw it as a ripe opportunity. Terrail, a tall, dapper man with a chipmunk face and a carnation in his lapel, came from restaurant royalty. His uncle Claude was the proprietor of La Tour d’Argent, the fine-dining palace on the banks of the Seine, and his great-grandfather, Claudius Burdel, ran the Café Anglais, among the poshest of Paris’s nineteenth-century restaurants. But Ma Maison was not remotely in his forebears’ league—it was a homely place in a stucco house on a dingy commercial stretch of Melrose Avenue that had only just begun to revive under the aegis of pioneering gallery owners and gay men who were opening up boutiques and antique shops.

Terrail had bounced from job to job in the hospitality industry, working for a time under Joe Baum at Restaurant Associates in New York—“I started out as assistant receiving steward, which meant I was counting eggs,” he says—and then running hotels in Africa and Tahiti. He finally settled on Los Angeles as his home and opened Ma Maison with seed money from Hollywood people, including Gene Kelly, who had dined at his uncle’s place while filming
An American in Paris.
But Terrail’s budget was skimpy—Kelly’s contribution was a mere $5,000—and the thrift-shop tables were set with secondhand china and silverware. The outdoor patio’s famous Astroturf carpeting, which became an emblem of Ma Maison’s reverse chic, was a simple matter of budgetary expediency. “It was a question of recementing the whole floor, which I couldn’t afford, or going out and buying $600 worth of Astroturf,” says Terrail. “Then we realized there was something good about the Astroturf-—it absorbed sound, and you could hose it down. Though we did change it every August.”

Ma Maison opened in 1973 to what Terrail calls “the most terrible reviews
in the history of the restaurant business.” After two years of struggle, he realized that the bistro menu wasn’t going to cut it, and he contacted an acquaintance at Maxim’s in Paris to see if he had any chef recommendations. The acquaintance recommended two ex-Maxim’s staffers, Puck and another cook, Guy Leroy, who were both working in the same Los Angeles restaurant. Terrail hired both Puck and Leroy, though it was the former who emerged as the star. “One day, at the other place where I was working, the manager wrote out a new menu and told me to cook it, and I gave him my apron,” says Puck. “I said, ‘You know what? If you write the menu, why don’t you just cook it, too?’ I knew at Ma Maison I could do whatever I wanted, cooking-wise. It looked like a dump, but I could cook exactly the way I wanted.”

Right away, Puck unleashed his French training on Ma Maison. In homage to Terrail’s heritage, he served
canard Tour d’Argent
, the Paris restaurant’s famous duck served in two courses: first, the breast covered in a sauce
au sang
, thickened with the bird’s blood, and then, the duck’s legs, simply broiled. In homage to Paul Bocuse, Puck served fish
en croûte.

“It was an interesting contrast,” Puck says, “because the quality of the food was as good as anywhere, but you had plastic chairs and Astroturf, and artists like Bob Rauschenberg and David Hockney coming in from across the street with paint all over their shoes.” He reckons that the lunchtime business nearly tripled over his first three months at Ma Maison. Before long, the movie and TV people started to come. Orson Welles installed himself at a table in the back, where he could be found almost daily until the end of his life, and Ma Maison became a regular haunt of the establishment players—Michael Caine; David Janssen, Jack Lemmon, Ed McMahon, Bob Newhart; the agent Greg Bautzer; the studio executives Sherry Lansing and David Begelman—as well as the body-wave glamour gals of the
Knots Landing
era, among them Loni Anderson, Jacqueline Bisset, Joan Collins, Morgan Fairchild, Donna Mills, Suzanne Somers, and Alana Stewart.

Terrail, a born showman, fussed over the star clientele and had his valets park the flashiest cars—the Rolls-Royces and Bentleys—in the spaces directly in front of the restaurant, rather than in a lot around the corner. Ostensibly, this was so his staff could keep an eye on the expensive cars, but
really, it was Robin Leach–style public relations for Ma Maison (where, indeed, the assaultively loud
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
host was among the most loyal customers). Ma Maison also introduced the concept of the coveted unlisted phone number, though Terrail insists this came about by accident.
People
magazine, he says, was supposed to run a story on the restaurant just as he was leaving for a vacation; not wanting to overburden his staff with the excessive call volume that the article’s publication would surely bring, he had Ma Maison’s number removed from the phone-company directory. But the article was delayed, and Terrail forgot to have the listing reinstated, inadvertently making knowledge of the number (for the record, it was 213-655-1991) an insiderist status symbol among LA’s showbiz kids.

Terrail further embraced two terms that made more skeptical food people recoil, “California cuisine,” which he’d heard in reference to Chez Panisse, and the ubiquitous “nouvelle cuisine.” Combining the two, he declared Ma Maison to be “California nouvelle.” “I thought, ‘What the hell, why not?’” he says. “Because we’re using California ingredients, but we’re also doing a version of the cuisine of the sun,
la cuisine du soleil
, which is what Roger Vergé was calling his cooking in Provence. I strongly believed in the phrase and promoted it.”

Terrail also claims to have been the pioneer in popularizing that most Californian of beverage trends, bottled water. “We were the first people to serve Perrier water—in California, anyway,” he says. “Flat water was not the first popular water, Perrier was. Because of the health-conscious attitude of Californians, it became kind of fashionable to say, ‘Gimme a Perrier and lemon,’ or ‘Gimme a Perrier spritzer,’ which was really just Perrier with a little bit of white wine for flavor. From the restaurant’s standpoint, it was kind of cool, because we were selling it for $3.95 a bottle.”
*

The food press rallied around Ma Maison, too, retracting its earlier condemnations, with the
Los Angeles Times
going so far as to proclaim, “Ma Maison not only has found its way to go, but has gone further than intended … Patrick Terrail’s destiny caught up with him in the person of his chef, Wolfgang Puck.” But the ambitious Puck and the vain Terrail were not destined to co-exist for long. “In a way, Patrick never trusted me,” says Puck. “He never let me sign the checks—he got all nervous about it, because one time, he went away on vacation, and I thought, ‘I can’t serve food on this old, gray, secondhand china,’ so I ordered new china. Also, I was looking around at what was happening in Napa, San Francisco, Berkeley, and I thought we had to change our approach and do more in the style of Italy and Nice—where we’d have some raviolis, maybe some pizzas.”

Terrail balked at Puck’s suggestions, so the chef started laying the groundwork for his own place, which he was going to call Spago. Puck chose an Italian word—
spago
means “string” and is Neapolitan slang for “spaghetti”—because he wanted to incorporate Italian elements into his cookery. Though he was exasperated by Ma Maison’s secondhand flatware and cheap decor (“I thought maybe we could get rid of the Astroturf and get a brick floor or something”), he was intrigued by the restaurant’s mix of high and low: the way his customers were a mix of people in jeans and suits, and the corresponding lack of strictures on what defined fine and casual dining, and even what defined French cuisine.

“In New York, they were completely boxed into French or Italian, but here, there was no tradition,” he says. “And
I
didn’t have the tradition, because I wasn’t from France. Jean Bertranou had very good food, but L’Ermitage was very formal. Somehow, I saw the whole picture of California being relaxed and casual, but still with really good food.” Puck found a location in a terraced building perched just above Sunset Strip that used to house a Russian restaurant called Kavkaz, and, before that, had been the Café Gala, a Hollywood high-life supper club where the young Bobby Short played the piano in the forties. With funding from Giorgio Moroder, the electro-pop composer known for his
Midnight Express
soundtrack and slinky disco hits for Donna Summer, Puck secured the space in 1981.

Puck had been to Berkeley and was duly impressed by what Alice Waters had done in 1980 with the upstairs area of the building that housed Chez Panisse, converting it into a lower-priced café with an à la carte menu and its own wood-burning pizza oven. On Waters’s recommendation, he hired the same German artisan who had built Chez Panisse’s oven to do Spago’s. He announced that he and his chef, Mark Peel, would prepare the pizzas right in front of the customers in an open kitchen. He also hired Ed LaDou, an actual experienced pizza maker who had worked at various restaurants in San Francisco and made a minor name for himself as a bold pizza experimentalist, stealing ingredients from the pasta stations in the restaurants where he worked—chopped garlic, eggplant, clams—and adding them to his pies. This practice did not endear him to his bosses, but LaDou developed a small following, and Puck hired him after venturing up to the enfant terrible’s last pre-LA employer, Prego, and eating a LaDou pizza topped with ricotta cheese, red peppers, pâté, and mustard.

At the dawn of the eighties, it was considered bizarre for an acclaimed chef to want to make pizza. Even now, Terrail says, “I think Spago was a step down, if anything.” The LA fooderati covered the run-up to Spago’s opening with hedged expectations, with
Los Angeles
magazine noting that Puck planned to use, in lieu of tomato sauce, “vine-ripened tomatoes, thinly sliced and marinated for one or two days in olive oil with a hint of basil” and then “strained and layered on the crust.” When the magazine asked Puck if this posed the risk of alienating “those diehards who feel that dodging quantities of sauce as it slides off a slice is what pizza eating is all about,” he responded cheerfully, “They’ll adapt.”

Puck’s serenity and good humor were frequently noted by his fellow chefs and the food press. Perhaps as a consequence of the rough treatment he’d received at the hands of that brute chef back in Austria, he never became a screamer or a bully, even as he ascended to the top of the kitchen brigade. Still, in the chaotic, unpredictable restaurant business, it was helpful to have a fearless, mouthy “bad cop” to look out for you, and this role was ably filled by the redoubtable Barbara Lazaroff, Puck’s girlfriend, and, as of
1984, his wife. A human tornado with curtains of dark hair, a Funkadelic wardrobe, and the sexpot body and tough-chick mien of the protagonist in a women’s-prison exploitation movie, Lazaroff was the id that Puck never dared unleash. “Wolfgang would never have gotten anywhere without Barbara—she was the catalyst who made him what he is,” says Terrail. “I’m not gonna go into that conversation, except to say that she was the reason that Wolf and I split. Otherwise, we’d still be together.”

Lazaroff—who memorably made her entrance in an early-eighties
People
profile “poured into a sequined bodysuit, with streamers floating from her waist and a pet cockatiel perched on her head”—is unapologetic about stoking Puck’s ambition. “If it was up to Wolf in the beginning, he probably would have had one restaurant—
maybe
,” she says. “You know what? It
was
the good cop, bad cop thing. Basically, if there was something that had to get done that he didn’t want to do, he would say
[comic Austrian accent]
, ‘
Baba-waa!’
He’d tell me to do it.”

Puck is as wary of being typecast as the gifted naïf steered to fame and prosperity by his force-of-nature scorpion woman as Lazaroff is of being known to posterity as Wolfgang Puck’s other half. (“She used to say, ‘They always just talk about you,’” Puck says. “We used to go to a shrink just because of that.”) But though their marriage ultimately foundered—they were finalizing their divorce as this book was being prepared—Puck grants that they had a combustive chemistry that helped them build what has become an empire of restaurants, cafés, supermarket products, and cookware bearing his name. “It was a very complex relationship,” he says. “She was ambitious, I was ambitious. Maybe being the yin and the yang is what made it work. She was the loud one, out in front, yelling at everybody about everything. The thing she forgets is, she yelled at me the same way.”